Black Panther’s 2018 release was such a force to be reckoned with at the box office that it now ranks with the likes of Titanic and Star Wars, having earned $1.3 billion and counting.
On Sunday night, Black Panther won a Screen Actor’s Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture. Chadwick Boseman, one of the movie’s stars, delivered a powerful speech.
“We knew not that we would be around during award season or that it would make a billion dollars, but we knew that we had something special that we wanted to give the world,” he said.
.@theblackpanther takes home the Actor for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture! #sagawards
Great and moving speech from @chadwickboseman pic.twitter.com/Nw2UGbs712
— TNT Drama (@tntdrama) January 28, 2019
Boseman referenced Nina Simone’s hit song, “Young, Gifted and Black” and said: “One [question] is, ‘Did we know that this movie was going to receive this kind of response? The second question is, ‘Has it changed the industry? Has it actually changed the way this industry works and how it sees us? My answer to that is to be young, gifted and black,” he added.
“To be young, gifted and black ― we all know what it’s like to be told there is not a place for you to be featured, yet you are young, gifted and black. We know what it’s like to be beneath and not above. That is what we went to work with every day because we knew … that we had something special that we wanted to give the world. That we could be full humans beings in the roles that we were playing. That we could create a world that exemplified a world we wanted to see. We knew that we had something that we wanted to give.”
His speech comes at a time in which America is more divided on racial lines than ever before. U.S. Senator Kamala Harris, only the second African-American woman ever to serve in the United States Senate, formally kick off her 2020 presidential campaign with the slogan “Not our America”.
In an NBC News|SurveyMonkey poll in May 2018, a majority of Americans said racism remains a major problem in American society and politics.
Boseman also teased a Black Panther sequel during his speech saying that “one thing that I do know is that you can’t have a ‘Black Panther’ now without a ‘two’ on it.”
We’re definitely hoping Marvel comes out with a sequel, are you?
