memoir of only woman to lead black panther party, elaine brown, to be adapted into film

Political activist, writer, and educator Elaine Brown’s (the first and only female leader of the Black Panther Party from 1974 – 1977) memoir ‘A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story’ is being adapted into a feature film.

Brown first came to led the party when co-founder Huey P. Newton fled to Cuba in 1974 to avoid murder chargers where she became one of few women to confront the Party’s misogynoir and violence against women in the movement.

“A woman in the Black Power movement was considered, at best, irrelevant. A woman asserting herself was a pariah. If a black woman assumed a role of leadership, she was said to be eroding black manhood, to be hindering the progress of the black race. She was an enemy of the black people…. I knew I had to muster something mighty to manage the Black Panther Party,” she’d write later in her memoir.

Ultimately leaving the party less than a year after Newton’s return to the states in 1977, Brown had reached her breaking point in the struggle against the patriarchal violence when Newton called for the beating of Panther Liberation School administrator Regina Davis after she reprimanded a coworker.

‘A Taste of Power’ was written in the years following her departure from the Party and it tells the story of a young black girl who grows up between rough neighborhoods in New York and North Philly as she struggles to “act white enough” for her friends at an experimental integrated school, her affair with Jay Kennedy, and her time spent with the Black Panthers.

Entertainment exec. Jeff Kwatinetz’s production company The Firm, Inc. acquired the rights to the project and are currently in talks with a writer about the script adaptation. Dallas Buyers Club producer Robbie Brenner has been tapped to co-produce alongside Kwatinetz and Kevin McKeon.