A Brother Who Spoke Light Into This World: Now is the Time to Remember Him

After the death of actor, musician and poet Malcolm-Jamal Warner, I took some time to process my thoughts. Like many, I felt a kinship to him that can only be explained the way a Black man can explain it. Although it’s been several weeks, my sentiment stands. Here it is:

The day the Los Angeles uprising began, April 29, 1992, I was 1,900 miles away in my apartment with my college friends and frat brothers. The moment we heard four LAPD officers, who had beaten Rodney King nearly to death a year prior, would go free, we all remarked that the City of Angels would go up in flames, and we were right.

We saw Black men angry about what happened, frustrated about a justice system that had failed them again.

The next night, we were in my apartment again, watching another historic moment on television. “And So We Commence, Part 2.” It was the finale of a show that we had not only grown up with, but saw ourselves as a part of, “The Cosby Show.” The focus on this last episode was Theo, the only son of the Huxtable clan.  He went to high school with us, then college, and was now donning his purple New York University robe to walk across the stage as he received his diploma.

While we wrenched in solidarity with the brothers in L.A., we also marched with pride as Theo took the steps we were all striving to achieve. Most of us were from urban America, a place where people struggle to be recognized as human, but we also came from working and middle-class backgrounds, with families that loved us, that cheered for us as we matriculated in pursuit of our degrees.

We were also well aware of what the streets were about in those days. It was the height of the crack epidemic. Homicides were worse than they had ever been, primarily Black males dying at the hands of other Black males.

But we were also Theo, a kid who messed up with girls, struggled in schools that tried to marginalize him, hung out with his homeboys, lots of times doing nothing. Learning, growing, laughing. Just being a kid. And contrary to the stereotypes against us, we were normal. Just like the character Malcolm-Jamal Warner played. It was a message especially for Black boys.

We lost him July 21. It wasn’t for the many reasons that Black men perish before their time. It wasn’t gun violence. It was not stroke, heart disease or diabetes. It was not alcohol or drug abuse. It wasn’t suicide. He drowned accidentally off the coast of Costa Rica. A riptide caught him while he was swimming with his daughter, which likely took him under and did not allow him to recover. The possibility exists that he sacrificed himself to save his child.

The sea can be unpredictable at times, and this is apparently not his fault. Just an accident that no one could have foreseen.

Learning of his death, I thought back to the day Theo graduated, sending “The Cosby Show” to continue in syndicated reruns for decades now. I graduated six months later, my march similar to his, my family there to shower the same love on me that he received.

It isn’t that there haven’t been untimely deaths of well-known Black men in my age group that shook me. Tupac, Biggie Smalls, Kobe Bryant, Chadwick Boseman. I wasn’t prepared for those, either. But Warner, a married father who was only a month older than me, was someone who represented what I was as a kid. He also, in many ways, represented what I became in manhood. Someone who was himself. Someone who was confident in his Black manhood and felt no need to apologize for it. For quite a while, I’ve felt the social pull of demands for apology for the sins of other Black men coming from many angles. Some of it performative, some of it sincere. None of it fair.

In Warner, though, there was an air of “I only need to be me. It’s all I can be anyway, so you’ll just have to live with it.” And that’s who I am, as well. So are so many other Black men.

The good news is that the loss of Warner does not mean the loss of that sentiment. All any of us can be is ourselves at the end of the day, no matter how hard society tries to convince us different. We don’t owe anyone anything phony or contrived. We only owe ourselves honesty, accountability, and agency.

Perhaps the roles Warner could have chosen in his career were stereotypical or degrading. But he apparently chose roles that fit his personality: even-tempered. Not silly or stupid for the money. That wasn’t him. That’s not me, either. In my own career, people have approached me with positions that would have netted me a lot of money, but demanded my dignity. I chose to go through lengthy periods of unemployment rather than hand over my integrity.

The main thing that I can say about Warner is that he spoke words of positivity and light into the world. “I don’t believe in canceling people. I believe in conversations, accountability, and growth,” he said one time. Another time, he said, “true maturity is learning that your opinion doesn’t always need to be spoken.”

When you speak hope, healing, and harmony into the world, people remember your words for years, generations, centuries, even ages. But when you speak negativity, harm, and hate into the world, people forget your words soon after you die, and the only thing they remember about you is how toxic you were. The only people who defend you are other toxic people.

We are fortunate that is not Warner’s legacy.

He can be remembered as our brother whom we grew up with, someone we were always pleased to see as teenagers. When we were young adults, we wanted to know that he was doing well. As we entered middle age, we were glad for his success and that he never veered into anything negative.

None of us knows when we will meet our end, but it is best to know that when you do, you leave this world with people remembering the joy you left in it.

Madison Gray is a New York City-based writer and editor whose work has appeared in multiple publications globally. Reach out to him at madison@starkravingmadison.com.

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