The King Is Forever

The King is Forever

Bruce Lockhart 2nd

Superheroes don’t die… It was all I could think when I heard the news. I clung to the childlike notion desperately as report after report came in, confirming the impossible.

At 48 years old, the king, Chadwick Boseman had finally lost his four-year long battle with colon cancer.

The feeling I had was much the same when I received the information my best friend from Highschool had killed himself, sheer disbelief… I myself am 28 years old and have been to more funerals and viewings than I can count; if there is a statistic that accounts for how many people your likely to lose on a year to year basis, I’m confident I’ve far surpassed it. The shadow that comes with death’s cold embrace never quite leaves you. I’ve lost a cherished aunt to cancer, I’ve seen it diminish people into specters of themselves, and perhaps it is only because I know death so well that I feel equipped to address one of the greatest losses of our time.

To say Chadwick Boseman was an inspiration to me would be a sore understatement, he is rather, and continues to be a beacon of hope for change. This man was an amazing advocate for hope, while fighting cancer he raised a nation and took on the role of a lifetime. Yes it’s true, he played the likes of Thurgood Marshall, a civil rights activist and Supreme Court Justice; James Brown, a musical icon dubbed the ‘Godfather of Soul’ and last but not least, Jackie Robinson, the first African American baseball player to break through the hateful walls of segregation. These roles propelled Boseman’s career to new heights until he landed what I consider the role he was born to play, T’challa—the Black Panther.

I won’t sugarcoat the truth—it was beyond discouraging to watch a respectable, decent black man leave the Whitehouse, only to be replaced by the antithesis of all he had stood for…as if the first black president in American had been nothing more than a misstep in our nation’s history.

Despite all the hateful rhetoric that became empowered with every waking day of the next president, in 2018 Boseman brought to life my childhood hero, along with this incredible conception of an African nation that had remained immune to the horrors of slavery.

Wakanda, although imagined, became very real to many across the board. You must understand, this was somewhere that embraced black skin and black hair, a magical place that celebrated everything unique and beautiful about our ancestry. If only for the length of the movie, it returned to us all the treasured things we’d lost.

Boseman breathed life into this character and this world, he earned the title of ‘King’ and became the warrior an entire race was desperately thirsting for. I’d like to think I have the unique perspective of a biracial male, because I went to a predominantly white school for the duration of my education.

My years there were rife with not only purposeful racism, but the ignorant kind as well. I rode the bus home every day, and every day there sat, in the back, an older crew of rowdy kids. I tried to mind my own business as the bus driver scowled silently at them in his rearview mirror, but every day they chose to make someone’s life unnecessarily more difficult.

I could no longer hold my tongue the day they started picking on a special needs kid. My older brother is on the Autism Spectrum, my little sister too, and all I could see was my siblings being harassed.

The moment I spoke up and told them to leave that boy alone, was the moment the bullseye became painted on my back. I saw the way their eyes traveled from him, homing in on me like a laser guided missile.

I was about twelve, and you might’ve pegged me as the runt of the litter. The leader of the bullies had about a head over me, but I just took aim at his scowl and sent him home with a bloody nose. After the altercation, I found myself far more wounded with the bully’s words than anything he did to me with his fists.

He had told me, “Go back to Africa.” I was visibly shaken and upset. I couldn’t find a way to rationalize such hate. Later, I would be struck with the painful decree, that it didn’t matter where I was born or how well I did in school, or how popular I might become—some people would only ever judge me by my skin color.

A drop of black blood will always be enough for some people to hate you, and I struggled to accept this ideology even as I recognized the truth…the harsh reality that you can’t reason with hatred.

I didn’t get in trouble. I have the type of mother who, when I told her about the fight and that I had punched the big bully in the nose, had asked, “Well, did you break it?” When I told her he had left with it bleeding, she nodded with satisfaction. Her motto had always been not to start a fight, but always finish one. After that altercation, bullies mostly steered clear of me.

I have a light complexion, and grey eyes, so I certainly could’ve tried to whitewash myself; I could’ve tried to become as unthreatening as possible and blend in to the sea of white faces that would always look at me as other, but something burned inside me from that point on.

It was a hunger, and a need to lean into my racial awakening rather than run from it. The likes of Fredrick Douglas, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr quickly began to fill up my understanding of the bigotry I’d faced, the history and past behind the ignorance and what it meant for my future.

Anyone who’s been in a similar situation has probably heard a similar piece of advice, that simply because you’re black you must work twice as hard just to come out even with people born white. This was the birth of what would become known as white privilege, which has existed since the first slave was taken from their home and brought here.

I learned in time the inner workings that went into such a disturbing racial food chain, I’d learn even harder truths still, that those in power tend to not want to be bothered with the sins of their fore-fathers…as if all the black blood spilled in the name of this country could ever have a price tag attached to it.

I think I only fully understood the significance of what Chadwick Boseman had achieved while reading about an African transfer student that had made his way over to America, into a predominantly white area. One student asked him if he’d transferred from Wakanda, mind you these were younger children so it was an innocent question, a conclusion drawn from the fact that the young man resembled the actors from the movie.

He responded simply by saying he was not from Wakanda, but that he lived close to it, and that was the totality of the interaction. I was at a loss for words; a place that didn’t exist had found a way to give black bodies and minds some of our power back. The nation may not have been a physical place, but it certainly had evolved into something more, a sort of spiritual realm where anything you set your mind on could be possible.

Chadwick would spend many hours with children who were struck with the evilness of cancer, and in hindsight we now know why. His presence undoubtedly gave strength and courage to all those around him, but I can imagine he also drew strength from them, he called them his Wakanadian Warriors and anyone who’s had to fight cancer has certainly earned the title ‘Warrior’.

One of the few things that gave me any sort of solace after his unexpected death was the fact that the Black Panther would not be recast. Boseman, in all his Wakandian swagger had immortalized that character, and no successor could ever take his place, or do what it was he did for the black community…or for me personally.

He was and is Wakanda, it was built on his back, he became the heart and soul of a nation that despite his absence will continue flourishing and paving new ways forward for us all regardless of race.

Because Wakanda is indeed forever…and therefore its King is forever, too.

RIP Chadwick.

Thank you for all you have given us, you are truly a hero among men, a beacon to the broken, and now at rest, you are a King who’s earned his crown.