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.

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