I’m sorry I had to fight in the middle of your
Black Panther party”: The Black Panther
Party, Hollywood, and Popular Memory
In a 1991 piece for the Los Angeles Times, journalist Nina J. Easton
reported that Hollywood was exploring five film projects dealing with the
origins of the Black Panther Party (BPP) during the turbulent 1960s. The
commercial success of such young Afiican-American filmmakers as Spike Lee,
John Singleton, and Mario Van Peebles encouraged the film industry to pursue
the marketability of the Black Panthers. Suzanne de Passe, president of
Gordy/de Passe Productions, proclaimed that Hollywood interest in the Panther
movement was based upon the perception that “black subject matter has definite
value, that black is green.”^ Despite such great expectations, Hollywood’s
commercialization of the BPP failed to materialize with the exception of Mario
Van Peebles's 1995 film Panther, which did not generate anticipated box office
receipts. The Van Peebles film and other proposed Panther projects were
apparently overwhelmed by a reactionary cultural discrediting of the 1960s and
leffist politics personified by the 1994 Hollywood blockbuster Forrest Gump,
which in its depiction of Afiican-Americans harkened back to the racist cinema
of D.W. Griffith and The Birth of a Nation (1914).
The pivotal role played by the film industry in the formation of black
representation and in influencing collective historical memory is the subject of
considerable critical scholarship. For example, critic James Snead argued in the
1980s that American cinema has “always featured not merely images of blacks,
but implicit or explicit co-relations between the debasement of blacks and the
elevation or mystification of whites.” Expanding upon Snead’s argument, Ed
Guerrero, in Framing Blackness, asserts that “in almost every instance, the
presentation of black people on the commercial screen has amounted to one
grand, multifaceted illusion. For blacks have been subordinated, marginalized,
positioned, and devalued in every possible manner to glorify and relentlessly
hold in place the white-dominated symbolic order and racial hierarchy of
American society.” But Guerrero does not perceive the history of AfncanAmericans in cinema as a chronicle of victimization. Instead, he envisions the
representation of blackness in film as a dialectical struggle, in which
“Hollywood’s increasing efforts to fi-ame blackness are constantly challenged by
the cultural and political self-definitions of African-Americans, who as a people
have been determined since the inception of commercial cinema to militate
against this limiting system of representation.” Echoing the sentiments of
Guerrero, Vincent F. Rocchio insists, “The purpose of analysis, therefore, is not
simply to expose the process of racism as it conducts itself through