Fathers can’t be identified on sight. They show up in the form of bus drivers, mail carriers, barbers, bankers and bartenders. Some come adorned in black robes or wear blue uniforms, sporting badges and guns. Others appear in orange jumpsuits and handcuffs.
Fathers can be found anywhere: in political parties, homeless encampments, newsrooms. Back in the day, there were enough of us among The Post’s cadre of editorial writers to create a “Grandfather’s Club,” of which I was a charter member. Longevity has its place. Fathers certainly aren’t the special province of any single racial, religious or ethnic group.
Yet there have been special secular moments that shone a light on the role of fathers in society. Such as on Oct. 16, 1995, when throngs of Black men gathered for the Million Man March on the National Mall to pledge to “accept the responsibility that God has put upon us … to be good husbands and fathers and builders of our community.” I was there when men warmly embraced in unabashed displays of brotherhood. When speaker after speaker extracted public promises to “take more responsibility for our families and community.”
However they have earned the title, for all they do to help children navigate life, fathers deserve their day on the calendar.
But Father’s Day 2024 is different than it was several decades ago. Time was, most children, White and Black, lived with two parents in their first marriage. Today, marriage rates are falling. More children are living in single-parent households. And the definition of family is expanding, too.
In October 1995, we pledged to reconnect with families and be good husbands. Now, more than 70 percent of Black births in D.C. are to unmarried mothers, as are about 55 percent of Hispanic births.
I return to this finding because for far too many children in this city, Father’s Day won’t be a day to honor Daddy. The people helping to mold those youngsters into thriving, growing girls and boys, their protectors and pillars of strength, are mothers, and grandparents, and nonbiological kinfolk — in some cases, even the D.C. government.
To be clear, some fathers are separated from their kids by military service, as I was from my wife, Gwen, and infant son, Rob, during my first year as a newly minted commissioned Army officer.
Some children don’t have a father around because of the painful separators of death and divorce. Some fathers are separated from their children by prison walls. And some kids are separated because their fathers, while out and about and free as birds, have not accepted their responsibilities to help take care of their children.
While I’m at it, let’s put to rest the stereotyping of all Black fathers as derelict dads. Many Black fathers in this city live with their children. Those who don’t might be noncustodial but still involved. Many find ways to remain active in their kids’ lives.
I’m fixed, however, on fathers who are missing from homes for the wrong reasons. The likely casualties? There’s no one-size-fits-all answer. But think of boys and girls doing poorly in school and with behavioral problems. Think of kids dropping out, running away, ending up involved in the juvenile justice system.
These children need a father or father-like figure — not a juvenile detention officer or social worker — to help them develop a firm understanding of what’s right and what’s wrong. Someone to give them a moral compass to sense good and bad directions.
The government can provide meals and snacks and host events with family-friendly things to do. But government can’t provide someone who will get up early and stay up late to listen as a scared and angry child talks. Who will provide love and support when a child is all at sea. Who will step in with loving discipline and make decisions that motivate. That’s what good fathers do. And it’s done through laughter and tears, when times are good and times are bad, and with love. That’s another thing that government, no matter how enriched or powerful, cannot bring to the table.
Money alone can’t turn the tables, either. My father didn’t have money to give. Except for a few quarters and dimes to go after supper to buy a pint of chocolate ripple that his five-member family could share. That was about it.
We never, either as a family or my parents as a couple, ever, ever, cross my heart and hope to die, entered a restaurant. Carryout was the best we could do.
Ah, but Daddy made us laugh, and sometimes squirm, and listen quietly as he prepared us for the world to come. God, how I loved that man.
My father, and lots of Black fathers around us in the Foggy Bottom/West End area, believed with every fiber of their being that we children were theirs. And that nobody, but nobody, on God’s Earth was going raise their children but them.
And they had the help of other Black father figures, unsung heroes of Black child growth and development. They were coaches, cops, Sunday school teachers, church deacons — people who helped steer young Black kids through a racially segregated D.C. that respected neither them nor those they were trying to help.
Those father figures, our dads, didn’t give a rat’s a– about “damaging and historically rooted cultural patterns that promote bad behaviors,” as today’s jargon might put it. Get on with it, we were told, and we did.
Why salute them on Fathers’ Day? If you must ask …
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