Haygood will lead a discussion about the film on the first-ever NBCC Movie Night after it is shown on Friday evening in the Grand Ballroom.

Haygood has also written dynamic biographies about Adam Clayton Powell, Sammy Davis, Jr., Sugar Ray Robinson and Thurgood Marshall, among others.

Retired from newspapers, Haygood was a highly decorated journalist with the Boston Globe and Washington Post who spent 33 straight days in New Orleans 20 years ago covering Hurricane Katrina on the ground.

His next book, which he will discuss at the 2026 NBCC, is another revealing must-read: The War Within The War: The Black Struggle In Vietnam and At Home.

Synopsis: The Vietnam war era, in many ways, mirrored and was the beginning of the racial and political turbulence and divisiveness we are experiencing today. By tracing the lives of a group of Black men and women—soldiers, doctors, nurses, journalists—who experienced the battles in Vietnam as well as the socio-political war raging at home in America, Wil Haygood brilliantly contextualizes the racial strife that dominated so much of life in those years and still dominates it today. The most important book to deal with this subject since the bestselling Bloods.

Haygood highlights three central characters to examine the role of Blacks in Vietnam and at home during and immediately after the war. Through the prism of their lives as well as many other crucial figures of that era—Marvin Gaye and Berry Gordy, Dwight Johnson (a war hero, who is shattered and ultimately destroyed by his experiences), Maude deVictor (who took up the cause of Agent Orange on behalf of veterans), Lyndon Johnson, William J. Fulbright, Martin Luther King, and still many others, Haygood reveals the tragedies and triumphs, the honor and hypocrisies, the courage and the cowardice that shaped an era and whose repercussions resonate today.

Please preorder this epic book by clicking here. And click on his photo to read a revealing Q&A with Mr. Haygood.