Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World - Hardcover

Haygood, Wil

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0525656871 ISBN 13: 9780525656876

Verlag: Knopf, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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, As Has his Most recent book, Colorization: 100 Years Of Black Cinema in a White World. IN 2022 he was the recipient of The Dayton Literary Peace Prize's Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, whose other recipients include Gloria Steinem, Louise Erdrich, Barbara Kingsolver, and Colm Tóibín. 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.

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1

Movie Night
at Woodrow Wilson’s White House

IN THE AFTERMATH of the Civil War, fathers throughout the Southern states—its landscape in ruins, the populace grieving—had to start imagining a future for their sons, who had either fought in the war or grown up around it. The Lost Cause of the Confederacy left the entire region in a state of near-shock. For families that still had money from cotton and plantation revenues, a college education for their sons was seen as a key to reclaiming a bright family future. No matter how smart the women in families were, or how intellectually gifted, it remained a patriarchal-led society.

Before the war, many moneyed families became attracted to colleges and universities in the North. Princeton University was a school that particularly stood out among Southern gentry. Fifteen Southern governors could count themselves as Princeton grads. It was not lost on Southerners that Alexander Boteler, Princeton Class of 1835, had helped design the Confederate flag. Boteler was revered throughout the South. In 1857, Rev. George Armstrong—Princeton Class of 1832—published The Christian Doctrine of Slavery. He argued that Southerners took better care of slaves than Northerners could imagine, though allowing, as he put it, for “some deprivation of personal liberty.” Two years after Armstrong’s screed, in 1859, a contingent of Princeton students from below the Mason-Dixon Line marched across their campus burning effigies of pro-Union Northern political figures. Alexander Stephens, who would serve as vice-president of the Confederacy from 1861 to 1865, proclaimed Princeton graduates to be “superior to those of any other school or college in the country.” During the long and bloody Civil War, seven Confederate brigadier generals were Princeton men. Some saw fit to sing the Princeton fight song as they galloped in the direction of Union cannon fire.

Joseph Wilson prided himself on his Southern ministry. In his reading of the Bible, slavery was simply a necessity. He and his wife, Jessie, had moved around the South, from Virginia to South Carolina and on to North Carolina. Jessie Wilson tended wounded Confederate soldiers. In the aftermath of war’s end, the Wilson family held on to endless grudges. They were especially pained with the onset of the Reconstruction era, when the United States tried to bring a measure of equality and opportunity to formerly enslaved Blacks. Their son Woodrow Wilson was born in Virginia and grew up in and around the South amidst Reconstruction. Young Woodrow thought of Reconstruction as a terrible experience for his family and other Southern whites. His earliest school tutoring came from Confederate veterans; they were men he came to admire greatly, men who told him of the great battles they had fought to keep the South firmly in the grip of whites and away from Abe Lincoln, whom they called a madman, and whose assassination they did not bemoan. In 1875, Woodrow Wilson’s parents—after he had spent a year at Davidson College—sent him off to a school they had heard a lot about because of its southern pedigree: the College of New Jersey, the school that would become Princeton University.

Woodrow Wilson easily took to college life. He joined clubs and organizations. He honed a gift as a public speaker; his articles for the student newspaper were widely and favorably commented upon. Professors praised his serious approach to academic life. Wilson made friends with classmates who hailed from Southern states, all bonding together over their history and hometowns. One of the people Wilson would have come across on campus was a gentleman by the name of Jimmy Johnson. Johnson began work at the school as a janitor in the 1840s and would remain there for sixty years, later also selling snacks at a makeshift stand on campus. Jimmy Johnson was a runaway slave from Maryland. He was ever mindful of trips that ranged too far from campus, nervous about bounty hunters and slave catchers. The runaway slave never met any Black students at Princeton, because they were not allowed.

While on campus, Woodrow Wilson convinced himself he might prefer a career in law. He applied to the University of Virginia Law School and was accepted. Several years later, after undergoing an abbreviated law-school stint and passing the bar exam, Wilson was settled in Atlanta and practicing law. But he felt his chosen profession boring and began imagining instead a career in public service or academia. To make that happen, he was advised to seek a doctoral degree. He applied and was accepted to Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore. He arrived on the campus in 1883.

A restless sort, Wilson sat through doctoral classes and concluded they were stuffy, and the professors too concerned with minutiae. The books assigned to him made him roll his eyes. So he began thinking of a book he himself would like to write. He began compiling notes about the inner workings of the United States government, and managed to get his book, Congressional Government, published in 1885. His professors were downright surprised. Some doubtless were also a little jealous. Wilson had dived into the gears of a churning government and explained its motions. There were six separate sections, all drawing the reader deeper into the arcane workings of the nation’s political system. It was a dryly worded document, but enough critics thought of it as original scholarship to give it a shelf life. Woodrow Wilson was no longer just a doctoral student; he was a doctoral student who had published a book. Damn the traditional route to a thesis! The book gave Wilson a kind of celebrity around campus.

The young student author resided in a boarding house near campus, where he found the nightly dinners lively, with animated conversations. One guest who befriended Wilson was Thomas Dixon, Jr. Both men gravitated toward literature and writing. Both also hailed from and loved the South and had a sharp disdain for Negroes. “The only place in the country, the only place in the world, where nothing has to be explained to me, is The South,” Wilson would come to say. Dixon was not shy in telling classmates he was going to write novels someday. He was also proud to tell them that his father had been a vaunted member of the Ku Klux Klan following Reconstruction. Dixon, however, wasn’t long for Johns Hopkins; he left before the end of his first year, then bounced around in a variety of jobs—actor, minister, lecturer, finally writer.

The years ahead saw Woodrow Wilson settle into the world of academia. In 1890, he became a Princeton professor. By 1902, Wilson had ascended to the presidency of Princeton. Campus buildings were erected during his tenure; enrollment increased. During the same period, Thomas Dixon began to write a trilogy of novels that would avenge what he deemed the massive white suffering that had taken place during Reconstruction across the South. Two of Dixon’s novels, both with baroque titles, became national bestsellers. The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden was published in 1902. Three years later, in 1905, came The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan. His trilogy was complete with The Traitor, published in 1907.

New Jersey Democrats were closely following the rise of Woodrow Wilson. He had taken on snobbery at Princeton and appeared to be reform-minded. Political operatives imagined such traits could be attractive to voters. Wilson himself had always been enamored of those who succeeded in politics, so, when approached by politicians to run for governor of New Jersey, he accepted, launched a campaign, and won in 1910.

As the 1912 presidential election approached, many saw President William Howard Taft as vulnerable. Former President...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2021
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0525656871
• ISBN 13: 9780525656876
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 464
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar