Stephen L. Carter, Columnist

'The Black Panther' Is No Call for Revolution

The superhero seeks to inspire, not force the world to change.

February 18, 2018 at 3:00 PM UTC

Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a professor of law at Yale University and author of “Invisible: The Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster.”

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I’m old enough to remember when the Black Panther was young. I first encountered the character in the late 1960s, and by the early 1970s, when he began appearing in the unfortunately named “Jungle Action” comics and learned scholars were arguing stridently over whether Marvel’s black superhero represented racial progress, the young radical I fancied myself was enthralled.

The name itself was revolutionary, but not by association with the Black Panther Party, whose prominence the character largely antedated. No, the revolutionary act was the use of “black” at a moment when the polite word was still “Negro.” The character was introduced in 1966, the year before Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton would publish “Black Power.” By choosing to call him what they did, the character’s creators, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, were casting their lot with the younger generation of activists in the struggle for racial justice.