Originally Posted by
DrNewGod
The Dispossessed:
A new criminal entity - The Dispossessed - begins to make a push into Organized Crime across the entire US. Almost Hydra-like, The Dispossessed is distinguished in seeming almost completely decentralized. They are also unique in being made up largely of Latin American and African immigrants, although a substantial minority of their ranks include native born American citizens of color. As the event unfolds, it becomes apparent that all members of The Dispossessed are, or are descended from people who had to flee persecution in their native lands.
The Dispossessed aren't like the gangs they seek to supplant. Aside from feeling more like a movement than an organization, they are as likely to covertly fund protest movements and civic programs as they are to run criminal operations, and they rigidly refuse to move drugs within their own ethnic and racial communities. In fact, some of their most intense battlegrounds with other gangs are not to take over drug trade, but to eliminate it. All that said, they are running rackets of all kinds, real estate swindles, identity theft, prostitution, kiddie porn, extortion, murder for hire... the list is endless.
The Heroes reacting to this are the usual suspects: Daughters of the Dragon, Cage+Iron Fist, Spider-Man, etc., but one extremely surprising character, The Black Panther. T'Challa's stake in all of this is as mysterious as The Dispossessed’s origins. The only one that seems to have some notion of what's what is Daredevil, and for some reason, he's not talking.
In the end, it’s revealed that Wakanda has a direct role in the roots of The Dispossessed. Klaw, it turns out, didn't just walk into Wakanda way back in the day when he killed T'Chaka, he had help. A cabal with members from all of the Wakandan tribes had colluded to aid Klaw in hopes of creating enough unrest to depose the existing order. The putsch failed, and there was a pogrom of these insurrectionists (in which more than a few innocents were swept up). The children of the traitors were driven out of the country, almost all of them on a ship bound for New York, where they grew up in squalor, surviving as best they could.
T’Challa, still being a child, was told none of this by the Wakandan council that exercised regency until he was of age, and they concealed it for some time, even after his coronation. This was one of the main reasons The Black Panther came to the US to join the Avengers, not just to spy – as he allowed others to believe – but to have a discrete base of operations from which to find as many of the lost children as he could. This is why, for a time, T’Challa adopted an alias and worked as a school teacher. This is also why The Black Panther would periodically return to the Avengers for no other discernable reason, to continue his search.
Early attempts proved that such a large number – particularly of second generation children – could not be repatriated. Being Wakandan is about more than birth, entailing many ritual rights-of-passage that earn one a place in the society. Instead, Wakanda set up a program to provide relief and aid for the exiles, and their children. Lawyer Matt Murdoch had been the program’s attorney and steward for several years (it gets overlooked a lot since the 1970s, but BP and DD had almost as tight a relationship as BP did with Captain America).
Thing was, The Black Panther was not the only one seeking these displaced children, so was Erik Killmonger. Exploiting their oppression by the powers of both their ancestral and current lands, Killmonger helped the children organize The Dispossessed. If The Dispossessed succeed, and create a power-base within America, that’s all well and good with Killmonger. Should they fail, he means to use their origins to turn the entire world on Wakanda.
Like the Triad idea I proposed, this one is tricky, requiring a very culturally aware pen, but it also offers some real dilemmas for Cage, Misty, The Falcon, Battlestar, Ms. Marvel and a several others as the nature of The Dispossessed are slowly exposed. The sympathies of some of the heroes could swing more than once, and there’s an opportunity for a real collision between Cage and The Black Panther. Writing the gang members and BP would be the key. The Dispossessed, have genuine grievances, want a better world, and are looking for a place in the world that was stripped from them. BP is trying to honor his obligations to the Wakandan-descended among them, but he can't countenance their crimes, nor can he take responsibility for their non-Wakandan members. Above all, he must protect Wakanda, not only diplomatically, but what it means to be Wakandan.