Wil Haygood Biography

Wil Haygood, a renowned reporter for the Washington Post, had a premonition that Barack Obama would win the 2008 election, and when he did, he wanted to publish an article about a black person who had served in the White House. This person had grown up when segregation was so pervasive and deeply ingrained in society that the idea of a black president was unthinkable. When he found Eugene Allen, a butler who had served no fewer than eight presidents, from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan, he struck gold. As a result, he spent the next three decades working as a "discreet stagehand who helped keep the show going in the most important political theatre of all." The outcome was The Butler: A Witness to History, a picture of Eugene Allen's life narrative from his birth in 1919 on a southern farm through his tenure as a White House employee. It also serves as a larger investigation into the history of African Americans in film. The Butler, a critically acclaimed film starring Oprah Winfrey, Forest Whitaker, Jane Fonda, Vanessa Redgrave, and Cuba Gooding Jr., and of which Haygood is an associate producer, was published at the same time as the novel, which rapidly became a bestseller. The movie has won several awards, including two NAACP Image Awards for Outstanding Actor in a Motion Picture (Forest Whitaker) and Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture. It also became one of the best-selling discs on the Nielsen VideoScan First Alert list. President Obama was quoted as saying, "I teared up thinking about not just the butlers who worked here in the White House, but an entire generation of people...I thought Forest Whitaker was wonderful and Oprah is a wonderful actress," and President Jimmy Carter called the movie, "...One of the best dramatizations of the civil rights movement I have seen." A number of other notable figures also reacted favorably to the film's strong message. Wil Haygood has had fellowships from the Alicia Patterson Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and Yaddo as a guest artist. He has attended Colorado College, Ohio State University, and the University of Georgia as a visiting author. The famous Ella Baker Award, named after the civil rights pioneer, was given to Wil Haygood in 2013. Haygood's literary career was praised by the judges "for shining a light on those who give much but receive little recognition." In 2013, he received an Honorary Doctor of Letters from Miami University (Oxford, Ohio) and a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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