Reclaiming Black history onscreen
Twenty-seven years ago, two films depicting the Black Panther Party were released 10 months apart. The first, Forrest Gump, needed only two minutes to reduce the movement to nameless, arrogant militants in allegiance with a domestic abuser. The film won Best Picture at the Oscars, earned $680 million and became part of many high school history curriculums.
The second film, Mario Van Peebles’ Panther, portrayed the group as a grassroots organization of idealists systematically stifled and imprisoned by an unjust legal system. The film drew vicious attacks from conservatives and skepticism from critics, with one Baltimore Sun story citing detractors who linked its antigovernment ideology to that behind the recent Oklahoma City bombing. Panther took in $6.8 million before fading from view; it’s currently unavailable on any streaming platform.
Those two films and their fates can be read as an object lesson in Hollywood’s relationship with Black history. While cinema has long had a love affair with historical narratives—reverently re-creating the lives of scientists, gangsters, pilots and kings—very few of those figures have been Black. In movies about the civil rights era like and Black activists are sidelined in favor of white do-gooder protagonists. Elsewhere, Black figures are thrust into a few reductive tracks: “a slave, a butler or some street hood,” Black filmmakers who attempted to reframe Black history in projects like and described overcoming years of stony industry resistance to put those movies in front of audiences.
