My Publicist Note Book

The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution Stanley Nelson's rousing documentary on the era-defining civil rights group When you think of the Black Panthers, the image that likely comes to mind is one of a group of black men, wearing afros and turtlenecks, berets and leather jackets, fists aloft, many arms of a single organism, presenting a stoic, united front. According to Stanley Nelson, director of the captivating new documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, we should actually be thinking of an elephant. In the opening scene of Nelson’s film, Ericka Huggins, an early Panther who’s now a professor of sociology, tells a story: Three blind men try to describe an elephant. One touches the animal’s side, another the tusk, another the trunk. They each call the elephant something different, based on three unique impressions. That’s the Black Panthers in a nutshell, Huggins concludes. “We know the Party that we were in, and not the entire thing,” sh...