Sam Wilson's Parents and His Approach to Captain America

The parents of superheroes can have a tremendous influence on their caped children's heroic lives. Superman's Kryptonian parents saved him from a dying world by rocketing him to a new one, where he was raised by the wholesome and grounded Kents. The Waynes' lives of service helped determine their son Bruce's devotion to the same, while their violent deaths set the particular path he would take to doing it. And it doesn't have to be parents: Peter Parker learned that with great power comes great responsibility from his Uncle Ben, whose death due to Peter's negligence led him to work to save others from the same pain and loss.

Sam Wilson's parents, Paul and Darlene, had just as large an effect on his heroic life, first as the Falcon and later as Captain America—not to mention being a social worker in his "off-time." In the last post, we explored how Sam Wilson’s race has affected his experience as Captain America in the comics, especially compared to his predecessor in the role, Steve Rogers. Now, we focus on Sam’s parents and how their lives and the example they set for Sam help him see his job as Captain America differently than Steve did.

Confronting Systematic Injustice

Once, as Sam reflected on his parents' tragic deaths—his father stabbed while intervening in a gunfight and his mother shot by a mugger—he remembered the urge to retaliate, to meet violence with violence. But then, he thought of his father, the preacher, and the dreams he held.

Dreams of bringing hope to the hopeless. Defending those who could not defend themselves. Helping the forgotten and impoverished. Fighting greed, racism and hatred. A dream of creating the kind of world we deserve to live in, the American dream.¹

For his part, Steve Rogers knows full well that the American dream is not the American reality for far too many Americans.² He regularly stresses the importance of standing up for those who cannot stand up for themselves, but he less often addresses the systematic factors that hold some people back from their full potential. Steve is not completely unaware of this. During his eulogy for his friend and immigrant Sung-Jin Jeong, he said, “I fight for those who persevere despite a system that has been rigged against them and I fight for those who struggle to change that system.”³ Nonetheless, he is much more likely to support the status quo by default until he’s made aware of the problems because these difficulties are not a constant aspect of his life—as they have been for Sam.

Source: Marvel Comics

Standing Up for Your Ideals

The memories of Sam’s parents continue to drive him throughout his career as Captain America to attack problems directly. After all, his father’s last words to him were: “It’s not just what we do in life that matters, it’s the evil we don’t confront that defines us.”⁴

Source: Marvel Comics

After his father died, Sam angrily told his mother, “Dad just got himself killed for nothing. Why? Why did he have to say a single word? He had a family who needed him. Maybe he didn’t care about us at all. Cared more about his ideals.” She explained to him why his father had to do what he did:

Sam, if we only looked out for our own families, if every person only worried about and cared for themselves—what kind of world would this be? A community is necessary for more than just raising a child. Cooperation is mandatory to achieve anything real and lasting in this life. We all feel his loss every minute. But there is no better ideal for your father to have given his life for, Sam. If we stop trying to help other people, we give up everything. And sometimes that has a price. That’s a price your father was willing to pay. And if you listen to your heart, I think it’s a price you’re willing to pay as well.⁵

Even Steve recognizes the importance of Paul Wilson to his son. During a brief period in which Sam was transformed into a fascist parody of himself—it happens to all Captains America eventually, as we saw in this post—Steve tried to remind him of his true principles, which Sam called “garbage.” Steve assured him, “It’s not garbage, Sam… it’s duty… I didn’t teach you that—your father did… He died to stop people fighting.” When Sam said, like he did to his mother years earlier, that his father died for nothing, Steve replied, “He died for an ideal. The same one you’re throwing away.”⁶

Establishing a Legacy

No wonder Sam finds it difficult to live up to his parents’ legacy. Soon after taking up the mantle of Captain America, he thought to himself, “I gave the people of Harlem everything I had—desperately trying to fill their shoes. Working myself nearly to death raising my sister and brother. Spent my life worried it wasn’t enough. How could I ever live up to the bar they set?”⁷

After Steve Rogers was brainwashed to join Hydra, Sam gave up being Cap to become the Falcon once more. Later, however, Misty Knight (whom we met in the last post) presented him with a new shield, crafted by his friends, and told him he should be Captain America once again. “Why now?” he asked, not only to her but also to his parents, whose graves he visited soon afterward to express his anxiety about whether he could or should be Cap again. In the end, he admitted he wanted their permission, and he finished by thanking them “for making me the man who could do this. The man who could be—Captain America.”⁸

In the next post, we’ll look at Sam’s more proactive stance as Captain America, how it differs from Steve’s approach, and what happened when they came into conflict over their different takes on the role.