Like too many Black children, I lost my father much too early. In my case, my father, my hero, died of cancer when I was twelve. While that was devastatingly hard, I was fortunate because over the course of my youth, many other Black men helped to fill the void in my life. They included pastors, coaches, family friends, neighborhood peers, and church members. Today, as a lead for the Family, Student and Teacher Academic Resilience (fSTAR) research pillar of NCEED, I am thankful to be able to study issues affecting African American families, including “social fathers,” who were transformational in my life and who are often overlooked.

In the many years that followed, I have worn several hats – senior executive of a New York City not-for-profit, political director of the New Jersey NAACP, columnist for a daily newspaper, and an on-air contributor on cable news. The common thread of these positions is that they all centered on creating better pathways for Black families.

In recent years, as the founder of a New Jersey-based not-for-profit advocacy group, my focus returned to my early interest, fatherhood, and the importance of including Black fathers in the educational journey of their children. As a young Black man being raised by a single mother, the prevailing narrative of the absent Black father and irresponsible, welfare-dependent single Black mother was neither my experience nor what I was witnessing in my community. To the contrary, although I lost my father when I was only in the 7th grade, other men stepped up. Their commitment to the community and their neighbors was out of kindness. It simply reflected who they were.

Not long after my father passed, I read the infamous Moynihan Report (Moynihan, 1965), and I became enraged. The report argued that the breakdown of the Black family, particularly the rise of single-mother households, was a major cause of poverty – a view that is almost certainly still held by many. In other words, the report blamed Black communities for structural inequalities. It seemed to me an intentional strategy to denigrate Black parents, and a way to absolve the nation of any responsibility for the economic oppression experienced by Black Americans. The latter aspect was particularly offensive to me because my father, a World War II veteran, had been denied the benefits legally owed to him under the GI Bill.

It also enraged me because this view disrespected my father, who, until he became too ill, was very active in my life and my siblings’ lives. He defied gender roles by being the best cook in the house and a tailor who made his daughters’ school dresses. He loved to dance with his four daughters and doted on his two sons without apology. Our time together was spent on fishing trips and Little League baseball games or accompanying him to job sites (he built fences), although he insisted that I bring books to read in his truck. It was my father, a son of the Jim Crow South with only an eighth-grade education, who told me in the first grade, “Son, you are going to college.” There was never a time when there was a school or church program where my father was not in the audience cheering his children. It was my father who showed me that a man can be emotional when he openly wept seeing his firstborn, my oldest sister, in her wedding dress. My father was too ill to attend the wedding, so the entire wedding party visited the hospital after the ceremony so he could see his daughter. The sight of my father, in a wheelchair, crying uncontrollably, gave me permission to cry and show emotion.

When my father died, it was his close friend, a barber, as well as my godfather, brother-in-law, pastor, athletic coaches, and young men who played basketball with me in my neighborhood park, who collectively reinforced the lessons my father imparted to me and who supported me when I needed them. All the while, my now single mother refused government assistance and returned to vocational school to learn new skills so she could secure a higher-wage job. My father was not in the home, but he was far from ‘absent.’ My mother was the female head of household, but far from needy and dependent. All of Walter Sr. and Mattie’s children have experienced higher education or military service.

Walter Sr.

So, yes, the negative stereotypes of Black fathers offend me. What I did not realize five decades ago was that the concept of ‘kinship’ and ‘social fatherhood’ were at the root of my inquiry, and that a cultural theory, Africanity, was what I was trying to wrap my head around. Scholars like Nobles (1974) and Hill (2003) conceptualized the Black family as African-centered and extending beyond biological definitions. Under this concept of family, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and family friends all engage in parenting the children. Africanity is unlike the stereotypical White, European “nuclear family” and embraces the idea that Black families are culturally different, not deficient, and that African values of family best explain the Black family experience in America (Coontz, 1992). There is ample evidence that even in low-income neighborhoods, Black men play an active role in the lives of children (Jayakody & Kalil, 2002). In fact, research by the CDC (2013) shows that Black fathers are more involved daily with their children than any other group of fathers. The narrow view of the “nuclear family” as the ideal ignores the power of kinship (Shimkin et al., 1978 and Jawando, 2022), changes in Black family structure (Staples, 1985), and the assets Black families possess (Hill, 2003).

When I became a father, patterning my parenting after my father’s allowed me to develop an unbreakable bond with my daughter, a lawyer.. Advocating on behalf of my daughter in her New Jersey public school district led me to create a not-for-profit Black parents’ advocacy organization, led by three Black fathers. Black fatherhood is not simply my area of scholarship, it is my ministry.

My current work for NCEED and my doctoral studies in Sociology are focused on revealing the depths and variety of the Black fathers’ experience in America, and how Black men are positively engaged with children in ways previously unrecognized to policymakers and social scientists. My goal is to change the perception of Black men as fathers. I do not subscribe to narrow definitions of fatherhood, determined by biology, but see “fathers” as men who take an interest and invest time in the welfare of children, providing moral, spiritual, and sometimes, financial support.

Unfortunately, too often, schools apply a “gender frame” to parent engagement and miss opportunities to engage Black and social fathers (Wallace, 2022). Our work, under the NCEED fSTAR pillar, is designed to bolster the support of fathers, specifically Black fathers, and reconnect them with schools to strengthen children’s safety net. At Gardenville Elementary School (less than two miles from the Morgan State campus), for example, we helped the school establish a fathers’ support group. The group meets periodically to share information, communicate with the community school coordinator concerning issues and activities at the school, and provide opportunities for fathers to share with and learn from other fathers. Similarly, the Charles County (MD) school district has established a Dads Advisory Council.

Our team is also partnering with the NYU Metro Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools to develop a documentary on Black fatherhood – Reframing Narratives: The Black Fathers America Doesn’t See – focused on the “hidden network” of Black men who are not biological parents but who actively support children (Connor & White, 2011).

My research shows that those types of fathers are numerous in the Black community. Under the Family, Student and Teacher Academic Resilience (fSTAR) pillar, the NCEED team has the opportunity to help school districts embrace a more culturally relevant understanding of the Black family so Black children gain the benefit of an expanded support system. I was one of those Black children whose “social fathers” and single mother paved the way for the life I lead today.

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References:

CDC, 2013.  Fathers’ Involvement With Their Children: United States, 2016-2010. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. National Center for Health Statistics.

Coontz, S., 1992. The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. New York: Basic Books.

Connor, M. & White, J., eds., 2011. Black Fathers: An Invisible Presence in America. New York: Routledge.

Hill, R., 2003. The Strengths of Black Families. Lanham: University Press of America.

Jawando, W., 2022. My Seven Black Fathers. New York: Picador.

Jayakody, R.  & Kalil, A., 2002. “Social Fathering in Low-Income, African-American Families with Preschool Children.” Journal of Marriage and Family 64(2):504-516.

Moynihan, D., 1965. The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Labor.

Nobles, W., 1974. “Africanity: Its Role in Black Families.” The Black Scholar 5(9):10-17.

Shimkin, D., Shimkin, E., & and Frate, D., eds., 1978. The Extended Family in Black Societies. Paris: Mouton Publishers.

Staples, R., 1985. “Changes in Black Family Structure: The Conflict between Family Ideology and Structural Conditions.” Journal of Marriage and Family 47(4):1005-1013.

Wallace, B., 2022. “That’s How They Label Us: Gendered-Antiblackness, Black Fathers, and the Parenting of Children.” The Journal of Men’s Studies 31(1):69-88.