Abar, The First Black Superman is a 1977 blaxploitation superhero film directed by Frank Packard and starring J. Walter Smith, Tobar Mayo, and Roxie Young.
Upon moving into a bigoted neighbourhood, the scientist father of a persecuted black family gives a superpower elixir to a tough bodyguard, who then becomes a superpowered crimefighter.
The film was the brainchild of James Smalley, a black pimp from Louisiana, and Frank Packard, a white actor and screenwriter; it was filmed partly in a working whorehouse.
Its original release was very limited, primarily to what was known as the "Chitlin' Circuit" of Southern drive-ins.
[1] The film was shot in the Baldwin Hills and Watts neighbourhoods of Los Angeles without permits to do so, and at one point actual motorcycle gang members who had been hired to play a black motorcycle gang surrounded the cars of the white police officers who had been called in to shut down shooting.