Chadwick Boseman

Chadwick Boseman was a Black American actor born November 29, 1976, in Anderson, South Carolina, whose performances ranged from historical drama to the imagined world of Wakanda. A Howard University graduate who studied directing, he won a Drama League Directing Fellowship before acting drew him toward New York and the screen. He portrayed Jackie Robinson in 42, James Brown in Get on Up and Thurgood Marshall in Marshall. He also attended the British American Dramatic Academy at Oxford. Taking on Robinson, Brown and Marshall in a span of a few years, he became one of the few actors asked to carry major studio films built on Black American history.

Boseman played T’Challa in Black Panther, directed by Ryan Coogler, working with an ensemble whose performance earned a Screen Actors Guild cast award. The film grossed more than $1.3 billion worldwide and became the highest-grossing film directed by a Black filmmaker. Speaking at that ceremony, he described the importance of creating roles in which Black performers could express a full range of humanity.

He returned to Howard as its 2018 commencement speaker, addressing graduates at the university’s 150th ceremony on May 12. In the university’s memorial, President Wayne A. I. Frederick recalled Boseman discussing his resistance to roles that diminished Black men.

His final performances came while he was privately ill. In 2016, Boseman was diagnosed with stage III colon cancer, which progressed to stage IV over the following four years. He kept the condition private, continuing to act through that period, including a turn in Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods alongside his other final films. In Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, he played Levee Green, an ambitious trumpet player in 1920s Chicago. Boseman died in August 2020, at 43. The Screen Actors Guild gave him a posthumous award for the performance, which his wife accepted on his behalf.