My 10-year-old nephew, William Ryan Cook, had been waiting for weeks for August 28. It was the day that his favorite sport, Major League Baseball, would celebrate one of his favorite people in the world: Jackie Robinson.

The next morning William’s mother, Patricia, woke him to talk about something else.

“Can I tell you something that’s sad?” she asked her son at their home in Fort Lauderdale. “Yes,” he replied. It was then that she told him that another one of his favorite people, Chadwick Boseman, the actor who had played Jackie Robinson in the movie 42 and the iconic Marvel character Black Panther, had died the night before. (Marvel and National Geographic are both owned by The