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I wasn’t sure I had heard him correctly, so I repeated the question. “How old are your kids?” “Six,” he said, this time with a grin between sheepish and sly. We were in a group discussion with other inmates and staff at the D.C. Correctional Treatment Facility near the D.C. Jail, so I let the matter drop. When the session ended, we spoke again privately, and that’s when the fog lifted.

He explained that six years earlier, at age 16, he had fathered three children in the District. “They were born one month apart,” he said. I told him he belonged in jail. He laughed and agreed he had left behind a mess.

These were the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1995/05/27/who-is-there-for-the-children/c8f61090-afed-432a-8d07-009129ff1247/" target=_blank>opening paragraphs</a> of a column I wrote nearly 30 years ago about children in trouble and the city’s besieged child welfare system. I had visited the correctional facility to meet separately with male and female offenders. I learned that many had children, some living with relatives or friends, some in the city’s foster care system. One inmate didn’t seem to know where her children were.

The week of my column, U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Hogan placed the city’s child welfare system under general receivership. He said the system was in a crisis so severe that he had no choice: Children were being neglected, abused, abandoned.

I don’t know what became of the 22-year-old inmate with three children. Those kids must now be about 36. Their father told me he never had a father to give him encouragement and support. What of his own children?

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/04/19/colbert-king-dc-youths-juvenile-crime-fathers-role/" target="_blank">Last week’s column</a> featured a long list of youths arrested in crimes committed during the first half of April. It asked, “What about the fathers?” The same question can be asked about the fathers of children in today’s child welfare system, children out in the streets — not in jail but also not in school.

Let me revisit <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1997/06/14/the-best-of-fathers/c34f8a5c-75ee-451a-9c87-c0c40d66019b/" target=_blank>another old column</a> to tell you about a different kind of father. Mine.

By today’s standards of success, my father might have been labeled a failure. He was a high school dropout, worked as a laborer, often two jobs at a time. Later in life, he landed work inside a government office building and retired as a senior clerk.

My father never gave me, my brother or my sister an allowance. There were no such things as family vacations. We were the last family in the neighborhood to get a television. We never owned a car. And my father didn’t have the kind of jobs that let him take time off to attend a kid’s drill competition or football game.

But failure? No. Isaiah King was a living example of what responsible fatherhood is all about.

His life refuted the notion that wealth, education and social status have anything to do with the irreplaceable condition for being a good father, which is simply being there. Apart from brief visits to out-of-town family and a few medical stays, my father spent nearly every night at home with Amelia, his wife of 53 years, and their three children.

To some people passing him on the street, my father might have been dismissed as a working-class Black man of little consequence. Goodness knows, he swallowed more than his share of insults and slights growing up in this racially segregated city. And we kids — familiar with being banned from schools, stores, theaters, restaurants, and pools and amusement parks — knew all too well that White people’s animus toward and disdain for men, women and children of a darker hue were as pervasive as the D.C. air we breathed.

For us, the most cherished part of the Washington landscape was Isaiah King’s home. Simply because he was there.

To be sure, my mother held the reins — and had the brains — in the household. After taking in washing and ironing at home and doing menial domestic work in far Northwest D.C. and suburban Maryland to help send three children to college, she went on to collect undergraduate and graduate degrees herself and retired as a D.C. public school teacher.

My mother was the sparkplug. But my father supplied the horsepower.

Except for the time our kitchen stove was converted from coal to natural gas, no electrician, plumber or carpenter entered our home. Daddy fixed everything. He painted; we held the ladder. He did the electrical work; we kept candles handy. So what if the light switch read “nO” instead of “On” when Daddy got finished? It worked, didn’t it?

I learned from him — and have tried to teach my sons so they will in turn teach my grandsons — that a real man doesn’t leave it to others to take care of his children. A real man respects and cherishes strong women. And while his boxing lessons never improved my win-loss record on the playground, he taught me to never run away from a fight.

Like the morning that self-taught man took his three grade-school youngsters to Washington Circle, pointed us east down K Street and told us to “just follow your nose.” Fifteen blocks later, we arrived at the Central Public Library and the world of books.

Like the first letter he wrote to me, pulling me up short after my marriage in 1961, and reminding me of a husband’s responsibilities.

Like the moment when I let on how hurt I was to lose a coveted banking position to a politically connected, fair-haired boy, and how he set aside his own pain and thoughts of impending death to snap me out of my self-absorption with the words of a loving father, “Son, keep your chin up.”

Today we see too many kids in jail. Kids in graves. Kids broken in body and mind.

Think of the story of that young inmate 30 years ago. Of my story.

How did we get to where we are? Where do we go from here?

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.

Colbert King

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D.C. kids in child welfare, juvenile detention. Where are the fathers? 

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