Panama in Black is an archival excavation of a forgotten Black world: the Afro-Caribbean Panamanians who built a nation, challenged two empires, and carried their culture in their hands from Panama to New York.
The film traces the journeys of two Panamanian-born visionaries: George W. Westerman, a journalist-turned-statesman whose pen and diplomacy linked Panama to Black American civil rights leaders and the broader global Black freedom struggle; and Carlos E. Russell, a Brooklyn-based radical whose cultural and political fire shaped Afro-Caribbean Panamanian identity in New York.
Together, their lives reveal how a people labeled “foreign” shaped community, influence, and belonging on their own terms.
