David Oyelowo’s feature directorial debut “The Water Man” has acquired worldwide distribution. RLJE Films will distribute the film in North America, with Netflix handling the rest of the worldwide rollout.

RLJE, a business unit of AMC Networks, plans to release the project day-and-date in theaters and on PVOD on May 7, 2021, with Netflix set to release the film internationally later in 2021.

“While in some ways this film is a father and son story, at its core it’s also a love letter to mothers everywhere and is dedicated to my own,” Oyelowo said in a statement announcing the acquisition. “To be able to share my directorial debut, ‘The Water Man,’ with the world through the hands of RLJE Films and Netflix is a dream come true for me.”

“The Water Man” follows a young boy named Gunner (“This Is Us” star Lonnie Chavis) as he sets out on a quest to save his ill mother (Rosario Dawson) with the help of a mysterious local girl (Amiah Miller). As the pair go in search of The Water Man, a mythic figure who possesses the secret to immortality, the more dangerous the journey becomes and, eventually their only hope for rescue is Gunner’s father (Oyelowo). The film is based on a Black List script from Emma Needell, and Alfred Molina and Maria Bello round out the cast.

In addition to directing the family adventure film, Oyelowo also produced the project under his Yoruba/Saxon Productions banner. The film is also produced by Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Films and ShivHans Pictures. Carla Gardini, Shivani Rawat and Monica Levinson produced the film, with Winfrey, Darren M. Demetre, Connor Flanagan and Needell serving as exec. producers.

Oyelowo’s film made its world premiere at the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival, where the first time director opened up to Variety about the project during a virtual conversation alongside his cast.

“The film is partly inspired by [the] films I grew up loving, like ‘E.T.’ A lot of them directed by the amazing Steven Spielberg,” he said. “But the truth of the matter is I didn’t see myself in those movies even though I related to those characters. So one of the amazing things for me is getting to make a film for a family that looks like mine, a boy who looks like I did and looks like my three sons get to be front and center.”

Explaining how important it is for people to see themselves represented on TV and in movies, Oyelowo added, “We all go to storytelling to see ourselves, to learn about ourselves or to learn about other people within whom we see ourselves.”

Rev. Raphael Warnock speaks at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, on Jan. 12, 2018. David Goldman—AP

BY HENRY LOUIS GATES JR.

FEBRUARY 17, 2021 7:00 AM EST

Gates is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. An award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder, Professor Gates has authored or coauthored twenty-five books and created twenty-one documentary films, including Finding Your Roots. His newest book is The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song

We are living through a traumatic inflection point in our American story. Millions of our fellow citizens are hurting from a series of pandemics. Our public health system, our economic fate, and issues of racial justice all are on the line at the very same time. So, too, is democracy itself.

Observing the vicious murder of George Floyd on the streets of Minneapolis last spring was not only shocking; it was disorienting. I wondered: was this 1968 all over again, or the Red Summer of 1919, when anti-black violence consumed the country amidst another devastating pandemic, or 1877, the year the bright lights of Reconstruction were violently snuffed out just a dozen years after the Civil War restored the Union on the basis of freedom and equal citizenship under the law? And this was before the presidential election in November!

The tense days that followed—made all the more desolate by the loss of such icons as John Lewis and C.T. Vivian—only reinforced my sense that the history of the first Reconstruction was being refracted through our own lives and in our own time. Then came the special elections in Georgia in January, when, on the eve of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, the Rev. Raphael Warnock, the pastor of Dr. King’s church in Atlanta, became the first African American ever sent to the Senate from his state and the eleventh Black American to be elevated to that chamber overall. The first had been Hiram Revels, of Mississippi, in 1870, and, like Warnock, Revels had been a man of the Word. In fact, during Reconstruction, the historian Eric Foner tells us, three of the first sixteen African American members of Congress were ministers, and of the more than 2,000 Black officeholders at every level of government in that era, more than 240 were ministers—second only to farmers.

All of this was a powerful reminder to me of the vital role that the Black Church and its leaders—men and women—have always played at pivotal moments in our collective struggle to realize that “more perfection union”: a lesson that had already been brought vividly home to me in filming my new history series for PBS and authoring its companion book, The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song. When we began working on it, though, never could I have imagined that we would be launching at a time when the stories we wanted to tell of grace and resilience, struggles and redemption, hope and healing, would be so desperately needed, given all that we’ve lost and endured in the past year.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preaching at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, circa 1960. Dozier Mobley—Getty Images

What I’ve learned in exploring the history of African American religion from the earliest days of the trans-Atlantic slave trade to the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement to my own return trip to the childhood church that witnessed my conversion in Piedmont, West Virginia, is that the Black Church is as diverse as it is foundational to the African American experience. As the great W. E. B. Du Bois observed in his 1903 masterpiece, The Souls of Black Folk, “one can see in the Negro church today, reproduced in microcosm, all the great world from which the Negro is cut off by color-prejudice and social condition…. Practically, a proscribed people must have a social Centre, and that Centre for this people is the Negro church.”

Black churches also were the first institutions built by Black people and run independent of white society in the United States, with the earliest Black Christian congregations roughly contemporaneous with the Declaration Independence of 1776, including churches in Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia. Since then, African Americans have taken their “masters’ religion” and made it their own through a flowering of denominations that run the gamut from the AME Church to the Church of God in Christ to so many storefront sanctuaries that remain a key refuge for many in hard times. In doing so, they have not only given the wider world astonishing cultural gifts in the form of oratory and song; they have found a new through-line in the Christian liberation story that they have used as a redemptive force to shine a line on the hypocrisy at the heart of their bondage. That was as true for Frederick Douglass as it is today for Rev. William Barber Jr.

As we stare down the array of threats to our democratic life in 2021, as we grieve and offer comfort to one another, and search for hope amid our shared despair, let us look to the history—and future—of the Black Church as an exemplar of what is possible when we, the people, assemble and march in the name of a higher power.

For a people systematically brutalized and debased by the inhumane system of human slavery, followed by a century of Jim Crow racism, the church provided a refuge: a place of racial and individual self‑affirmation, of teaching and learning, of psychological and spiritual sustenance, of prophetic faith; a symbolic space where Black people, enslaved and free, could nurture the hope for a better today and a much better tomorrow. For a community disenfranchised and underserved by religious institutions established by and catering to the needs of white people, it served both secular and spiritual needs. Its music and linguistic traditions have permeated popular culture, and its scriptural devotion to ideas of liberation, equality, redemption, and love have challenged and remade the nation again and again, calling America to its higher self in times of testing and trial.

No pillar of the African American community has been more central to its history, identity, and social justice vision than the “Black Church.” To be sure, there is no single Black Church, just as there is no single Black religion, but the traditions and faiths that fall under the umbrella of African American religion, particularly Christianity, constitute two stories: one of a people defining themselves in the presence of a higher power and the other of their journey for freedom and equality in a land where power itself—and even humanity—for so long was (and still is) denied them. Collectively, these churches make up the oldest institution created and controlled by African Americans, and they are more than simply places of worship. In the centuries since its birth in the time of slavery, the Black Church has stood as the foundation of Black religious, political, economic, and social life.

The Black Church has influenced nearly every chapter of the African American story, and it continues to animate Black identity today, both for believers and nonbelievers. In that sense, the Black Church functions on several levels, as a spiritual center—a place of worship—and as a social center and a cultural repository as well, a living treasure trove of African American sacred cultural history and practice: literally the place where “the faith of the fathers and mothers” is summoned and preserved, modified and reinvented each Sunday, in a dynamic process of cultural retrieval and transformation, all at the same time.

With a language all its own, symbols all its own, the Black Church offered a reprieve from the racist world, a place for African Americans to come together in community to advance their aspirations and to sing out, pray out, and shout out their frustrations. It was the saving grace of both enslaved Black people and of the 10 percent or so of the Black community that, at any given time before the Civil War, were ostensibly free; the site of possibility for the liminal space between slavery and freedom, object and subject, slave and citizen, in which free Black people were trapped. The church fueled slave rebellions, nurtured and sustained the Underground Railroad, and was the training ground for the orators of the abolitionist movement, and for ministers such as Richard Harvey Cain who emerged as powerful and effective political leaders during Reconstruction. It powered antilynching campaigns and economic boycotts, and formed the backbone of and meeting place for the civil rights movement. Rooted in the fundamental belief in equality between Black and white, human dignity, earthly and heavenly freedom, and sisterly and brotherly love, the Black Church and the religion practiced within its embrace acted as the engine driving social transformation in America, from the antebellum abolitionist movement through the various phases of the fight against Jim Crow, and now, in our current century, to Black Lives Matter.

The Black Church, in a society in which the color line was strictly policed, amounted to a world within a world, providing practical physical and social outlets and economic resources for local African American communities. Even in the antebellum period, the Black Church was the proving ground for the nourishment and training of a class of leaders; it fostered community bonds and established the first local, regional, and then national Black social networks. It was under the roofs of these churches that African Americans, in the heyday of Reconstruction—especially in that magical summer of 1867, when Black men in the former Confederacy got the right to vote—also learned of the opportunities and obligations of citizenship and the sanctity of the franchise.

The church also bred distinct forms of expression, maybe most obviously its own forms of music. Black sacred music, commencing with the sacred songs the enslaved created and blossoming into the spirituals (which W. E. B. Du Bois aptly dubbed the “Sorrow Songs”), Black versions of Protestant hymns, gospel music, and freedom songs, emerging from within the depths of Black belief and molded in repetitions and variations in weekly choir practice and Sunday worship services, would eventually captivate a broad, nonsectarian audience and influence almost every genre of twentieth‑century popular music. The blues, jazz, rock and roll, soul and R&B, folk, rock, and even hip‑hop bear the imprint of Black sacred music. It is evident in the sound of such a wide array of legendary artists that it is difficult to limit a list, but there are some names that simply cannot go unspoken: Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, and Dinah Washington; Aretha Franklin, Little Richard, and James Brown; Sam Cooke and Marvin Gaye; Donny Hathaway and Teddy Pendergrass; Curtis Mayfield and Jerry Butler; Tina Turner; Whitney Houston; Patti LaBelle; practically all of Motown, all the way to Mary J. Blige, John Legend, Jennifer Hudson, and Kirk Franklin, whose talents were nurtured in church pews and choirs. Mahalia Jackson, Dr. King’s sacred soul mate and private muse, is, of course, in a class of her own, stubbornly resisting the extremely lucrative financial lure of “going secular” but nevertheless influencing the styles of a plethora of Black singers ranging over a host of genres. “The church is our foundation,” Hudson says. “Somehow to me it relates to our culture. I noticed when I was in Africa how the music wasn’t just music; it was a message. Well, it’s the same in the church. When you’re singing a song, it’s not just a song; it’s your testimony. It’s your story. You’re singing with purpose and to God.”

Today, African Americans, like all Americans, are increasingly moving away from organized religion. Yet in nationwide surveys, roughly 80 percent of African Americans—more than any other group—report that religion is very important in their lives. This is hardly surprising when we understand just how central faith institutions have been in the history of Africans and African Americans and their cultures and social institutions in this country. For centuries, these religions—primarily but not only many denominations of Christianity—have served as a lifeline for African Americans. Whether that lifeline will remain as vigorous and vital in the twenty‑first century is an open question. At a moment when the Black community and the nation overall seem to be at a crossroads in the future of race relations, it is more important than ever to illuminate the Black Church’s past and present, both to appreciate what Black religion has contributed to the larger American story and to speculate about the role it will play as race relations transform in this society.

Worthiness. Personhood. Somebody-ness. Religion has fed generations of African American souls in this country, through the brutal trials of slavery to a new hope within a new nation, through the struggle for liberation, economic freedom, education, and the fight for full citizenship in the country we helped build.

From THE BLACK CHURCH by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Published by arrangement with Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2021 by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

by Angelique Jackson

Black filmmakers are offering an unvarnished look at the legacy of the 1960s civil rights era, examining America’s tortured history of racism and drawing parallels to contemporary cries for social justice in some of the year’s most captivating films.

Regina King’s “One Night in Miami,” Shaka King’s “Judas and the Black Messiah” and Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods” serve as a triptych of the Black experience, inviting viewers inside the great debates that accompanied an earlier generation’s fight for equality. Together, they chart the course of that turbulent decade.

Lee has spent his career spotlighting Black stories that have gone unshared or were framed inauthentically in the history books, most famously with 1992’s “Malcolm X,” which gave audiences a new view of the man behind the fiery speeches, but the director “practically killed myself to get made.”

“Black folks are part of American history, American her-story,” Lee says. “Right now, there are more films being made about our past than ever before.

“The studio heads are more apt to make these films than they were in the past. It’s not that Black filmmakers weren’t trying to do these films. It’s always come down to us telling our stories versus somebody else. I know Regina; Shaka was a student of mine. The more the merrier.”

“One Night in Miami” is based on the real-life encounter between Malcolm X, Sam Cooke, Jim Brown and Muhammad Ali. It’s set on Feb. 25, 1964, the night the boxer (then Cassius Clay) won the heavyweight title for the first time. “Judas and the Black Messiah” takes place in the late 1960s and documents the final days in the life of Black Panthers leader Fred Hampton, while “Da 5 Bloods” travels between the Vietnam War era (with a scene in 1968 in which the titular Bloods learn of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.) and the present, as the surviving quartet cope with the scars of war.

These filmmakers double as historians, contextualizing the past to determine how we got to where we are. King (credited for writing the “Judas” story with Will Berson and the Lucas Brothers), Lee (who partnered with Kevin Willmott for “Bloods”) and Kemp Powers (who adapted his “One Night in Miami” play for the screen) detail their process.

Why did you want to look back at the 1960s through the lens of today? What lessons can audiences take away?

Spike Lee: I was a kid growing up in that era; I remember it. In ’67, I was 10 years old. Thank God, I’m not old enough to be drafted, but the Afros, the music, Black Power, Dr. King getting assassinated, RFK assassinated, the Vietnam movement, the anti-war movement. I remember watching the Chicago Democratic convention on television in 1968 when Mayor Daley unleashed those cops cracking heads, and anti-war marches. That time was very rich.

Kemp Powers: We live in a country that it’s almost incredible how we’re able to contort ourselves to avoid discussing race in any way, shape or form, but every once in a while, it bubbles to the surface. And I think the 1960s were a crucible moment in the history of the country, as far as race relations. And I think we’re living through another crucible moment now, these past five or six years.

So much of the change is brought about by young people. That’s what really drew me to the night that I focused on for “One Night in Miami” — it wasn’t just that these were four famous men, but it was just reminding myself of how young they were. That Cassius Clay was 22, that Jim Brown was 28, that Sam Cooke was 31, that Malcolm X wasn’t even 40 yet.

And it was interesting for me watching “Judas and the Black Messiah.” My knowledge of the Black Panthers doesn’t go that far beyond Huey P. Newton. I knew who Fred Hampton was, I knew about his death, but at no point did I think all that happened to a man who was 21 years old.

That youth component inspired me, because I feel like young people need to be inspired to pick up the mantle and realize that they have this amount of power.

Shaka King: To piggyback off what you said about youth, Fred Hampton’s phone was tapped by the FBI at age 14; he was an NAACP youth leader at 16. Youth is the lifeblood of revolutions across the globe, because young people don’t have stuff to rope them in and fool them into thinking that everything is OK. Their life is in front of them, and they’re impatient in the best way.

During the rebellions of the summer, that was a very youth-led movement. I’m 41, and a lot of times, my generation and certainly the generations above us think of that younger generation as not really having any spine and backbone and having resilience. But I think nothing could be further from the truth.

What they’ve had to circumvent in their childhood and adolescence, and the ways in which they’ve responded, has been really impressive. I’ve heard the revolutionaries in their 60s [now], who were the young people in the Black Panthers, talk about how this feels different and, in some ways, even bigger than when they were the folks on the front line.

What was your process in preparing to tell these stories?

Lee: Research, research, research, research and more research — documentaries, films, books, everything I could get.

Powers: I would argue that when it comes to both Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, everyone’s an expert and knows more about them than you do, and that’s OK. I never profess to know everything. I’m just a guy who’s read a lot of stuff and done a lot of reporting.

But even when it’s a person that you know so well, it’s always interesting to try to look at it from a slightly different angle; it can change the meaning of that moment. That’s why I really wanted to make this a piece of historical fiction, because there’s a certain burden to try to fairly characterize each of these men. Even though the words that they’re speaking are words that you’re making up, you do have a burden.

However, this is not supposed to be a biopic. This is just to give you an understanding of what these men represent, rather than what they did, when and how. This isn’t supposed to be your historical document. If anything, quite the opposite; it’s supposed to make you go out [and read]. The FBI files on Malcolm X have been available for years; you can track everything the man did the last year of his life.

King: The only difference for me is that not as much is known about Fred Hampton and the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party as the individuals in “One Night in Miami.”

But nevertheless, in the writing process, in our first draft, my co-writer Will Berson and I had the address of the apartment and the Better Boys Club in the slug line. When you’re trying to regurgitate everything you’ve learned — which, for us at least, a lot of it was ego; we wanted [the audience] to know we did our jobs — but when you do that, you end up with a script that’s like 205 pages and not at all dramatic.

It took five or six drafts before we got out of our own way and allowed ourselves the freedom to treat this more like historical fiction and make a movie about ideas. Let’s make this movie about these two people, and let these two people represent and serve an exploration of these opposite poles of humanity — socialism or capitalism — and allow the viewer to watch and see if you connect with both of them in any way, or see where you fall in between those two poles, even on a subconscious level. We just thought that was more interesting and more useful.

If you watch these movies, leave and go to Wikipedia or Google some books, maybe buy one or two, that’s the best that we can hope for in terms of aiding in these individuals’ legacies. Young people probably don’t know about these folks, so there’s an opportunity for them to learn their history.

Let’s talk about the music. Spike, Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” album was an important thread. How did it help you shape the narrative?

Lee: Like a surgeon, I did it very skillfully [laughs]. He was a prophet. “What’s Going On,” one of the greatest albums ever made, came out in 1971. I know the album back and forth, and I knew where to put the songs.

When Kevin and I decided to do this movie, I automatically thought the song “What’s Going On” could be the spine of the film. “Inner City Blues” was the first song that came to me because I knew I wanted the film’s opening sequence to be archival footage. And then we had the Bloods singing “What’s Happening Brother” in the film.

Kemp, Sam Cooke is a player in your story, how did his music influence the film?

Powers:Your gut reaction is to get all the biggest Sam Cooke songs out there, but I felt like that wasn’t what served the story. What was important to me was getting elements of Sam’s process and influences into the song selection.

From the very beginning, with the play, I knew that “A Change is Gonna Come” was the crux of the story. But, in terms of the other music, Sam was very much an observational songwriter. “A Change is Gonna Come” is the epitome of that, but that started way back during his gospel roots, singing with the Soul Stirrers, which is why I structured it around “Put Me Down Easy,” which is actually a song that he just wrote for his brother L.C.

It’s not a biopic, so it wasn’t about, “When are we going to have the next Sam Cooke musical number?” In fact, the biggest musical number in the stage play, is not in the film — the recreation of his performance at the Harlem Square Club in 1963, that’s something that, in the play, is a show-stopping moment. But it didn’t serve the story.

Telling people about the screenplay, I always would warn them, “You’re going to get a movie with a singer, with not much singing; a boxer, but not much boxing; a football player with no football scenes; and Malcolm X, not giving any speeches.” That wasn’t really what the story was about. You should leave this film and want to hear a lot more Sam Cooke.

How have the streamers changed the road for films like these to get made?

Lee: The streamers are more doors to knock on. You only need one, and Netflix was that one door, and I thank them. The more places that make films, it just makes sense that more, different films will be made.

King: Obviously, people have been asking me about this because our movie is coming out in theaters and on HBO Max the same day, and this is new. But one thing that I immediately found exciting was that we were not only going to get it to more people, but because of the pandemic you’re literally talking about a captive audience — people who can’t go outside.

You have an opportunity to put a movie in front of someone who probably wouldn’t have watched it, or might have been turned off to the
politics, or made the easier choice to go see like a tentpole because you know we can bring the kids and everybody. But now it’s like, “OK, well, why not watch ‘Judas and the Black Messiah’? The trailer was cool.” And maybe there’s some information and medicine that’s contained there, and it’s beneficial.

Powers: When you write these screenplays, you have no idea how it’s going to ultimately be realized. In a normal year, let’s say all these films had been released in theaters; people would have been forced to make a choice. This year is interesting because I would argue that anyone who’s seen “Da 5 Bloods” probably has seen “One Night in Miami” and will probably see “Judas and the Black Messiah,” and I don’t think that would have necessarily been the case with all three of them released in theaters. Instead, it’s like, wow, people are getting to take in all of these films, and that’s just three.

These past 10-15 years, it’s just been a series of pendulum swings in terms of people’s boldness; I was talking to a friend of mine, just marveling at the bumper crop of films that came out this year. And I wondered, “Is this because of Trump?” Did people finally say, “Well, we’ve got nothing else to lose? A lot of the work that I’ve seen is very bold, like Shaka’s film, down to the title. I think that’s a very bold title to lean into and it’s commendable. There’s just an in-your-face boldness to so much of the work that I’m seeing; I just hope the pendulum doesn’t suddenly swing another way and people revert back to safety mode, because we have a new administration.

The one thing that I think everyone should realize is there is no back to normal anymore. We’re going to be in like a brave new world. I hope that this encourages more people to be bold in their filmmaking.I love “Da 5 Bloods,” but 10-15 years ago, a Spike Lee movie would have been the event that we all had to wait for, and that would be it — that’s your honest Black movie for the next two years. We don’t have anything else. And now it’s like sweet, the tree is bearing a lot of fruit.

King: I think it actually is because of Trump. My friend, filmmaker Mtume Gant, called the wave of Black cinema and TV around “Selma,” “Moonlight, “Atlanta,” he called it the Black Excellence Industrial Complex. That’s brilliant because it sums it all up.

Companies finally realized that movies, by us, starring us, could make money, and started investing in them, so they could make some money. I think, President Obama really ushered in that in a lot of ways, on a cultural level, just being the most famous person on the planet, being Black, and being president. And then I think when Trump came in, a lot of Hollywood is an incredibly white and liberal town and the same way that Trump ushered in a culture that was racist, hateful, sexist, misogynistic, and it was mainstream, I think there was a reaction to that.

That didn’t change me, I’d been wanting to make movies like this my entire career, I just had a little bit more access to it now because they were willing to counter that rhetoric with equally, brash loud [filmmaking]. Ultimately, it depends upon the success of our movies financially. You can hope for a Black Radical Industrial Complex, but it’s only if our movies are successful.

Powers: That’s the thing – people have been asking me, “Where have you come from?” I’ve always been here telling stories. The only thing is now all of a sudden people want to do it. That’s not credit to me, it’s credit to the political environment we’re in, because what stopped “One Night in Miami” play from going as far as it did, is because of the perception that it would alienate white audiences.

It’s so nice that being unapologetically Black is in now, because it wasn’t four years ago. And I know it wasn’t, because my voice wasn’t as well received. You’re talking to a guy who just did a Disney movie. What they read of mine that made them interested in me on “Soul” was “One Night in Miami;” that was my sample. So, when I came on board, I realized, “Oh, they know what they’re getting.” Usually that’s the type of sample that would stop you from getting a job, in years past. It’s interesting that people are interested in your voice because I’ve been telling these stories for years, it’s just now that people seem to be receptive to them.

AARON WILLIAMSHIP-HOP EDITOR

It’s impossible to talk about Black art and not talk about Black life — just as it’s impossible to talk about Black life without talking about Black art. Art is life and throughout the generations, Black life has centered around art as much as any other unifying concept other than religion. The recently-released film version of Kemp Powers’ stage play One Night In Miami is just one example that highlights the interplay between the two, and it might be one of the best depictions of that history, even taking into account some of the creative license Powers and the film’s director Regina King took in imagining that one, possibly pivotal night in Black life, music, and politics.

One Night In Miami poses a possible exchange between four of the civil rights era’s most accomplished activists and entertainers in 1964, shortly after one of their number, Muhammad Ali, defeated Sonny Liston to become world heavyweight champion for the first time. Settled into a hotel room to celebrate, Ali — then still known as Cassius Clay — is joined by singer Sam Cooke, football star Jim Brown, and outspoken Nation of Islam firebrand Malcolm X for a night of discussion, debate, and reflection on their respective duties toward using their platforms and popularity to change Black Americans’ second-class status in a world where Jim Crow was still the order of the day.

Their conversation — and their relationships — are heavily fictionalized, largely by necessity; two of the four men died in the months after that night’s events, while Ali passed away between the play’s conception in 2013 and the movie’s creation. But at its heart, the film asks and seeks to answer the question: “What is the responsibility of Black celebrities to Black Americans as a whole?” Taking up opposite ends of the debate, Kingley Ben-Adir‘s Malcolm X and Leslie Odom Jr.’s Sam Cooke become each others’ primary antagonists, while Brown and Clay find themselves drawn in both directions throughout the night, like flags on the rope in a game of tug-of-war.

That debate has echoes in recent history, ones that we now see played out on social media and on podcasts between crowds of commenters instead of behind closed doors. Today, Sam Cooke’s role is occupied by entertainers like Beyonce and Jay-Z, who receive criticism from both common commentators and their celebrity peers alike. For instance, take Noname, who came under fire from Beyonce’s self-appointed defenders for suggesting that the star take a more firm position on the troubles of the African continent after filling her visual album Black Is King with imagery from throughout African nations like Nigeria and South Africa. Noname may not be Malcolm X, but the analogies are certainly there for anyone looking.

In One Night In Miami, Cooke argues, much like Jay-Z or any number of other modern celebrities, that he’s doing his part to advance the race just by opening doors to rooms they would ordinarily be barred from, manifesting in his obsession in performing at the Copacabana nightclub. This is akin to Jay partnering with the NFL to offer opportunities to Roc Nation clients like The Weeknd to perform on one of the biggest stages in entertainment, the Super Bowl. This, in turn, generates even more revenue for The Weeknd and Roc Nation, which then theoretically filters outward through their various charities and foundations. Less tangibly, their presence inspires others, both through the art itself — which can be motivating and uplifting — and through the aspirational example they provide. Others seeing Jay-Z’s success can use him as a role model, pursuing financial freedom through ownership and entrepreneurship and doing what Jay boasts on “Moment Of Clarity”: “I got rich and gave back; to me, that’s a win-win.”

Meanwhile, Malcolm X’s character berates Cooke’s approach as facile and self-serving, pointing out the practical obstacles to others following in his footsteps and pushing him to be more vocal about the prejudices and injustices facing Black Americans in the 1960s. Likewise, we see critics like Noname and others pointing out the very material ways Jay’s approach, which strongly resembles the “trickle-down” economics embraced by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, falls short of addressing many real problems and injustices born of those policies that persist to this day. Sure, Jay-Z opens doors, but mainly to enrich himself, with any benefits to the race as a whole becoming tertiary at best — after all, his business partners made the lion’s share of the money as millions tuned in to the “big game” to see what The Weeknd’s performance would look and sound like.

The film ends somewhat ahistorically, with Malcolm’s harassment apparently having an effect on Sam Cooke, prompting him to use his appearance on The Tonight Show to debut the moving anthem “A Change Is Gonna Come,” directly addressing in words the injustices done to Black Americans over the years. In truth, Cooke’s performance came a full two weeks before the title bout in Miami on February 7, 1964. However, other details are kept somewhat true to life: Cooke was certainly inspired by Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ In The Wind” in 1963, embarrassed that a white singer had addressed the topic of racism when he had not, for fear of alienating his large white fanbase. To some degree, he was right; “A Change Is Gonna Come” was only a moderate hit compared to smashes like “You Send Me” and “Bring It On Home To Me.” However, it’s become one of his most enduring and beloved songs, selected for preservation in the Library of Congress in 2007 and receiving countless covers and placements in pop culture, from film to television to a quote from Barack Obama after being elected president in 2008.

In many respects, this is the part of the film and the history that has been the most resonant throughout the years: Black artists have used their platforms to speak out about injustice, even in the face of potential backlash. From NWA and Public Enemy speaking out against police brutality and authoritarian overreach in the 1980s to Tupac Shakur addressing the pressures facing Black people in 1992 on “Changes” (released posthumously in 1998) to Cardi B using her social media to stump for Bernie Sanders, Black music and activism are more thoroughly tied together than ever before. Look no further than Chika’s powerful television debut with “Richey V. Alabama” in 2019. Given a national television audience and the first big look of her young career, the courageous, then-21-year-old rapper used what could have very well been the only opportunity she would have to make a lasting impression to shed light on the devastating injustices taking place in her home state.

It has been a long time coming and a change may come, but not without folks who are willing to create it by any means available. One Night In Miami highlights the variety of forms this activism may take, as well as the disagreements that may arise between adherents to one form or another. But it also highlights how interrelated all of those forms are, how needed both the examples and the outspoken voices can be, even if they don’t always agree on the best ways to leverage the influence they’ve been given to wield. The film tries to make one thing certain; that the responsibility to speak out never goes away, that for Black Americans, success is always political, and that no matter what, we’re connected by bonds that are way more than skin deep.

One Night In Miami is out now on Amazon Prime Video. Watch it here.

By CNN Staff • PHOTO: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

Carter G. Woodson, an African-American historian, wrote black Americans into US history

February marks Black History Month, a federally recognized, nationwide celebration that calls on all Americans to reflect on the significant roles that African-Americans have played in shaping US history. But how did this celebration come to be – and why does it happen in February?

The man behind the holiday

Carter G. Woodson, considered a pioneer in the study of African-American history, is given much of the credit for Black History Month.

The son of former slaves, Woodson spent his childhood working in coal mines and quarries. He received his education during the four-month term that was customary for black schools at the time.

At 19, having taught himself English fundamentals and arithmetic, Woodson entered high school, where he completed a four-year curriculum in two years. He went on to earn his master’s degree in history from the University of Chicago and later earned a doctorate from Harvard.

How the holiday came about

Disturbed that history textbooks largely ignored America’s black population, Woodson took on the challenge of writing black Americans into the nation’s history.

To do this, he established the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. He also founded the group’s widely respected publication, the Journal of Negro History.

In 1926, Woodson developed Negro History Week. He believed “the achievements of the Negro properly set forth will crown him as a factor in early human progress and a maker of modern civilization.”

In 1976, Negro History Week expanded into Black History Month.

Why he picked February

Woodson chose the second week of February for his celebration because it marks the birthdays of two men who greatly influenced the black American population:

• Frederick Douglass, who escaped slavery and became an abolitionist and civil rights leader; though his birthdate isn’t known, he celebrated it on February 14.

• President Abraham Lincoln, who signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which abolished slavery in America’s confederate states; he was born on February 12.

For his work, Woodson has been called the Father of Black History.

A version of this story was first published in 2007.