This year's celebration will take place on February 24 in Columbus City Council Chambers beginning at 6 p.m.

Our keynote speaker this year is Columbus native and author Wil Haygood. You can read more about our speaker below.

Wil Haygood has been recognized as one of America’s foremost chroniclers of history where it intersects with truth, investigation, race, and memory. The author of ten books, he has received writing fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Alicia Patterson Foundation, and the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College. His longtime journalism career - which took him around the world and into several war zones - was spent largely at the Boston Globe, where he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist - and the Washington Post, where he won numerous awards. He has written acclaimed biographies of Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., entertainer Sammy Davis Jr., prizefighter Sugar Ray Robinson, and U. S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. His book, “The Haygoods of Columbus,” about his coming of age in Columbus, Ohio, was awarded the Ohioana Book Award and the Great Lakes Book Award.

Haygood wrote The Butler: A Witness to History, which was adapted into the award-winning motion picture, THE BUTLER, directed by Lee Daniels and starring, among others, Forest Whitaker, Oprah Winfrey, Vanessa Redgrave, Jane Fonda and Mariah Carey. Haygood served as an Associate Producer of The Butler 

For his literary output as a civil rights historian, Wil Haygood received the Freedom Summer of 1964 Award from his alma mater, Miami University, in Ohio. The university also awarded him The President’s Medal, the highest honor bestowed by the university. 

In 2022 Wil Haygood received the Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award from the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation, an international award presented annually to a writer whose work has “produced an enduring body of writing on or connected to peace.”

Wil Haygood, born and raised in Columbus, Ohio, resides in Washington, D.C.