Last Father’s Day, I was invited to speak to the members of Salem Baptist Church on the South Side of Chicago. I didn’t have a prepared text, but I took as my theme “what it takes to be a full-grown man.” I suggested that it was time that men in general and black men in particular put away their excuses for not being there for their families. I reminded the men in the audience that being a father meant more than bearing a child; that even those of us who were physically present in the home are often emotionally absent; that precisely because many of us didn’t have fathers in the house we have
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