WHEN I first heard that Sam Wilson was going to be the next Captain America, I was furious.

I wasn’t angry because Marvel Comics was sidelining a beloved character like Steve Rogers, the Star-Spangled Avenger, and giving his title to the African American man who was created to be his sidekick (though many other people were upset by this). I wasn’t even upset because Marvel was retiring one of the first African American heroic identities in the comic-book industry and turning Sam Wilson into just another replacement for a World War II-era white super hero.

I was mad because I thought this would be an ignoble end to a great character like Sam Wilson.

You see, I’m a longtime comic-book fan. I started reading comic books as a child, and five decades or so later I still have a pull list—digital, not paper—and I’m a longtime devotee of Marvel Unlimited, the electronic catalog of Marvel Comics, so I read backward into the past as well as forward as I keep up with the most recent adventures of my favorite heroes and teams. And there’s one thing I know for a fact, given all of my years of reading comic books:

The status quo always returns.

And that’s where I thought they were going with Sam Wilson. He would be Captain America for a while, his falcon, Redwing, on his arm, but Steve Rogers was going to be back, and he was going to be Captain America. Which meant Sam was probably going to have to die, break his back, lose a leg, or go insane, and probably at the hands of Steve’s greatest enemy, the Red Skull—all to inspire Steve Rogers to remember and prove to the world that he was the one and only Captain America.

And Sam Wilson deserved better.

I’ve always been a fan of Sam’s. He and the Black Panther were the first characters of color I encountered in my early days of reading the Avengers, and unlike T’Challa—who was very proudly Wakandan and not American—the Falcon was the only Black American super hero that I knew of for a very long time. I would eventually discover Luke Cage and Monica Rambeau, but Sam for the longest time was the only super hero who looked like me and was from a real place that I recognized—Harlem—instead of a made-up country from a continent that I had never visited. That gave him a special place in my heart, and I always paid attention when he showed up.

Gene Colan, the artist on that issue and co-creator of the Falcon, described what was going through his and Stan’s minds when they came up with the character in the introduction toMarvel Masterworks: Captain America Volume 4 (2008):

“In the late 1960s, [when news of the] Vietnam War and civil rights protests were regular occurrences, and Stan, always wanting to be at the forefront of things, started bringing these headlines into the comics … one of the biggest steps we took in this direction came in Captain America. I enjoyed drawing people of every kind. I drew as many different types of people as I could into the scenes I illustrated, and I loved drawing Black people. I always found their features interesting and so much of their strength, spirit and wisdom [was] written on their faces. I approached Stan, as I remember, with the idea of introducing an African American hero, and he took to it right away. … I looked at several African American magazines, and used them as the basis of inspiration for bringing The Falcon to life.”

It was only when I was older that I discovered how special Sam Wilson actually was. Not only is he a cool super hero and an awesome character, but he also holds a special place in the pantheon of characters of color in the comic-book industry’s history books.

Many comic-book and movie fans now know that the Black Panther, King T’Challa of Wakanda, was the first Black comic-book character in mainstream comic books, debuting inFantastic Four #52 in July 1966. But T’Challa wasn’t the first African American comic-book super hero… because he wasn’t African American. That hero was Sam Wilson, the Falcon.

Sam Wilson was introduced by Stan Lee and Gene Colan inCaptain America #117, which hit stands in September 1969. And from the beginning, Sam was a hero. He didn’t have to lose his parents to murder (that came later in the rewrites). He didn’t have to avenge the fridging of a girlfriend or wife. He didn’t even start out fighting racism or running from corrupt cops or Klansmen in the United States.

Sam started out his career as a hero fighting for freedom for natives in a foreign land in the tropics, for no other reason than it was the right thing to do. Steve Rogers came along and gave him a costume and some training, but Sam was already a falcon-wielding hero when he met Captain America. Steve Rogers—and later the Black Panther—only gave him the training and, eventually, the mechanical wings and flight suit to make him a better-equipped hero, not a hero. Sam did that all by himself.

That, for a teenaged and young adult me, was very refreshing. Sam Wilson didn’t need a tortured backstory of pain and sorrow to usher him into the world of heroics. He was a Bl