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When church bells ring on Sunday, the single largest congregation of D.C. fathers will be found in custody of the D.C. Department of Corrections. As of April 24, of more than 1,700 men incarcerated at the jail, 913 (or 53 percent) report having one or more children, according to the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice. No church can compete with that.

What’s more, 61 of 109 women (or 56 percent) in custody also report having one or more children. That means that, as of this moment, many hundreds of D.C. children have a parent behind bars.

The matter of incarcerated parents isn’t limited to the Department of Corrections. While the D.C. Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services doesn’t formally track youths who report having children, the deputy mayor’s office told me that staff at DYRS secure facilities report knowing of 12 who are fathers.

The Department of Human Services’ Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program also draws attention to fathers, albeit indirectly.

Of the nearly 13,000 needy D.C. households drawing TANF cash and services, more than 11,000 are headed by a single parent — 95 percent of whom are women, according to the Executive Office of the Mayor.

That question has been <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/04/19/colbert-king-dc-youths-juvenile-crime-fathers-role/" target="_blank">the focus</a> of my past <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/04/26/dc-child-welfare-fathers/" target="_blank">two columns</a>. But the matter of fathers has popped up with regularity in more than three decades of writing about this city. How can that question escape attention?

You can’t talk about children living on the brink of poverty or failing in school or getting chased down by police but fall silent about the fact that many of these kids are in homes without a man to help take care of them.

In his June 1965 commencement speech at Howard University, my alma mater, <a href="https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/commencement-address-howard-university-fulfill-these-rights" target=_blank>President Lyndon B. Johnson hailed</a> progress toward equality with the passage of civil and voting rights legislation but also noted the existence of separate and unequal Black and White families.

Johnson cited economic disparities and breakdowns in the Black family structure as “the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice and present prejudice.”

He said, “Less than half of all Negro children reach the age of 18 having lived all their lives with both of their parents.” As he was speaking, “Little less than two-thirds are at home with both of their parents,” he said.

“The family is the cornerstone of our society,” Johnson said. “More than any other force it shapes the attitude, the hopes, the ambitions and the values of the child. And when the family collapses it is the children that are usually damaged. When it happens on a massive scale the community itself is crippled.”

Johnson’s message was not well received by conservatives who believed the Black community’s problems were the result of self-induced pathologies. And it didn’t draw raves from liberals who felt Johnson gave insufficient attention to the contribution of joblessness and poor education, job training and health care to the plight of Black families. The system, not single parenthood, damaged the Black community, they argued.

Some among the social services intelligentsia contend that a low-income, single-woman household can raise a cohesive family if given enough government help and cash.  After all, goes the argument, Black women have strength beyond bloodlines, including supportive community connections.

On that point, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/04/26/dc-child-welfare-fathers/" target="_blank">last week’s column</a> sang praises to my father, Isaiah King. But it didn’t say enough about the neighborhood culture in which my working-class parents, our friends and other low-income families were raised. Chief among them were our churches, which were the spiritual glue that helped bond together families, neighbors and the historically close-knit Foggy-Bottom/West End community where we lived. Forced displacement in the name of urban renewal and development scattered and destroyed the familiarity, the sense of security, the welcoming faces of relatives and family friends wherever you turned. Gentrification, while upgrading standards of living where it landed, also spawned intergenerational problems, creating voids in Black communal life.

I now drop the “why” subject because I have learned by now that the issue has no purchase with people who believe deep in their hearts that all that plagues Black folks begins and ends with Black folks.

Let’s spend a moment more with fathers.

Several years ago, Morehouse College in Atlanta, this country’s only all-male historically Black private liberal arts college and the alma mater of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., hosted a conference on African American fathers. The conference examined the absence of fathers in Black America and tried to identify some reasons for badly frayed Black family bonds. The conference highlighted an excerpt from a luncheon speech by <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/william-raspberry-dies-washington-post-columnist-wrote-about-social-issues-including-race-poverty/2012/07/17/gJQAS210qW_story.html" target="_blank">William Raspberry</a>, my late Post colleague, family friend and fraternity brother.

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1999/07/10/where-are-the-fathers/6f42c17f-57a1-4688-8f19-911a6bb8a8d9/" target=_blank>Raspberry said</a>: “Are Black fathers necessary? You know, I’m old and I’m tired, and there are just some things that I just don’t want to debate anymore. One of them is whether African American children need fathers. Another is whether marriage matters. Does marriage matter? You bet it does. Are Black fathers necessary? Damn straight we are.”

One morning, Raspberry roped me in at The Post water fountain. Let’s put our money where our mouths are, he said, and, as fathers, answer the Washington Urban League’s call for Black men to step up as mentors for youths on the edge. Thus began for me a once-a-week meeting with a chronically truant 14-year-old who doubted he would make it to his 18th birthday. That session blossomed into five years of nearly daily dealings with a kid I came to regard as a third son.

I know of other Black men who have fulfilled similar roles. D.C. civic leader <a href="https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/james-l-hudson" target=_blank>James L. Hudson</a>’s years-long mentorship of two young kids comes to mind.

I read somewhere that “Black boys cannot be what they cannot see.” (True for girls, too.) These children — those without fathers and those who are fathers themselves — have to interact with positive Black male leadership, with people who look like them, people who have shared some of the same life experiences and cultural struggles and yet have managed to endure. And positive Black role models are needed in schools, neighborhoods and, yes, jails.

These past three weeks of columns about fathers will not end with any grand conclusion. Except maybe this from someone who, at 84, is in the late autumn of life:

No one is going to save us and our children but us. Yes, there’s God. But the Almighty has given us the means to save others.

Colbert I. “Colby” King writes a column — sometimes about D.C., sometimes about politics — that runs in print on Saturdays. In 2003, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. King joined the Post’s editorial board in 1990 and served as deputy editorial page editor from 2000 to 2007.

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