The South Carolina town that helped launch Chadwick Boseman

Herman Keith Jr., 51, recalls what it was like growing up Black in Anderson, S.C., the home town of Chadwick Boseman:

“I went to an almost all-white elementary school, but I grew up on the black side of town. I always had white friends, but I always knew I was black. I didn’t experience much racism, but every now and then it would come up.

One time my grandmother took me to the market, and I picked up this giant tomato to show it to her. After we moved on, the white man behind us told his kid to look at the big tomato. His kid said, ‘You mean, the one that nigger had?’ I’ll always remember that. My grandmother said ‘Just ignore him. He’s ignorant.’”

Chadwick Boseman, or Chad, as he was called in Anderson, was really just getting started when he died of colon cancer two weeks ago at 43. The Tweet announcing his death was the “most liked Tweet ever” with 5.7 million hearts.

Mourning for the actor who was the Marvel character T’Challa, or the Black Panther, and who portrayed Jackie Robinson, Thurgood Marshall, and James Brown to acclaim, went not only viral, but global. Love poured out from his colleagues; children around the world turned out in the costumes of the first Black superhero.

How, I couldn’t help wondering, did this kid from Anderson, S.C., scale such heights? Then, I thought, is it racist to even ask such a question?

“No, it’s not racist to ask,” assured Eugene Robinson, the Pulitzer winning columnist for the Washington Post. “But I don’t know the answer.” Robinson is both African-American and from a small town in South Carolina, Orangeburg—an old cotton plantation town that is home to two historically black colleges. Growing up a faculty kid, Gene says, “I thought Black people were the educated, sophisticated, urbane ones. The white people I knew were very provincial and not very well educated.”

Anderson is a manufacturing town on the Piedmont Plateau, and, as the first to ever power a cotton gin with electricity, calls itself the “electric city.”

No one gets where Chadwick Boseman did without enormous talent and work. In Boseman’s case, two other factors weighed heavily: family and school.

“Everything Chad accomplished is a direct projection of his family,” says Keith, who, like Boseman, attended T.L. Hanna High School and preceded him at Howard University. “He came from a strong, beautiful family.”

Keith wasn’t close to Chad, but their parallel lives reveal a lot. While not world famous, Herman Keith Jr. left Anderson and became, as his friend, South Carolina native and billionaire art patron Darla Moore says, “One of the true good guys. A successful artist and a successful human being.”

In talking to folks from Anderson, the conversation kept coming back to T.L. Hanna, the county’s premier high school that integrated successfully in the late 60’s, and today offers an International Baccalaureate degree to a student body that is about 60% white, 35% black.

The school loves its sports, so much so that district lines were allegedly redrawn to include a young African-American tight end named Ed Rice. Ed later became Jim Rice, who made it into the Baseball Hall of Fame after a 16-year career with the Boston Red Sox. The Cuba Gooding Jr. character in the film “Radio” — a mentally challenged “assistant coach” adopted by the football team — was from T.L. Hanna.

But a lot of people also bring up Herman Keith’s now deceased father, Herman Keith Sr., a long-time art teacher who was one of the first two African-American teachers to join the T.L. Hanna faculty.

“Herman Keith changed hundreds of lives here, black and white,” says Ginny Bailes Fretwell, publisher of the Electric City News. Herman Jr. concurs: “When I go home people always come up to me and tell me how much he meant to them. He believed in the healing power of art.”

Charleston architect Reggie Gibson, who is white and was a student when the school integrated, recalls: “We had no fights at T.L. Hanna. One of the reasons was Herman Keith. He was cool. And all the white people knew he was cool.”

While making it clear life was no fairy tale for Black folks, Herman Jr. says, “In Anderson the races tolerated each other. Even though there were confederate statues, confederate flags, and I saw a Klan rally once on the way to a football game, I also experienced many kindnesses from white people.”

Like Herman Jr. before him, Chad Boseman left Anderson educated, confident, and headed to Washington, D.C., for Howard.

“Howard is where you discover your Black identity, a sense of history and pride that you don’t learn in high school,” says Keith, “and you meet people. My mother (a music teacher and Howard graduate) rode the train South with (opera star) Jessye Norman. And I now have friends who are mayors, airline pilots, generals, ceo’s, judges.” Boseman, of course, famously caught the attention of actress Phylicia Rashad, who was teaching at Howard, who then called him to the attention of Denzel Washington...

There is no secret formula that propels someone from obscurity to the Big Time. But in the cases of Chad Boseman, Ed Rice, and Herman Keith Jr., it’s only fair for their parents, their high school, and much of their community to take some credit for what they became. It wasn’t entirely a lucky break.

This story was originally published September 12, 2020 at 3:37 PM.