Fight The Power

It took half a century for the civil rights movement to deliver an African American to the White House. But in a nation where police disproportionately target and kill young black men, where opportunities for black voices are still narrow and prescribed, and where counter-protesters feel emboldened to say black lives don't matter, the fight is far from finished. Now, Michael B Jordan, star of Marvel’s blockbuster Black Panther, is picking up the baton.

- Kevin Powell

The first time I truly noticed Michael B Jordan was in the 2013 low-budget indie film Fruitvale Station. Yes, I knew his journeyman standing from TV shows such as HBO’s The Wire, but nothing prepared me for his spirit-chilling depiction of police shooting victim Oscar Grant. In this extraordinary performance as the young black man shot and killed by a police officer in Oakland, California in 2009, Jordan simultaneously morphed himself into a major actor and a living, breathing symbol of what most black men fear: being killed simply because we are black.

Afterwards, as the credits rolled, I sat in the theatre, crying unashamedly at my country’s sordid love affair with racism. And I said to myself, ‘This young man is going to be somebody...’

And being young, gifted and black, as Nina Simone once crooned, for Jordan, meant being handed the Rocky franchise by Sylvester Stallone, in the form of the blockbuster movie Creed. It also meant co-starring in the new Marvel juggernaut Black Panther. Created, coincidentally, by comic book innovators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby just months before Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the political organisation of the same name, Black Panther was the first superhero of African descent in mainstream US comics. It has been a long time coming for this franchise to make the transition to cinema, but now it’s here, at long last.

Directed by Ryan Coogler, the film marks the third time, after Fruitvale Station and Creed, that he and Jordan have collaborated. All of this is unprecedented, especially the fact that it is two young black men staking claim to a Hollywood that would not have been open to them in this way when Spike Lee first hit the scene in the late Eighties. Things done changed. But have they really? This is what Michael B Jordan wants to talk about with me and I with him.