Product Description: From Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities fellow Wil Haygood comes a mesmerizing inquiry into the life of Eugene Allen, the butler who ignited a nation's imagination and inspired a major motion picture: Lee Daniels' The Butler, the highly anticipated film that stars six Oscar winners, including Forest Whitaker, Oprah Winfrey (honorary and nominee), Jane Fonda, Cuba Gooding Jr...read more

From the author of the critically acclaimed In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis, Jr., comes another illuminating socio-historical narrative of the twentieth century, this one spun around one of the most iconic figures of the fight game, Sugar Ray Robinson.Continuing to set himself apart as one of our canniest cultural historians, Wil Haygood grounds the spectacular story of Robinson's rise to greatness within the context of the fighter's life and times. Born Walker Smith, Jr., in 1921, Robinson had an early childhood marked by the seething racial tensions and explosive race riots that infected the Midwest throughout the twenties and thirties. After his mother moved him and his sisters to the relative safety of Harlem, he came of age in the vibrant post-Renaissance years. It was there that—encouraged to box by his mother, who wanted him off the streets—he soon became a rising star, cutting an electrifying, glamorous figure, riding around town in his famous pink Cadillac. Beyond the celebrity, though, Robinson would emerge as a powerful, often controversial black symbol in a rapidly changing America. Haygood also weaves in the stories of Langston Hughes, Lena Horne, and Miles Davis, whose lives not only intersected with Robinson's but also contribute richly to the scope and soul of the book.From Robinson's gruesome six-bout war with Jake "Raging Bull" LaMotta and his lethal meeting with Jimmy Doyle to his Harlem nightclub years and thwarted show-biz dreams, Haygood brings the champion's story, in the ring and out, powerfully to life against a vividly painted backdrop of the world he captivated.

A biography of the influential African-American political figure discusses Powell's childhood in Harlem, his years as a minister, his tenure in politics, his personal life, his crusades against poverty and racism, and his eventual downfall. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.

Traces the iconic entertainer's entry into the vaudeville circuit at the age of six, his survival of the Depression, his nightclub appearances in the 1930s, and his achievements on Broadway, in Hollywood, and in Las Vegas in the face of pre-Civil Rights race tensions. Reprint.

An evocative account of Columbus, Ohio, and the Haygood family offers portraits of the author's grandmother, the hotel cook; his mother, the nightlife-loving waitress; his mostly absent father; his brother the pimp; and his poverty-stricken sisters as they struggle to find their dreams.

The authors retrace their journey from the headwaters of the Mississippi in Minnesota down the entire length of the river to the Gulf of Mexico