MIT rarely allows Hollywood films to be shot on their campus. So it was a surprise when an email went out in 2021, alerting students that a film titled Summer Break would be filming at the school. Turns out, this was the working title of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. It’s now burst into theaters, with its rare commodity of MIT as a backdrop.
But something else was special about Wakanda Forever’s filming location. The MIT scenes were shot a stone’s throw from where, a century before, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins worked at the Institute.
Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins was a groundbreaking novelist, playwright, performer, orator, thinker and activist—and she’s credited with inventing the setting that eventually became Wakanda in her science fiction. But while her imaginative creations live on in massive-franchise form, her name isn’t widely known.
This tremendous literary and political figure is memorialized sparsely: a small placard stands outside her former North Cambridge home, where she lived until her death in 1930. The Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins Society—founded in 2009—continues to uphold her legacy through scholarship, publications and conference events. But there are no records of her in MIT’s archives—though there are numerous contemporary accounts of her working at the school, she seems to have vanished quietly and undeservedly from Institute memory as much as from public acclaim.
Deeply enmeshed in the intellectual and activist community around Beacon Hill in the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, Hopkins was a groundbreaker from the time she was a teen as a playwright and performer.
Born in 1859 in Portland, Maine, she moved to Boston at a young age and remained in Massachusetts for most of her life. Lois Brown writes that her family had a long history of racial activism, which she explores at length in her excellent biography of Hopkins, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution (the title is drawn from a speech that Hopkins gave at Boston’s Faneuil Hall in 1905).
She was a graduate of Girls’ High School—“a venerable Boston institution founded in the early 1850s that, despite considerable opposition from families and even family physicians who ‘strongly advised’ against certain advanced courses of studies for girls, placed graduates in leading American colleges.” Also among the alumnae of Girls’ High School was Marcella O’Grady Boveri—the first woman to graduate from MIT.
Hopkins’ career, in a nutshell, can be understood in three portions: In the first, she was a successful playwright and performer, with her first original 1879 production of Peculiar Sam, or The Underground Railroad which Brown writes, “provided American audiences with the first staged reenactments of slavery that were not offered through the lens of the white imagination.”
