The bio page for Chadwick Boseman’s 2014 play, Deep Azure. A man who truly contained multitudes & never stopped creating.

“He loved basketball & was good enough to be recruited to play college ball. But during his junior year, a boy on his team was shot & killed. Boseman coped w/ the tragedy by writing a play in response to the incident, which he called Crossroads & staged at his high school.”

“He realized he liked telling stories. ‘I just had a feeling that this was something that was calling me,’ he says.” https://web.archive.org/web/20180225052231/https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/features/black-panther-chadwick-boseman-ryan-coogler-cover-story-w516853

“He applied to study directing at Howard...’At a historically black college, you're getting turned on to all these things—the pantheon of our culture. It's John Coltrane, it's James Baldwin. And it's Black Panther.’” https://web.archive.org/web/20180225052231/https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/features/black-panther-chadwick-boseman-ryan-coogler-cover-story-w516853

One of his first jobs, in 2003, was on the soap opera All My Children. He was fired after one week for voicing concerns about the racial stereotypes of his character: “I was like, This is not part of my manifesto. This is not part of what I want to do.” https://www.thewrap.com/black-panther-chadwick-boseman-michael-b-jordan-all-my-children-soap-played-same-role-fired/

“I remember going home and thinking, ‘Do I say something to them about this? Do I just do it?’ And I couldn’t just do it. I had to voice my opinions & put my stamp on it. And the good thing about it was, it changed it a little bit.”

In 2005 his play, Deep Azure, which began as a poem, was produced in Chicago

The artist statement he wrote about the play https://www.press.umich.edu/special/hiphop/deep_azure

“He always looked for projects that had the same emotional weight he felt when he was 17 and a bullet took his friend and inspired his first play.

‘For me, doing this, it has to be meaningful,’ Boseman says. ‘Because that's how it started.’” https://web.archive.org/web/20180225052231/https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/features/black-panther-chadwick-boseman-ryan-coogler-cover-story-w516853#