While scanning the Op-Ed page of The New York Times last month (4/23/21), I landed on comments by a prominent Black activist, writer, and artist, Eve L. Ewing, about her revisions to a Black Superheroine, Ironheart for Marvel Comics. Though Ewing focused on the “firestorm” of hate that she experienced for working with this character, I was drawn to the implications of her portrayal.

Created in 2016 by two white males, Ironheart is the alter ego of a 15-year-old South Chicago Black girl genius/inventor named Riri Williams who loses loved ones to street violence and is inducted as a Superhero with a power suit that she designs, builds, and wears to fight evil and crime. What a topical character! A Black girl, supremely gifted in the STEM domain, from the roiling streets of Chicago, introduced as hostilities and bloodshed escalated in the “real” world.  

Ewing, however, gave Ironheart a humane, artistic side—she quotes Maya Angelou’s poetry—that gives new meaning to her inherited name: a riff on Lionheart and Braveheart? Rather than suggesting “impenetrable,” “iron” signals this heart’s strength and constancy under continuous assault—and sensitivity to human dilemmas. Ewing emphasized her Ironheart has singular empathy, as we’ll see in the forthcoming streamed TV series for Disney+.  

In addition to saving the world from Supervillains, this daunting Superheroine, as the panel here shows, also kneels nonthreateningly to engage with a petty thief she unmasks as a 10-year-old tangled in local gang activity. She then helps and takes him flying for sheer goofy fun.

Ewing’s Ironheart, I concluded, is a knight-errant for our times: a well-rounded, soulful human to complement the skilled warrior and engaged protector. In this case, Ewing’s knight is a precocious, street-wise, heartful adolescent girl.

Why does Ewing’s Ironheart matter? These complex times, with so much change as well as divisiveness and turmoil, make such a multi-faceted Superhero/knight extraordinarily welcome. Especially one so engaged with helping on an eye-popping scale along the stumbling path to maturity, when so many adults despair of the world for the emerging generations.

Some context helps us here.  There are many heroes committed to compassion and helping the vulnerable (notably Jesus), and even mounted militant protectors worldwide and through time. Though horseless (who needs to ride when you can fly?), Ironheart recalls the mounted European model inspired by the knights of Muslim Spain.

For all the emphasis on fighting skills, the informal code of chivalry that most of us know, through the Arthurian Legends or the Song of Roland, was multi-faceted to prevent self-interested materialism and bellicose brutishness. Such a knight was devout for spirituality and a Christian ethos. He acquired courtly manners and learning to polish his conduct and enrich his mind. Even the knight-errant who undertook quests, like Sir Galahad, declared fealty to a lord or lady to root him socially and emotionally.

According to historian David Crouch (The Birth of Nobility. . . 2015), the chivalric code draws on the Old Testament Book of Psalms attributed to David the warrior-bard-king. There, God is both source and sanction for the knight’s mission. The singer-poet thanks God for providing him with weapons, lessons in warfare, and protection and success in battle, even to killing his enemy (Psalm 18). He seeks God’s help for the poor persecuted by the wicked, and for the humble, orphaned, and oppressed (Psalm 10). He praises God’s call for the righteous to show mercy (Psalm 37).  As singer-poet, he is the consummate spiritual artist.

The medieval European knight-errant evolved in later troubled times. No example may startle as much, however, as the profoundly democratic American Lone Ranger, whose creed emphasized “my Creator, my country, my fellow man” in the depths of the Depression: He first emerged in 1933.

Ewing’s Riri/Ironheart literally heartens me for NOW. Blending love of her roots, her Mom and friends, and the world; formidable smarts and learning; knightly action in defense of others with heart, she carries personal tragedy with her into unending world and local problems. Though she experiences moods and emotions, and broods about her unique condition and future, she’s defiantly optimistic and works ceaselessly for good. When in meditative flight, she gives soaring life to the very line she quotes from Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise:”

Such light-filled engagement and anticipation of a new day are themselves uplifting. With the Psalms deeply embedded in her quest, Ironheart’s embrace of Angelou, who treasured her Christian roots and spirituality, illuminates the very being of this irrepressible young woman. Thank you, Eve Ewing.

—Suzanne Glover Lindsay, St. Stephen’s historian and curator