Drawing on the lives of soldiers and officers, doctors and nurses, journalists and activists, artists and politicians, Haygood illuminates a generation caught between two battles: one on the front lines in Vietnam and another for justice and dignity in America. Among those at the heart of the story are Air Force pilot Fred Cherry, the first Black officer captured by the North Vietnamese and a hero to millions back home; Dr. Elbert Nelson, a doctor who came to Vietnam after watching TV footage of the Watts riots in Los Angeles and soon found himself amid rising Black soldier protests overseas; Wallace Terry, a groundbreaking Black reporter determined to expose the dynamics of race and war to the American public and Philippa Schuyler, a biracial concert pianist who traveled to Vietnam to rescue mixed-race orphans, many fathered by Black soldiers, and died trying to bring them to safety.

Beginning in 1915 with D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation --- which glorified the Ku Klux Klan and became Hollywood's first blockbuster --- Wil Haygood gives us an incisive, fascinating, little-known history, spanning more than a century, of Black artists in the film business, on-screen and behind the scenes. He makes clear the effects of changing social realities and events on the business of making movies and on what was represented on the screen. He considers the films themselves, including Imitation of Life, Gone with the Wind and Do The Right Thing. And he brings to new light the careers and significance of a wide range of historic and contemporary figures: Sidney Poitier, Alex Haley, Billy Dee Willliams, Richard Pryor, Halle Berry, Ava DuVernay and Jordan Peele, among many others.

Over the course of his 40-year career, Thurgood Marshall brought down the separate-but-equal doctrine, integrated schools, and not only fought for human rights and human dignity but also made them impossible to deny in the courts and in the streets. In SHOWDOWN, Wil Haygood uses the framework of the dramatic, contentious five-day Senate hearing to confirm Marshall as the first African-American Supreme Court justice, to weave a provocative and moving look at Marshall’s life as well as at the politicians, lawyers, activists and others who shaped --- or desperately tried to stop --- the civil rights movement.