Behind the Revolutionary Power of Black Panther

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• serving a black audience that has long gone under­represented.

• what it means to be black in both America and Africa

• than dodge complicated themes about race and identity, the film grapples head-on with the issues affecting modern-day black life

• may be the first mega­budget

• to have an African-American director and a predominantly black cast

• s the entertain­ment industry is wrestling with its toxic treatment of women and persons of color.

• prove to Hollywood that African-American narratives have the power to generate profits from all audiences

• making movies about black lives is part of showing that they matter.

• themes challenge institutional bias, its characters take unsubtle digs at oppressors, and its narrative includes prismatic perspectives on black life and tradition

• In the midst of a regressive cultural and political moment fueled in part by the white-nativist movement

• resistance

• would be released into the fraught climate of President Trump’s America—where a thriving black future seems more difficult to see

• The history of black power

• and the movement that bore its name can be traced back to the summer of 1966.

• activist Stokely Carmichael

• ntegration in a white-dominated America meant assimilation by default

• one year after the assassination of Malcolm X and the Watts riots in Los Angeles, Carmichael took over the Student Non­violent Coordinating Committee

• away from a philosophy of pacifism

• escalate the group’s militancy to emphasize armed self-defense, black business ownership and community control.

• June of that year, James Meredith, an activist