Patricia Proctor, director of the Simon Perry Center for Constitutional Democracy, said that Haygood’s book has been recognized as one of the most important nonfiction books of the year, receiving accolades that include being long-listed by the National Book Foundation for the 2026 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
“Hosting Wil Haygood to discuss ‘The War Within a War’ is an incredible opportunity for us,” she said. “He has had a phenomenal career as a journalist and, through his books, has created a body of work that inspired Pulitzer Laureate Richard Rhodes to recognize him as ‘the preeminent chronicler of the Black experience in America.’ The timing of this lecture is also meaningful, coming so close to Veterans Day.”
As Brent Staples observed in The New York Times Book Review, “Civil rights histories typically treat Vietnam as an external matter that came to the fore domestically when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. condemned it on moral grounds in 1967. But ‘The War Within a War’ conceives of Vietnam as a foreign theater of the rights struggle, in which concerns about inequality were magnified by the fact that Black soldiers were being asked to die for a country that discriminated against them in housing, employment and education.”
Haygood’s book is based on four years of traveling the country to talk with Vietnam War veterans about the challenges they faced, especially Black veterans who faced discrimination before, during and after the war. He will share his own experience growing up in a Columbus, Ohio, neighborhood where a half dozen young Black teenagers he knew went off to fight, and will explore the societal and political forces around the war and why the nation still has a difficult time discussing America’s first racially integrated war.
Haygood was last on the Marshall campus in 2017 to speak on his book “SHOWDOWN: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination that Changed America,” which won the Scribes Book Award for the best book on American law. He has been the recipient of numerous honors, including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship. He is Distinguished Scholar in Residence at his alma mater, Miami University of Ohio. In 2026, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Haygood began his journalism career at The Charleston Gazette and from there went on to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He was later a national reporter and then a foreign correspondent for The Boston Globe, where he was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He also worked at The Washington Post, where he wrote the story that became the prize-winning film “The Butler,” directed by Lee Daniels and starring Oprah Winfrey, Forest Whitaker, Vanessa Redgrave and Jane Fonda. He is the author of 10 nonfiction books, including his biography of civil rights icon and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, and was a featured source in the 2025 public television documentary “Becoming Thurgood.”
The Amicus Curiae Lecture Series is sponsored by the Simon Perry Center for Constitutional Democracy, and the lectures are free and open to the public.
For more information, contact Patricia Proctor at patricia.proctor@marshall.edu