He's a black private dick that's a sex machine with all the chicks. He doesn't take orders from anybody, black or white, but he'd risk his neck for his brother man. I'm talkin' about Shaft. Throughout Shaft, the lead character is built up to be a black superman. He refuses to give in to the expectations of a largely racist white society that he be a criminal and that he bow to the will of authority.
Shaft is equally at home in white uptown and black harlem.
And in 1971, he was a hit with white and black audiences alike. In 1971, America had just put the most violent and strenuous years of the century behind it. The civil rights movement had won equality under the law for black Americans. But equality in the real world was another story. Previously, the history of cinema had been played out in a government that had oppressed its black citizens as a matter of policy.