Haygood has expanded his feature on Allen - who had a front row seat to the evolving civil rights movement as he served every president from Eisenhower to Reagan - into a book titled The Butler. Haygood is an associate producer of Lee Daniels’ The Butler.It’s not every day that a newspaper article sparks a Hollywood movie starring Oprah Winfrey and Forest Whitaker.īut Wil Haygood’s 2008 Washington Post article about White House butler Eugene Allen wasn’t just any article. In 2009, he wrote Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson, which told the story of the famed New York pugilist known as much for his prowess in the ring as his elegant style outside of it. That was followed-after publication of a family memoir-by In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis, Jr., which was awarded the ASCAP Deems Taylor Music Biography Award, the Zora Neale Hurston-Richard Wright Legacy Award, and the Nonfiction Book of the Year Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association.
His King of the Cats: The Life and Times of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., told the story of the enigmatic New York congressman and was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He is the author of a trio of iconic biographies. About The AuthorĪ Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities fellow and a writer for the Washington Post, Wil Haygood has been described as a cultural historian.
Timely, “poignant and powerful” ( Kirkus Reviews) The Butler also explores Eugene Allen and his family’s background along with the history of African Americans in Hollywood and also features a foreword by the film’s director Lee Daniels. But even as Allen witnessed the Civil Rights legislation develop, his family, friends, and neighbors were still contending with Jim Crow America. Johnson’s work during the Civil Rights Movement and Ronald Reagan getting tough on apartheid.
An African American who came of age during the era of Jim Crow, Allen served tea and supervised buffets while also witnessing some of the most momentous decisions made during the second half of the twentieth century, including Lyndon B. This mesmerizing companion book to the award-winning film, The Butler traces the Civil Rights Movement and explores crucial moments of twentieth century American history through the eyes of Eugene Allen-a White House butler who served eight presidents over the course of thirty-four years.ĭuring the presidencies of Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan, Eugene Allen was a butler in the most famous of residences: the White House.
0 kommentar(er)
