Wil Haygood, author of Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World, in conversation with host Richard Wolinsky.

Colorization looks at the history of Hollywood from the perspective of the African American community, from protests over the showing of the racist silent film, “Birth of a Nation,” to the first great Black director, Oscar Micheaux, through the forties and the rise of black actors such as Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte and Dorothy Dandridge, to so-called Blaxploitation films and up to the present, all the while putting the films in context of the larger society and race in America.

In the interview, he discusses the origins of the book, the careers of some of the Black pioneers in Hollywood film, and the way television and streaming has changed the race equation in our culture.

Wil Haygood is a journalist who spent several years with the Washington Post before writing a series of biographies. He is also known for an essay in the Post which became the source for the successful film, Lee Daniels’ The Butler.

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