Media Matters: Wil Haygood – ‘Solo Voyager’

Wil Haygood is a traveler, a storyteller. Apparently, he is also dangerous.  

His 10th book, “Colorization,” a history of Black films and filmmakers, was temporarily banned last year from the Naval Academy library by the Trump administration. Someone thought that stories of our American history might harm future sailors.  

His 11th book, “A War Within a War: The Black Struggle in Vietnam and At Home,” was published earlier this month. In his New York Times review, Brent Staples writes: “Haygood’s earlier books, including biographies of Sammy Davis Jr. and Adam Clayton Powell Jr., earned him a reputation as a temperate and perceptive social historian. He maintains his characteristic low-key tone as he explains why the full picture of Black Vietnam went unseen by most Americans: the white press corps was uninterested in questions of how race and racism were shaping the Blackest war in our national history.”

“A lot of people didn’t know the social commentary that was the backdrop behind the war,” Wil told me. “Black soldiers lived in the shadow of legal segregation in the Jim Crow South. They were fighting a war for America and they didn’t even have full rights legally until the civil right acts were passed in 1964, 1965, and 1968. And after the war the laws weren’t fully enforced. Southern states paid little attention to these laws. Black soldiers were fighting to defend their country but  back home Mom and Dad were still not allowed to vote.” 

I first met Wil Haygood, a 1976 Miami University graduate, in spring 2013. He delivered Miami’s commencement address, beginning his talk with the trailer for “The Butler.” This 2013 Hollywood movie was based on a story he had written as a reporter for the Washington Post in 2008. Wil had found a Black butler, Eugene Allen, who had worked for eight presidents. The story ran two days after our first Black president was elected. That led to his bestselling book, “The Butler: A Witness to History” and to the award-winning film, starring Forest Whitaker and Oprah Winfrey. Thanks to Wil, Whitaker was Miami’s 2014 commencement speaker.

After that 2013 commencement, I asked Wil if he would be interested in teaching at his alma mater. He joined the new Media, Journalism & Film department, which I chaired at the time, and has since served as a scholar-in-residence at Miami, teaching, speaking and mentoring. He helped two former students, Reis Thebault and Emily Williams, both former editors of The Miami Student, land internships at the Boston Globe, where Wil had worked for 17 years. Reis is now a national correspondent for the New York Times. 

“I was starstruck when I first met him,” Reis told me. “But what’s less known is his generosity as a mentor. When I was a young journalist, I always knew I could call him up, ask his advice and get a thoughtful answer, studded with anecdotes from his work across America and around the world. He had faith in me, and that confidence propelled my career.”

Emily is now a podcast producer at CNN, currently working on the show “All There Is with Anderson Cooper.” 

“Having Wil Haygood as a professor was a highlight of my journalism education at Miami,” Emily said. “I admired his work so much, and his feedback and encouragement to me as a student held significant weight. I’m always so grateful to hear from him and excited when he has a new book out to read!”

Wil served as Miami’s 2018 convocation speaker, focusing on his book “Tigerland,” which tells the stories of the East Columbus High School basketball and baseball teams who won Ohio state championships in the 1968-69 school year – in the shadow of Martin Luther King’s assassination.   

A Columbus high school was where the seed was planted for his writing career. It was 1972, his senior year at Franklin Heights. “There was an essay assignment and the teacher handed back papers and stopped to share with the class that I had written the best paper,” he said. “I was stunned that anybody would take the time to say something that good. So when I went to Miami I had the wind at my back.”

The winds shifted and Wil struggled at Miami, starting out as a business major. But after an economics class went sideways, “I started taking English classes.” As he recounts in his first book, “The Haygoods of Columbus,” published in 1984, he switched to an urban studies major, minoring in English. “I wanted to be somebody moving about in the world,” he told me. “Urban studies seemed to say that I could find a job in any big city.”

Wil’s urban studies major was the inspiration behind that first book – about the Mt. Vernon Street neighborhood where he grew up and where tanks roamed during the urban unrest of the late 1960s. By that time, he had worked a series of reporting jobs in Charleston, WV, Pittsburgh and Boston, where colleagues told him he should write longer pieces – even books. After a feature piece in the Globe’s Sunday magazine on a trip down the Mississippi celebrating Mark Twain’s 150th anniversary, an editor from the Atlantic Monthly Press called. He told Wil, “You have the skills to write books.” So he did.

Haygood’s books are not produced quickly. He is a meticulous researcher and constant traveler – a “solo voyager,” he likes to say. He needs four to five years to produce each book. All that shoeleather and commitment leads to excellence and recognition. As a traveler, Wil Haygood has reported from France, Germany and India. In South Africa he wrote about Nelson Mandela’s liberation from prison and in Somalia he was kidnapped then ransomed by rebels. In addition to Pulitzer Prize nominations as a reporter, his books have earned multiple honors, including Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships. In 2022, acknowledging the long arc of his work, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize honored him with the Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award.

Wil Haygood’s books are about American history. “Black souls,” he says, are at the center of the tapestry of this country. “Without Frederick Douglas, Ida B. Wells, Thurgood Marshall, Sidney Poitier, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Harry Belafonte. Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Oprah Winfrey, and so many more,” Haygood said, “you do not have the full fabric of America, the mosaic that has become America.”

Richard Campbell is a professor emeritus and founding chair of the Department of Media, Journalism & Film at Miami University.  He is also a co-founder of the Oxford Free Press.