It’s never an easy thing when someone makes their transition if we think that one had a lot more life left to live. Such is the case with Chadwick Boseman. (My teary-eyed wife said to me, “I can’t explain it, but it feels like Marvin Gaye and Prince all over again.) An excellent actor, Boseman was not an example of the fake-ass American Dream; he was the epitome of African-American brilliance, which includes resolve, intelligence, style, and grace. When Alain Locke conceptualized the New Negro, he was making commentary on African-American brilliance, showing that African peoples have managed to adapt more readily, more successfully, and more creatively than any other people on the planet as they have been warred upon, dislocated, colonized, and enslaved more than anyone else on this planet. Yet, at every juncture, African people have emerged more powerful than before. Boseman reflects that history as a child of the South (Anderson, South Carolina), a product of an HBCU (Howard University), and a mentee of greatness (Phylicia Rashad, Denzel Washington, and others); he is truly in the tradition of everything great about African peoples. Therefore, we must resist the temptation to narrow Boseman’s excellence to one or two characters and be willing to see the vastness in his work in the same manner that his work demands us to see the vastness in what it means to be African.
Boseman’s self-awareness and his desire to know and celebrate that history enabled him to portray every type of black man because he understood the wide-ranging diversity and dimensionality of what it means to be African, both at home and dislocated. Additionally, he understood the key ingredients of what it means to be successful: quality work ethic, belief in oneself, and developing one’s unique style. As such, he could become Jackie Robinson, Thurgood Marshall, James Brown, T’Challa, Stormin’ Norman, and Levee because he knew that Africanness is an endless well of creative possibilities that always produces just what humanity needs when it most needs it. All of these figures, real and fictional, offer a commentary on what it means to be African in the most ideal and in the most dysfunctional circumstance and what it means to impact those circumstances in a manner that makes those circumstances better than what they were before they arrived on the scene. However, Boseman was not interested in romanticizing Africanness as each of these characters are not perfect and are flawed in their own way. That is the quality of well-crafted writing and acting to provide nuanced and complex figures and storylines to force the audience to think more critically in the engagement of the art and of the ideas and issues presented in the art. Though he was the beneficiary of quality writing, he had the acting skills and the knowledge of history to take words and make them live in a manner that his work becomes both a reflection of reality and a blueprint by which to gauge and live one’s life. Thus, Boseman’s commentary on humanity through a historical lens is what I tell my students: History is not the study of perfect people creating a perfect world. History is the study of people working daily to overcome their iniquities to construct a more perfect world. Boseman, like all great artists, helped to create art that inspires viewers to be better than they were as it consoles and informs them that they have what is necessary to endure and overcome whatever is hindering or oppressing them. So, I will say about Boseman what I said about Prince. His legacy is not that he died too soon. His legacy is that he did more with less time than most do with double it. RIP Black Man—your life is both a rebellion and a refutation of the white lies regarding African humanity.