Colorization One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World

A NEW YORK TIMES CRITICS' TOP BOOK OF THE YEAR • BOOKLISTS' EDITOR'S CHOICE • ONE OF NPR'S BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

“At once a film book, a history book, and a civil rights book.… Without a doubt, not only the very best film book [but] also one of the best books of the year in any genre. An absolutely essential read.” —Shondaland

This unprecedented history of Black cinema examines 100 years of Black movies—from Gone with the Wind to Blaxploitation films to Black Panther—using the struggles and triumphs of the artists, and the films themselves, as a prism to explore Black culture, civil rights, and racism in America. From the acclaimed author of The Butler and Showdown.

Beginning in 1915 with D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation—which glorified the Ku Klux Klan and became Hollywood's first blockbuster—Wil Haygood gives us an incisive, fascinating, little-known history, spanning more than a century, of Black artists in the film business, on-screen and behind the scenes.
 
He makes clear the effects of changing social realities and events on the business of making movies and on what was represented on the screen: from Jim Crow and segregation to white flight and interracial relationships, from the assassination of Malcolm X, to the O. J. Simpson trial, to the Black Lives Matter movement. He considers the films themselves—including Imitation of Life, Gone with the Wind, Porgy and Bess, the Blaxploitation films of the seventies, Do The Right Thing, 12 Years a Slave, and Black Panther. And he brings to new light the careers and significance of a wide range of historic and contemporary figures: Hattie McDaniel, Sidney Poitier, Berry Gordy, Alex Haley, Spike Lee, Billy Dee Willliams, Richard Pryor, Halle Berry, Ava DuVernay, and Jordan Peele, among many others.
 
An important, timely book, Colorization gives us both an unprecedented history of Black cinema and a groundbreaking perspective on racism in modern America.

WIL HAYGOOD is a former Boston Globe (where he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist) and Washington Post reporter. Haygood has received writing fellowships from the Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Alicia Patterson Foundations. His biographies of Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Sammy Davis Jr., Sugar Ray Robinson, and Thurgood Marshall have been widely acclaimed. Haygood also wrote the New York Times bestseller, The Butler: A Witness to History, which was adapted into an award-winning movie. Haygood is currently serving an appointment as Boadway Visiting Distinguished Scholar at his alma mater, Miami University, Ohio. 

1 Movie Night at Woodrow Wilson’s White House 
2 The Rare and Extraordinary Sighting of a Black Filmmaker 
3 The Imitation Game 
4 A Most Peculiar Kind of Fame 
5 [An Interlude—1933] Baby Face and Chico 
6 [Flashback] The 1939 Academy Awards 
7 Dangerous Love, Starring Inger Stevens, Sammy Davis, Jr., James Edwards, Ike Jones, and Dorothy Dandridge
8 The Pricey Black Movie That Vanished and How It Came to Be 
9 Two Cool Cats with Caribbean Roots Disrupt Hollywood 
10 [Flashback] The 1964 Academy Awards 
11 The Hustlers, Detectives, and Pimps Who Stunned Hollywood 
12 Foxy Brown Arrives, Vanishes, and Gets Resurrected 
13 [Flashback] The 1972 Academy Awards 
14 Berry Gordy Dares to Make Movies 
15 Kunta Kinte Seizes the Moment 
16 Aiming a Camera in Brooklyn 
17 The Blackout That Haunted a Decade 
18 [An Interlude] The Ghost of Sidney 
19 The Reckoning 
20 The Front Page 
21 Moving in the Moonlight 
22 The Scourged Back

Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index