Young black filmgoers see themselves in screening of ‘Panther’

“Black Panther” director Ryan Coogler surprised the Bay Area on Thursday night, flying to his hometown to greet stunned crowds before screenings of his hit movie.

Media: Peter Hartlaub, The Chronicle

Throughout the Bay Area, people haven’t been buying tickets just for themselves to see “Black Panther,” the box-office smash that’s become a cultural phenomenon.

For the past month, groups from around the Bay Area have worked to bring the movie to young African Americans. They have watched with anticipation as the donation numbers ticked up, from small amounts of $10 or $15 to $500 in Oakland and an eye-popping $1,078 in San Francisco to top it all off.

The money flowed in from friends, neighbors and strangers on the Internet, along with messages cheering the fundraisers who looked to connect kids with a movie that features a black superhero and an almost entirely African American cast.

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“Black nerds unite!” Danielle Williams wrote with her $15 donation. A cry of “Wakanda Forever!” came from Erin Gould, along with $150. Wakanda is the movie’s fictional African nation.

In the course of smashing records at the box office, “Black Panther” is also shattering old Hollywood myths about what stories succeed on the big screen. The movie brought in $192 million in its opening weekend, according to studio estimates Sunday, making it the fifth-biggest opening weekend ever.

In the Bay Area, a number of organizers jumped onto the national #BlackPantherChallenge to bring kids to see the film. On Monday, the first group came out to the Grand Lake Theatre in Oakland, clad in bold patterns and lush colors rooted in African tradition.

Seventeen-year-old Kyziah Shavers waited for popcorn while wearing a yellow-printed dashiki from Nigeria, a shirt frequently worn for special occasions. The screening qualified as a moment worth celebrating, Kyziah said.

“It’s a time to see that women and men like us have power,” she said. “We can use it to effect change.”

Cheers erupted in the crowd as the film opened with a shot of Oakland. For many, the film is the first time they will see a superhero or a technology genius or warrior who looks like them.

“Half the battle is getting that kind of imagery made,” said Oakland’s Rafe Chisolm, a 37-year-old product designer for Facebook who organized the Grand Lake screening. “Lots of kids never see anyone who looks like them in that kind of light.”

When he was 12 years old, Chisolm’s mother took him to see “The Meteor Man,” a 1993 film that featured a black superhero who fights off a gang terrorizing his neighborhood.

“We lived in Birmingham, Ala., and it was a key image for me to see, someone like me who had a technical mind,” Chisolm said. “It wasn’t a spiritual experience or anything like that, but I needed to see something like that.”

During a Thursday screening at the Grand Lake, Ryan Coogler, the film’s black, Oakland-born director, made an appearance and recounted how his father would bring him to the same theater as a kid. At Monday’s screening, his father, Ira Coogler, surprised the audience as a guest on the post-film panel that focused on diversity in media.

Monday’s screening connected the film’s high-tech world to questions of diversity in the Bay Area’s booming tech industry. Chisolm and other organizers brought in groups like the Hidden Genius Project and Black Girls Code, which mentor black youth interested in coding, to speak and recruit after the film.

Sasha Williams, a 15-year-old Black Girls Code member, said she found the film most powerful in its depiction of Shuri, the 16-year-old inventor and princess of Wakanda. The character defied stereotypes of scientists and engineers, Sasha said, especially with her age.

“I used to think I have to be an adult to do things,” Sasha said. “But why do I have to wait? I hope that inspires a lot of young black girls that they can do the same.”

Chisolm said he hoped to use the screening to connect young people interested in technology with organizations that could give them early exposure to coding and engineering opportunities. As a high school student, he had no access to technical courses, despite his strong interest in the sciences.

In his job at Facebook, Chisolm said he now works with people 10 or 15 years younger than he is who have thrived thanks to early exposure to science and technology education.

“In the Bay Area especially, so many kids are sitting in a sea of resources, but they’ll never see it without that connection,” Chisolm said.

In the next few weeks, the African American Art Culture Complex in San Francisco’s Fillmore neighborhood will take about 100 more children to see the film in a separate screening. Ciara Swan, who runs programming at the complex, said the staff kept checking the GoFundMe page in the days leading up to the release to see if they would meet their goals.

Swan said, “We just want our youth to see more depictions of themselves — too see themselves as well-rounded and capable of doing anything, capable of being represented in positive ways.”

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