The Butler: A Witness to History (14 page)
Read The Butler: A Witness to History Online
Authors: Wil Haygood
The butler shares a word with Alan Rickman as President Reagan.
After eight presidents, a farewell send-off for the butler.
The butler greets George H. W. Bush and his wife, Barbara Bush.
Although he never worked in the Clinton White House, Eugene Allen was often invited back. Here he sits next to Hillary Clinton.
Eugene Allen, in front of President George W. Bush, at a butler reunion.
Whitaker in silhouette.
One of the votes that got President Obama to the White House was cast by Eugene Allen.
“He stepped out”:
David Thomson,
The Big Screen
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 22.
“unloosen the energy”:
Patricia Sullivan,
Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement
(New York: The New Press, 2009), 50.
“It is like”:
Thomson, 24.
“Every Race man”:
Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds.,
African American
Lives
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 591.
“I did not”:
James Baldwin,
The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948–1985
(New York: St. Martin’s, 1985), 561.
“It has been”:
Sidney Poitier,
This Life
(New York: Knopf, 1980), 255.
“We black people”:
Poitier, 255.
“moving toward two”:
Mark Harris,
Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood
(New York: The Penguin Press, 2008), 403.
Photo by Julia Ewan
Wil Haygood is a prizewinning writer for the
Washington Post.
A Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities fellow, he has written five nonfiction books, among them acclaimed biographies of Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Sammy Davis Jr., and Sugar Ray Robinson. In 2013 he received the Ella Baker Award from the Zora Neale Hurston–Richard Wright Literary Foundation and received an Honorary Doctor of Letters from Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. A native of Columbus, Ohio, Haygood resides in Washington, DC, where, in 2008, he first met White House butler Eugene Allen. Haygood is an associate producer of
The Butler.
Oscar-nominated director Lee Daniels is perhaps best known for his prizewinning film
Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire,
which received six nominations including best picture, winning in the categories of actress in a supporting role and writing (adapted screenplay). Daniels also produced the Oscar-winning
Monster’s Ball
and directed
Shadowboxer
and
The Paperboy.
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