Impact from ‘Black Panther’ will go beyond box office returns

The impetus was somewhat different back then: Civil rights advocates filed these claims against Hollywood because they were upset with the quality of black films offered to the public. This was when the films “Shaft” (1971) and “Superfly” (1972), directed by Gordon Parks and his son Gordon Parks Jr., respectively, had just been released, both portraying arguably the first black “superheroes” to grace the silver screen.

“Shaft” is about a black detective, fancied as a black Derek Flint and Errol Flynn wrapped in one, who takes on the Italian mafia in Harlem. “Superfly” is about a drug dealer looking for one last, big cocaine offload so that he can ride off into retirement in a fancy Cadillac. Both movies were criticized for peddling stereotypes of black men as vice lords and sexual predators in an film era permeated by toxic masculinity, but these films broke ground in terms of black representation.

“Hollywood has been so unkind to us throughout history that until this era, when we went to the movies, when you saw a black character you started to cringe because you knew [he was going to die],” says Stanley Nelson, the African-American filmmaker who recently created a PBS documentary on The Black Panther Party and has an upcoming documentary on historically black colleges and universities.

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With “Shaft” and “Superfly,” Nelson added, “You had a black hero [who] was going to win. Shaft was not going to get shot in the first reel. He was going to succeed, and we were not used to seeing that. So what Shaft did was made it so we didn’t have to cringe.”

“Shaft” brought in $12 million in its first year, while costing only a little over $1 million to create. “Superfly” was shot on a budget of less than $500,000, and pulled in $20 million at the box office in its first year.

These films boosted the film industry at the time when it was under financial duress, but they also signaled a bonafide market for black movies. They paved the way for Disney-backed “Black Panther” today, but this certainly was not an Afro-futurism that the civil rights activists of the ‘70s could have foreseen.

The December 1972 cover of Ebony asked “The New Films: Culture or Con Game?” The article scrutinized the new wave of black cinema, questioning whether many of these films even deserved to be classified as “black.” Virtually everyone quoted in the article leaned heavily towards calling them cons.

The critics’ perspectives could easily be summarized as: Martin Luther King didn’t die so that a pimp could snort coke off a black woman’s backside on screen.

There’s a question, though, of whether a Disney and Marvel-produced fantasy like “Black Panther” might overshadow the work of real-life black activists, such as the Black Panthers of the 1970s.

“I don’t think so,” said Nelson. “If the movie was really bad, or was some Uncle-Tom movie with black people cooning in it, that could be a problem, but from what I’ve heard that’s not what this is.”

“Black Panther” does have much in common with its 1970s forebears.

It taps into the radical-chic aesthetic of this generation’s Black Lives Matter and Afropunk movements, just as “Shaft” reflected the militancy of black power activists of its day. And while “Superfly” projects a somewhat testy relationship with these activists, its protagonist Priest still adopts their me-versus-The-Man attitude. “Shaft” and “Superfly” boasted scores from two political musical artists, Isaac Hayes and Curtis Mayfield, just as “Black Panther” features a soundtrack by the political rapper Kendrick Lamar.