I became a father at 15. That’s not just part of my story; it’s the beginning of my purpose. I still remember holding my daughter for the first time, caught between unspeakable joy and the quiet terror of knowing I was responsible for a life so precious.
I was a teenager on Chicago’s West Side, in neighborhoods where boys who look like me are pushed to the margins before we even have a chance to become men. I didn’t have material wealth. I didn’t have a road map. What I had was love—and the fierce determination to show up, even when everything around me said I would fail.
The world expected me to vanish. Instead, I stayed. I parented through pressure. Through poverty. Through judgment. I balanced school, work and fatherhood not because I was perfect—but because I was determined not to become another story used to justify the lie that Black fathers don’t care.
And then, at 30, I became a father again. But this time, it came with a flood of complex emotions. I was no longer a boy trying to find his way—I was a man: financially stable, more grounded and carrying years of hard-earned wisdom. And yet, the news of my son’s arrival shook me.
His birth was unplanned, and I wrestled with the reality that—despite all the growth, all the progress—I was once again navigating fatherhood in a way I hadn’t anticipated. I grieved the vision I had for how this chapter of my life would unfold. I questioned myself. But what I didn’t do—what I refused to do—was walk away.
I leaned in. I chose presence over pride and responsibility over retreat.
My son’s birth wasn’t part of my plan, but it was part of the process of becoming more honest, more present, more whole. He taught me that fatherhood isn’t always convenient or clean, but it’s sacred. And when we answer it with our whole selves, we become more than caretakers—we become vessels for healing, for legacy, and for love that endures.
That decision—to stand firm in fatherhood—reshaped my life. It propelled me toward higher education, culminating in a Ph.D. in sociology and a postdoctoral fellowship at a top-ranked national university. But my education didn’t happen in classrooms alone. While pursuing my degrees, I was also in the trenches—working directly with Black fathers as a practitioner, facilitating support groups, connecting men to resources and building community in spaces where fatherhood was too often overlooked or dismissed.
That hands-on work grounded my scholarship in lived experience, and just as meaningful as the degrees were the men I walked alongside—Black fathers fighting to rewrite their stories, to break generational chains, and to become the kind of men their children could be proud of.
In every city, I wasn’t just studying fatherhood—I was living it. I was building trust, holding space, and walking with brothers who, like me, were choosing love over silence, presence over absence, and healing over harm—even when the world gave them every reason not to.
Today, as Executive Director of Fathers, Families & Healthy Communities (FFHC), I continue to walk alongside other Black fathers who, like me, are choosing presence in a world that has done everything to make our love invisible.
Let’s be clear: Black fathers are not absent. We are not broken. We are not waiting to be saved. We are already doing the most radical thing you can do in a system built to erase you—showing up for our families.
But we’re not just fathering—we’re Fathering through Pain.
From slavery and Jim Crow apartheid to mass incarceration and generational economic exclusion, the systems surrounding us have never been designed to help Black fathers thrive. They’ve been designed to contain us, control us and remove us. And yet, we remain—guiding, protecting and nurturing our children through the wreckage of what this country has refused to repair.
The problem isn’t personal failure. It’s a structural betrayal.
And that betrayal shows up everywhere: in the courtrooms that strip us of custody, in the workplaces that deny us opportunity, in the schools that treat our sons like criminals before they can even read. Despite this, we continue to build. We continue to lead. We continue to love.
But love alone is not enough. Without meaningful investment, even the deepest love cannot overcome the structural barriers Black fathers face every day. That means more than symbolic gestures. It means systemic repair. And yes, it means reparations.
Reparations are not a handout—they are a moral debt. A long-overdue return on the centuries of stolen labor, stolen land and stolen lives that built this nation’s wealth while locking Black families out of it. Any serious investment in justice must include reparations that, at minimum, eliminate the racial wealth gap between Black and white families. The federal government is both the architect and the only entity capable of paying this long-overdue debt. It built white wealth through the Homestead Act, the GI Bill, mortgage subsidies, redlining, segregation and mass incarceration—while systematically disinvesting from Black communities at every turn.
We need guaranteed income programs for system-impacted Black men and fathers—unconditional cash support that restores dignity, stability and the space to parent with purpose.
We need workforce equity that opens doors to lasting careers, not just jobs. This means paid apprenticeships, recognition of skills gained during incarceration, access to union-protected employment and partnerships that combat bias in both hiring and retention.
We must also fund community-rooted organizations that have long supported Black fathers without the resources they deserve.
We also need to confront the truth. Truth that shatters the myths and exposes the policies that have criminalized our love, erased our presence, and punished our attempts to provide. To invest in Black fatherhood is not just an economic imperative—it is a moral one. It is a declaration that our lives, our families, our communities and our futures are not disposable.
To invest in Black fathers is to invest in restoration, resilience and a rebirth of justice.
That’s why FFHC partnered with Equity and Transformation (EAT) to release Breaking the Chains: Reclaiming Wealth, Power & Dignity for Black Men. This report is not just a data set—it’s a declaration. It exposes the ongoing extraction of wealth and worth from Black men and offers a bold, necessary blueprint for transformation: reparations, guaranteed income, trauma-informed care, investments in fathers and a decisive shift from punishment to healing.
We cannot talk about Black family health while ignoring the structural violence that undermines Black fatherhood. If we want to strengthen families, we must center the people already holding them together.
So, what do we do?
We stop asking why Black fathers aren’t showing up—and start asking why our systems still treat us like we don’t belong.
We invest in organizations serving Black men and fathers. We demand that funders, policymakers,and community leaders stop treating Black fatherhood as a side note and start treating it as strategy.
We move money from surveillance to support, from cages to care, from crisis response to generational restoration.
And we do it with urgency. Because Black fathers aren’t just providers—we are protectors of possibility. We are healers, builders and legacy makers. And when we are invested in, our families don’t just survive—they thrive.
If you want to see stronger Black families and a more just society, start here: invest in Black fathers.
We’ve been here. We’ve always been here. Now it’s time the systems around us finally catch up to our commitment.
Clinton Boyd, Jr., Ph.D, is the Executive Director of Fathers, Families & Healthy Communities, a Researcher at Chapin Hall, and an Aspen Institute Ascend Fellow.