I can’t forget the roles James Earl Jones played.

The first that comes to mind is the boxer he played in “The Great White Hope.” A loose profile of the great Black heavyweight champ Jack Johnson, Jones captured Johnson in the fictional character (Jack Jefferson).

Johnson’s life was fascinating: a Black man at the turn of the last century who charted his own path. Bed white women? Who’d dare do such?

From his role in the boxing biopic to Darth Vader in “Star Wars” to King Jaffe Joffer in “Coming to America,” Jones, who died last week at age 93, used his acting chops to elevate every role.

His artistry helped him build a brilliant career on stage and screen.

It might not be Jones’s acting, however, that sticks with me most. It would be his voice, which made him unforgettable in much the same way Sydney Poitier’s voice made him unforgettable. Jones’s baritone played well in film, in TV commercials and TV series.

Nowhere did it resonate more than it did in the 1989 movie “Field of Dreams,” perhaps the finest sports movie ever. Jones played Terence Mann, a disillusioned writer caught up in Iowan farmer Ray Kinsella’s dream of bringing “Shoeless Joe Jackson” back into the game.

No movie told the story of baseball better than “Field of Dreams,” and no scene in the film spoke to America’s national pastime the way Mann’s wistful chat with Kinsella did.

Do you remember it?

The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time.”

Jones was more than this movie or any of the other roles he took after his 1964 debut in Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove.”

Role after role followed. His filmography is thicker than almost any Black actor who came into the industry in the ’60s. With his successes, Jones had clunkers too. Does anybody recall “On the Q.T.” or “Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold”?

“You cannot be an actor like I am and not have been in some of the worst movies like I have,” Jones once said.

His return in 2021 to play King Jaffe Joffer in “Coming 2 America” was his last movie, and it will end up in the same category of flops as films like “Bloodtide” and “The Meteor Man.”

Hollywood will never applaud him for those. Nor will I.

But the good in his filmography far outweigh the bad, and I will remember James Earl Jones only for the good.

When I think about him and his acting, my mind takes me to my introduction to Jones in “The Great White Hope.” He played the role masterfully, although the film didn’t get the due it deserved.

For to grow up Black and in a big city, which I did, you had to appreciate what Jones’s character thought about his plight. In the film, he’s talking to a sports reporter about an upcoming fight:

Hey, look, man, I ain’t fighting for no race, I ain’t redeeming nobody. My mama told me “Mr. Lincoln” done that. Ain’t that why you shot him?

Jones’s fight in acting wasn’t with “nobody” either. It was, if anything, with himself. He won.