Father's Day: A Reflection on Black Fathers, Grace, and Love

🎙️ Episode 18

Father's Day: A Reflection on Black Fathers, Grace, and Love

Father's Day can bring celebration, gratitude, longing, grief, and complicated emotions—all at the same time.

In this special Father's Day episode of Our Truth, Our History, Our Story (Our THS), Rita Coburn reflects on the enduring love, sacrifice, and resilience of Black fathers through history. Inspired by Paul Laurence Dunbar's beloved poem Little Brown Baby, Rita explores the historical realities that shaped Black fatherhood—from enslavement and Reconstruction to the Great Migration, the Memphis Sanitation Strike, and the challenges many families continue to navigate today.

Drawing from her own memories of her father, Rita offers a deeply personal reflection on grace, forgiveness, and the humanity of fathers who did the best they could under extraordinary circumstances. This episode is an invitation to honor the fathers who nurtured us, remember those we've lost, and extend compassion where relationships remain unfinished.

At its heart, this is a conversation about family, history, healing, and love.

🔍 What You'll Hear in This Episode

• Paul Laurence Dunbar's Little Brown Baby
• Maya Angelou's influence and love of poetry
• The historical realities of Black fatherhood in America
• Why fathers were separated from their families during enslavement
• The Memphis Sanitation Strike and the meaning of "I Am A Man"
• The impact of welfare policies on Black families
• Rita's personal memories of her father
• The importance of grace and forgiveness
• What fathers teach us—through both their strengths and imperfections
• Why honoring our parents is also honoring our history

🧠 Key Themes

• Father's Day
• Black fathers
• Family legacy
• Paul Laurence Dunbar
• Little Brown Baby
• Maya Angelou
• Grace and forgiveness
• Black history
• Great Migration
• Civil Rights Movement
• Family
• Healing
• Love
• Storytelling

💬 A Defining Idea from This Episode

"Our fathers are human beings who walk into the room with all of their good and all of their bad."

Understanding history allows us to extend grace—not to excuse hurt, but to recognize the burdens many fathers carried while still striving to love their families.

❤️ Join the Conversation

This Father's Day, I'd love to hear from you.

What is one lesson your father—or a father figure—gave you that still shapes your life today?

If your relationship with your father has been difficult, what has helped you find healing, understanding, or peace?

Share your reflections in the comments or on social media using #OurTHS. Your story may encourage someone else.

📣 Resources / Links

Read "Little Brown Baby" by Paul Laurence Dunbar
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44197/little-brown-baby

Read "Song for the Old Ones" by Maya Angelou

https://allpoetry.com/poem/14326519-Song-for-the-Old-Ones-by-Maya-Angelou

Maya Angelou and Common perform an excerpt from "Song for the Old Ones"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8pLATICKq8 

Watch Our Truth, Our History, Our Story on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/@ritacoburn9240

Watch this episode
https://youtu.be/pqs92fnRRl0 

Transcript available here
 https://www.buzzsprout.com/2598323

Stay connected with Rita Coburn
 https://linktr.ee/ritacoburnmedia

Upcoming events and screenings
 https://www.ritacoburn.com/upcoming-events

Download event photos
 https://www.ritacoburn.com/event-photos

Social Media Toolkit
 https://www.ritacoburn.com/social-media-tool-kit

🎬 About the Series

Our Truth, Our History, Our Story (Our THS) explores the people, ideas, and cultural forces shaping Black history and storytelling. Hosted by award-winning filmmaker Rita Coburn, the series features conversations and reflections that connect our past to the present while inspiring a deeper understanding of our shared humanity.

👥 Production Credits

Host: Rita Coburn

Executive Producer: Andrew T. Carr

Producers: Christine Coburn Whack, H. Lee Whack

Produced by RCW Media Productions, Inc.

© 2026 RCW Media Productions, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

For a long time, the love of black men for their families has been evident in our history. Paul Lawrence Dunbar wrote about a father who looks at his baby son with joy. He makes up a story, it's a poem, to warm both of their hearts. And it includes the wife and mother reminding us all of the love of family. Little Brown Baby was part of a collection published in 1895. Life was hard in 1895 for most, if not all, African Americans. And yet, this is a document of a love poem from a father to his son. There have always been fathers who lived in the love of family, some more than others, and some driven from or walking away from their responsibilities. This is a hard Father's Day for anyone who has experienced the loss of a father from any of those areas of life. We'll unpack that, but let's start with Paul Lawrence Dunbar's Little Brown Baby, read in the vernacular the language of that day Little Brown Baby by Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Little Brown Baby with sparkling eyes, come to your papy and set on his knee. What you been doing, sir, making sand pies? Look at that bib, you's as dirty as me. Look at that mouth, that's molasses, I bet. Come here, Mariah and wipe off his hands. Bees gon' catch you and eat you up yet being so sticky and sweet Goodness lands. Little brown baby with sparkling eyes. Who's Pappy's darling and who's Pappy's child? Who is it all the day never once tries for to be cross ere once loses that smile? Whatcha get them teeth? Ma you's a scamp. Where did that dimple come from in your chin? Pappy do know you I believe you's a tramp. Mammy, this here some old straggler got in. Let's throw him out the door in the sand. We don't want no stragglers a laying round here. Let's give him way to the big booger man. I know he's hiding around here right near. Booger man booger man, come in de doe. Here's a bad boy you can have for to eat. Mammy and papy don't want him no more. Swallow him down from his head to his feet. Ah there now. I thought that you'd hug me up close. Go back, old booger. You shan't have this boy. He ain't no tramp, near no straggler, of course. He's Pappy's partner and playmate and joy. Come to your palate now. Go to your rest. Wish you'd always no ease and clear skies. Might you could stay just a child on my chest. Wish you could stay just a child on my breast. Little brown baby with sparkling eyes. I did not know that poem until Maya Angelo read it to me one day when I was working with her. I was in her home four days a month to record shows for Oprah Radio between 2006 and 2010. And her generosity was that I would stay at her home, and her way of being was always to teach. One day she said, Get that book over there off the shelf. I want to read you a poem. And she read that poem to me. What it said to me was that in eighteen ninety five, thirty years after the Emancipation Proclamation, fathers were making an effort to be fathers in a country that did not see them as fully human. Often they did not know their own fathers, most of whom had been born during enslavement. We often talk about how mothers were separated from their children, but fathers were separated from their children and their families too. For most men who were born into that reality, the responsibility of taking care of a family while not being able to keep that family together or safe left a scar, a harm that I believe we still see generations later. When the I am a man sign was hoisted in the sixties, it was as a result of two fathers who died. Black sanitation workers Echo Cole and Robert Walker were crushed to death by a malfunctioning garbage truck. The city's refusal to compensate their families prompted over thirteen hundred black sanitation workers to go on a strike. They had been working in a rainstorm and these two men were not allowed to shelter inside a building because of segregation laws, so they sat in the compacting area of the garbage truck and were killed when the compactor accidentally activated. The city refused compensation for their families, and their deaths ignited the Memphis sanitation strike during which our civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., another father, was assassinated. Being a black father in this country has not been always an easy task. It has been difficult. I grew up at a time when welfare separated fathers from families and men from families. Depicted in the movie Claudine starring Diane Carroll and James Earl Jones, which I highly recommend you watch or rewatch, Claudine was a single parent of six children, and the social workers would make sure there was no man in the home or she would lose benefits. This happened in our recent history and was a part of that story that was true. And it contributed to the fact that if a father left, the family would be better off. There has been a baked-in decimation of black fatherhood in this country. And I say all these things to connect fatherhood for African American men to a toil, a pressure, and a stress that has existed for centuries and has not been escaped even in recent decades for some of our population. Black men couldn't simply be fathers. They had to be fathers impacted by racism from the beginning of fatherhood in this country. So now, with that backdrop, when we look at fathers today, from the attentive and loving fathers to fathers who desert families, I think we have to dig a lot deeper. Being and loving a black father in this country at times requires us as a people to have some grace and forgiveness despite the hurt that we might feel when abandonment, incarceration, unemployment, and other social ills impact a father's ability to do what is right or when a father simply makes a bad choice. We're going to have to apply some grace so that we and our families, sons and daughters and mothers can be okay when we don't get the Paul Lawrence Dunbar little brown baby with sparkling eyes. Daddy, I grew up in the south suburbs of Chicago. My father completed the fourth grade. He scrubbed his way out of Mississippi, the poorest state in the Union at that time, and came to Chicago, making him part of the Great Migration. He stayed with his sisters, my aunts, until he got on his feet. He married my mother, and in the late 50s, one way to get a home was through the government and a program where homeowners would temporarily rent out their homes so that the military could also use them at least once, if not from time to time. And he jumped at the chance to become a homeowner. It's one of the things fathers desire to do is to provide shelter. So many of our fathers don't have businesses or educational checks to give us. Some of them have been reduced and denied their manhood in the process of trying to make those provisions of shelter. I see it in black men today who run the strata from just making ends meet to being very wealthy. They want to be providers. And I see children wanting those fathers to provide warmth and relationship. I'm happy to say that I see many of them doing just that. And I'm really excited when I see young men and women on social media, in churches and in my community being loved and enlarged by the love and attention of their fathers. So on this Father's Day, if you can celebrate that, celebrate the man who is responsible for your being here. Oftentimes, he is the only man in the world who knew you from the moment you arrived and wanted nothing more for you than the very best. And there are times when fathers have been absent or physically present and still absent and not knowing which way to turn. Again, we're going to have to apply some grace so that you can be free in that instance and so that they can be free. My father was a hardworking fourth grade educated man who worked at the steel mills in Indiana. He would hit the table and say man-aids, and you knew you were supposed to bring him the mayonnaise. But he would also come to the school after his night shift and a nap and pick me up for lunch. We would go to McDonald's and I would get a fish sandwich, orange pop, and fries and think I was better than anybody else at school on the day that my daddy came to take me for lunch. As time went on, he could also be found drunk when I was a teenager and I'd have to go to a parking lot, push him over, and drive the car home. Working in the steel mills of Indiana was not an easy task, and sometimes more than a swallow of Grandad A Hundred Proof paused that pain. But I had a daddy, and I knew that he loved me, and I knew that he tried. In later years, when he had retired, he would sit up in a chair because there had been no OSHA, no occupational safety and health administration laws in place. In the still mills, the men breathed still for years. By the time they got a chance to retire, they were sick and dare I say dying. If my father laid down flat at night, the fluid congestion and damage in his lungs would suffocate him. So he would sit up in a chair at night, and none of us knew how to comfort him. Many years later, I realized that he had done the best he could. He was a man. Like all of us he walked into the room with all of his good and all of his bad, a human being, a father, and I feel blessed to have had him. Some of the things he taught me and some of the things our fathers teach us are intentional lessons, and some by observation we see things that we wouldn't do. My father taught me right from wrong. He also taught me that he would fight for me at the slightest provocation. He used to say what he would do with quote these thirteen triple E's, end quote, referring to his foot sides and ability to throw hands if necessary. It was his way of saying I love you. Fathers are a portal just as mothers are a portal for you and I to get to this earth. So our fathers, if we are here, deserve something about honoring that position. We are asked to honor thy father and mother so that our days may be long upon the earth. If you can honor, celebrate, and have joy with your father today, Sunday or Father's Day or at any time, do that. And if for any reason you cannot, if they're not here, if things aren't resolved, have a prayer or a thought about the fact that you are here in part because of that father. He may not have put you on his knee or called you a straggler or a scamp and wished that you could stay upon his breast, but maybe you can give him the gift of believing that had all circumstances been favorable, you would have been, and you possibly are, his little brown baby. And in any event, he's your father. And for all the fathers who are holding it down and doing it to the utmost, salute. For any that carry a tinge of shame or guilt, you can always ask for forgiveness and give that gift so that your children might be able to lay on your breasts, at least metaphorically. I love my father. I was born on june thirteenth. He was born on june twentieth. He would say I was his father's day present, and I love the parts I got to know about him. I could only wish we had more time together. Remember you are your father's present, his gift to the world. As a Christian, I believe God is also my father, so I have an example of a perfect father who mets out discipline and loves unconditionally. So to God, happy Father's Day. And then the human father who is a man and his position is to be respected. I'd like you to consider another poem. Maya Angela wrote this poem about fathers. And I suggest you look it up. We'll have it in the show notes. And what I'm going to do is give you one line from it. The poem is called Song for the Old Ones. It has a recurring line of a father who speaks for many fathers, and it explains his pain and progress in our society with this recurrent phrase, sugar, it was our submission that makes your world go round. You will also find in the notes Maya Angelo doing one stanza of that poem, followed by common, with the rapper doing another stanza of the poem Freestyling on the Spot with his own understanding of each stanza. Again, Happy Father's Day. I hope you'll look up those poems and enjoy this day. I am Rita Cobert, the producer, director, and writer of W.E.B. Du Bois Rebel with the Cause. Thank you for listening to our truth, our history, our story. And have a wonderful Father's Day.