When I learned that William “Buggs” Polite, one of my oldest friends and a person I deeply admired from my old neighborhood, had died following a stroke, my thoughts turned to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 2015 masterpiece, “ Between the World and Me .”

In one passage, Coates discussed losing his friend and classmate Prince Jones. Buggs wasn’t young, but to many of us, he was every bit the prince, and one who’d long been denied his crown. Buggs experienced the plunder of opportunities so common for Black professionals.

Still, he continually gave and continually served.

“I would smile whenever I saw him,” Coates wrote of his friend, “for I felt the warmth when I was around him and was slightly sad when the time came to trade dap and for one of us to go.”

That passage suits Buggs, the quintessential example of the good person you wanted good fortune to bless.

Buggs was a fixture of my childhood.

Playing 21 on a homemade goal behind Tony Hill’s house. Tackle the Man football along Don Eaton’s red duplex. Bumper pool and basketball pickup games at the MEFSEC (Moving Effectively for Social and Economic Change), now the Lynette Woodard Center.

Buggs stood out. He didn’t bully us. He seemed interested in what us little kids said. He encouraged us. I remember playing an entire summer of baseball and him smiling there in his bowlegged stance, at the last game of the season, after I swatted my one and only hit.

At North High, Buggs blazed trails.

One of our beloved counselors, Tommie Williams, bragged about how Buggs posted a near-perfect ACT score, and that Buggs had broken the classroom barrier of a teacher who’d said Black students couldn’t excel in his class.

He wrote an insightful editorial for the North Star newspaper, explaining how men wearing an earring could symbolize ties to African culture. He launched “B-BASE,” or Blacks for Better Academics and Social Equality.

Buggs then headed east to Atlanta’s historic Morehouse College, the school that accepted Martin Luther King Jr. when King was only 15. Buggs majored in math and eventually led charter schools. He once worked for one of basketball icon Magic Johnson’s foundations.

That meant little when he returned to Wichita and applied for a leadership position at a neighborhood youth center. We were shocked and angry when he wasn’t chosen. He was one of our brightest stars.

You might expect someone so accomplished to join in the orgy of self-promotion that seems so commonplace, but I don’t remember him ever bragging, even though he was one of the few who justifiably could. He wanted that job. I sensed his disappointment.

I’d once written an article about the city’s Black brain drain. Famed architect Charles McAfee inspired the article. He said our segregated community produced numerous Ph.D.s who were forced to leave Wichita to find opportunity.

That’s theft. That’s plunder. Too often, our hometown served as a killing field for Black professionals’ dreams. I felt that was a crown that had been denied him.

Undaunted, Buggs continued to give, and he eventually gained his crown as a stalwart in the public school system.

He tutored kids in math. He and Hercules Finley visited incarcerated youths and encouraged them. Buggs secured a building allowing him to expand his vision. He excitedly raised money and the hopes of community youths.

“The thing to understand about Prince Jones is that he exhibited the whole of his given name,” Coates wrote. “He was kind. Generosity radiated off him, and he seemed to have a facility with everyone and everything. This can never be true, but there are people who pull the illusion off without effort, and Prince was one of them.”

Buggs, too.

A lasting image of him came after my mother’s funeral. I had just slipped Pastor Lincoln Montgomery folded bills through a handshake as my family patriarch instructed, and there stood Buggs, his face registering the hurt and concern you’d expect from a friend.

“There are people,” Coates said, “whom we do not fully know, and yet they live in a warm place within us, and when” we lose them, “and the dark energy disperses, that place becomes a wound.”

This wound, for me and for that community, will take years to heal.