Amandla Stenberg

1998– ACTRESS AND ACTIVIST UNITED STATES

I don’t feel afraid to talk about racism or to talk about sexism or the gender binary.

—AMANDLA STENBERG

Amandla paced nervously outside the audition room. She had to get this part! The Hunger Games was one of her favorite books of all time—she’d already read the series three or four times—and this role was perfect for her. Rue, a tribute from District 11, was small and musical, just like Amandla. Rue was also one of the most important parts in the movie—the heart of the story. It’s Rue’s death that motivates Katniss to fight back against the Capital.

It also happened to be one of the best parts for an African American actress Amandla had seen in a long time. She’d begged her agent to get her this audition.

Amandla wanted the part so badly that she’d even enlisted her mom’s help. Her mom took some Rue-style clothes—old khakis and a T-shirt—and rolled them around in the dirt. When Amandla was dressed in the stained clothes, her mom put twigs in her hair and leaves all over her body. Finally, Amandla tucked a tiny flower wreath into her pocket—a good-luck charm Rue might have carried.

Suddenly, the door opened and an assistant called Amandla’s name. Her mom gave her hand a squeeze for reassurance, and then the twelve-year-old actress strode into the room.

Inside sat the director, Gary Ross. He smiled at Amandla’s getup and said, “I see you have your own makeup and hair department.”1 Amandla grinned, and the director grinned back. As she performed her Rue scene, she thought maybe he could see what she felt inside—the role was hers.

Amandla was right, of course. She beat out all the other actresses and got the part of Rue. Many months later, in thousands of movie theaters across America, audiences watched her brave and cunning Rue and fell in love. The young actress was a movie star in the biggest blockbuster of the year!

Amandla Stenberg was born in Los Angeles, California, to an African American mother and a Danish father. On her father’s side, she also has Greenlandic Inuit ancestry, and her name means “power” in Zulu. Little did her parents know how much power their daughter’s words and actions would someday have.

She got started in the entertainment industry when she was very young. At age four, she began modeling for Disney, and then appeared in commercials for such brand giants as McDonald’s and Walmart.

In 2011, she starred in her first movie, Columbiana, as the younger version of the lead character played by Zoe Saldana. Critics loved her from the start. A reviewer posted on ScreenAnarchy, “A star is born! Amandla Stenberg steals the entire film, which isn’t bad considering she’s only ten years old and is onscreen for only the opening fifteen minutes.”²

Soon after, when Amandla heard that they were casting for The Hunger Games, she desperately wanted to be the one to portray Rue’s powerful story: “I called my agent repeatedly, saying, ‘Please, please, please get me an audition.’ ”³ And all her preparation and hard work (and maybe that good-luck charm) paid off!

Amandla’s wise words (on growing up black): “I think that as a black girl you grow up internalizing all these messages that say you shouldn’t accept your hair or your skin tone or your natural features, or that you shouldn’t have a voice, or that you aren’t smart. I feel like the only way to fight that is to just be yourself on the most genuine level.”7

The four-month shoot wasn’t easy—there was a ton of running and tree climbing for the young teen. But Amandla gave it her all, and in the end, she was one of the most popular characters in the movie. Again, she got great reviews, but this time, she also won an NAACP Image Award and a Teen Choice Award.⁴ Fans loved Amandla and the movie, which was an enormous blockbuster. It set records for opening day gross ($67.3 million) and had the third-largest opening weekend gross of any movie in North America ($152.5 million).⁵

Amandla followed her gargantuan screen success with smaller movie roles, plus a regular gig on TV’s Sleepy Hollow. Currently, she has more movies in the works, but she is also a talented musician who plays the violin, drums, and guitar. Her folk/rock duo, called Honeywater, recorded an album in 2015.

That same year, she also began cowriting the comic book series Niobe: She Is Life, about a black elf girl. Her inspiration, Amandla says, came in her childhood:

I was always super into fantasy and The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones and all of that, but I could never find black characters whom I really liked.  .  .  .  I think [Niobe is] officially the first comic book to be written by a black girl, starring a black girl, and illustrated by a black girl.⁶

In addition to her movie career, Amandla has become famous for her social activism and for speaking her mind on social media. A Tumblr video she made for school entitled “Don’t Cash Crop on My Cornrows” went viral in 2015. In it she criticized white actresses and pop stars who adopt black culture and fashion for personal profit, without any acknowledgment or respect for where it came from (called “cultural appropriation”).

Amandla’s wise words (on the power of social media): “In the past you could look only to movies or TV or music or celebrities in order to feel like you had representation. Now you can go on Instagram and you can see a girl who looks like you who is killing the game and expressing herself. Just being able to see that is so affirming.”12

She is also passionate about feminism. When she interviewed feminist leader Gloria Steinem, Amandla said: “I’m learning now that a feminist does not look like one certain thing. I used to think it just meant fighting for women’s rights, but  .  .  .  it’s so much more than that. It’s about dismantling this entire wack system.”⁸

At age seventeen, Amandla came out publicly as bisexual. She also identifies as nonbinary, which means she doesn’t identify as exclusively male or female: “My identity exists without the labels; it’s already there. A label is just a name for it.”⁹

Amandla has many causes she cares about, but she volunteers her time as a youth ambassador for No Kid Hungry, which aims to end child hunger in the United States, and for the Ubuntu Education Fund in South Africa.

For her social activism, Dazed magazine called her “one of the most incendiary voices of her generation”¹⁰ and Time magazine named her one of the 30 most influential teens of 2015 and 2016.¹¹

So, keep your eye on Amandla Stenberg. She’s still making her mark all over the place.

ROCK ON!

MIKAILA ULMER

After getting stung twice in one year, four-year-old Mikaila Ulmer was both terrified of and fascinated by bees. She studied them for a school assignment and discovered honeybees could soon be extinct! This could cause a lot of problems for humans, since most of our food crops need bees for pollination. Mikaila decided to do something about it. She pulled out her great-grandmother’s 1940 lemonade recipe, which uses honey for sweetener, and started a business, Me & the Bees Lemonade. Mikaila’s business boomed. At age ten, she was on ABC’s Shark Tank and won $60,000 to grow her business. A year later, she signed an $11 million deal with Whole Foods to carry her lemonade. She even served some to President Obama! Mikaila now gives workshops on how to save the honeybees and donates part of her profits to the cause.