Chaz Harris walked into St. Louis-based Fathers & Families Support Center (FFSC) in April, seeking help with a custody dispute of his only child. 

After spending hours in FFSC’s group sessions listening to other fathers share their stories, learning how to navigate the legal system, and finding quiet moments of camaraderie in shared struggle, he left with more than just legal help. 

“I needed to learn certain things. I needed to be quieter and see other people going through what I was going through. I felt like I was the only one,” Harris said. 

A decade after Michael Brown was shot and killed in 2014 by a police officer in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, we are still here at FFSC, just blocks from where his body lay for four hours under the August sun. Brown graduated from high school 10 days before his murder, leaving behind a grieving family and friends, and the life that might have been.

As part of my work as a FFSC social services case manager, I work directly with men who need crisis support or help finding stability through housing, utilities assistance, therapy, public services, legal support, or assistance completing paperwork that, if left undone, can funnel them into homelessness or the criminal legal system. The broader goal of FFSC is to provide leadership development, employment resources, mentoring, and trauma-informed care to community members in need, with much of this programming earmarked to help parents become more stable, accountable, and responsible for their children. 

FFSC offers trainings that address violence prevention, helping men unlearn unhealthy patterns in relationships and promoting self-sufficiency. These programs include instruction on de-escalation, personal safety, emotional regulation, and safety planning, as well as support in navigating court proceedings. Yet, despite these resources, barriers to mental health care remain significant. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2021 only 14.8% of Black adults ages 18 to 44 received mental health treatment, compared with 30.4% of their white peers. Among all adults in this age group, men were less likely than women to receive care (17.8% versus 28.6%). 

I know this work makes a difference because the young Black men we serve tell us so. Harris once became emotional when he told me that the support offered by FFSC helped him rebuild his life.

“[FFSC makes] sure that we know that we are still human beings and deserve respect,” he said.

In St. Louis, history has shown that respect is often not extended to Black men like Harris. That legacy stretches back to the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision. The initial Missouri state court ruling—which was issued at the St. Louis Courthouse just blocks from FFSC—declared that Black and enslaved people had no rights that white men were bound to respect. The repercussions of that ideology continue to shape how society and institutions view and treat Black men. 

Within our community, Brown’s 2014 killing shattered lingering myths of racial harmony in a historically gentrified city, and it ignited demands for structural changes that have yet to occur. 

Brown’s death was also not an anomaly. 

From the highly publicized cases of Rodney King’s 1991 beating by Los Angeles Police Department officers to George Floyd’s 2020 murder in Minneapolis by Officer Derek Chauvin, police violence against Black men remains a constant. As recently as April, 39-year-old John “LJ” Scott Jr. died after being shocked with a Taser by officers while experiencing a mental health crisis in Decatur, Alabama. Loved ones remember Scott for his quiet care, kindness, faithfulness, and his love of football.

My work at FFSC and my many years of reading media reports about Black men beaten or killed by the police ultimately led me on a quest to learn more about how the mainstream news teaches the public to see Black men when the state harms or kills them.

As part of my research for my master’s thesis, a clear pattern emerged, one I’ve repeatedly witnessed in the stories of the young Black men FFSC serves.

Criminals or martyrs 

Media coverage often portrays Black men as dangerous or at fault for police brutality they are subject to, and reduces them to either criminals or martyrs.

King’s 1991 beating shocked the nation. After state-court acquittals, two officers were later convicted in federal court of intentionally violating King’s constitutional rights. However, across trials and coverage, King endured harmful stereotypes about his superhuman strength, animalizing tropes, and constant reminders of his previous arrest record—all staples of an anti-Black mythology that recasts the victim as a threat rather than a person. 

King was a father of three. Yet as part of my master’s thesis research, I gathered a 25-article sample from The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal and found that not a single article referred to him as a father. In King’s 2012 autobiography “The Riot Within: My Journey from Rebellion to Redemption,” he wrote about trauma, faith, and his desire to raise his children differently, sentiments that also never made headlines. The media’s erasure of these integral parts of King isn’t neutral; it’s discursive violence that primes the public to rationalize physical violence. More broadly, these media narratives make King and other men like him seem less complex and less human.

In 2020, Floyd’s killing under Chauvin’s knee led to widespread protests and media discourse on Floyd’s inherent worth and humanity. In 2021, Chauvin was convicted of unintentional second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter. Early coverage of Floyd’s murder also foregrounded Floyd’s arrest records, “no angel” rhetoric, and toxicology reports, while sidelining his caregiving and community ties. Of the 27 articles I sampled from the Times, the Post, and the Journal, only six noted that Floyd was a father of five.

However, a fuller accounting eventually emerged. “His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice,” the 2022 biography written by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, evolved from The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning series “George Floyd’s America,” which assembles a complex portrait of the 46-year-old through interviews with his family and friends. 

According to the biography, Floyd mentored younger men, navigated a learning disability, loved his mother, and inspired his daughter Gianna, who once told former President Joe Biden, “Daddy changed the world.”

In reporting, this layered humanity is often sidelined in favor of narratives that cast Black men as public threats rather than private caretakers. The distance between the man and the media is where policy, prosecution, and public perceptions take shape. These divides are not accidental or new. 

In his book, “Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America’s First Civil Rights Movement,” historian Fergus M. Bordewich traces how the stereotype of the “dangerous Black man” was used in the antebellum North to justify early policing and punishment. By rationalizing early carceral logics, Black men were presented as inherent threats to public safety. 

In “The Condemnation of Blackness, Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America,” author and Princeton University professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad shows how, after Reconstruction, selective use of crime statistics, such as the 1890 U.S. Census and Frederick L. Hoffman’s 1896 book, “The Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro,” turned Blackness into a proxy for criminality in the public mind. When framing repeats for a century, it begins to seem like common sense. Eventually, this “common sense” shapes policy.

The April death of John “LJ” Scott Jr., a father of five in Alabama, illustrated the endurance of these logics. Police body camera footage taken before police used a Taser on him showed Scott in distress. In a police briefing, Decatur officials described Scott as “combative,” compressing his life story to a few minutes of police contact during a mental health crisis. Local reporting and his obituary, however, remembered a larger-than-life caregiver, a faithful friend, and a devoted father who faced the same struggles many of us do. The official record chose one version; his people insisted on another.

In our rooms at FFSC, discourse and daily life intersect. I hear broad-shouldered, soft-spoken men say they believe society often sees them as “apex predators,” while I watch them weep over their children’s first steps or birthdays they missed. Naming the framing these men are often subjected to isn’t just critique; it clears space for repair. When the media erases Black fatherhood, courts, agencies, and the public import the erasure into decisions about bail, sentencing, custody, and care for Black men. When headlines reduce a life to a toxicology line, they invite a shrug rather than a shudder. 

This is not a story about the individual exceptionalism of Black men killed by police; it is a demand for narrative justice. King, Floyd, Scott, and Brown’s humanity, in all of its complexity, deserves the public’s memory, not just their brutality and fatality.

Nonnegotiables

If media frames shape policy, FFSC’s practical work shows the power of shifting the narrative firsthand. Daily practices like writing clear court orders, providing supportive employer letters, and trauma-informed counseling turn the image of “public threat” into that of a present parent. These records don’t just help families access services; they make fatherhood visible in systems that often erase it—especially under the dominant model that only recognizes certain men and families as worthy of care or grief.

Equally significant are the people chosen to lead various lanes of FFSC’s work. Charles Barnes Jr., for example, first came to the organization in 1999 as a dad trying to steady his life. He’s now the director of community outreach. Reginald Slaughter spent time incarcerated before joining FFSC, where he has worked for more than 20 years. He’s now an alum and a member of the street team, performing outreach to fathers at bus stops, barbershops, halfway houses, hospital waiting rooms, and everywhere in between.

Across the organization, there are experts, specialists, and individuals who are both personally impacted by the work and lead efforts on initiatives, including emotional regulation and youth reentry, as well as therapy, employment, and legal services, which is often the most pressing need. 

Many of the parents who walk through FFSC’s doors do not have an attorney to help them navigate the family court system. Members of FFSC’s legal team help these families obtain meaningful parenting time, workable temporary custody orders, and accessible roadmaps for navigating the legal system, in part by hosting events such as child support symposia. 

According to members of FFSC’s legal team, the organization’s clients often walk into court unrepresented and leave unheard. In part, this is why at the local level, the organization advocates for funding counsel for low-income parents, making legal filings more accessible, and—when both parents are fit—enforcing parenting time with the same level of seriousness as enforcement for child support. There are existing models of what this could look like. For example, New York City’s interdisciplinary family-defense model, which combines lawyers and social workers, has shortened foster care stays by an average of approximately four months. 

FFSC’s senior staff accountant, Greg Cooper, was once a father who needed FFSC’s help to get time with his children and find stable work. 

“I represent the father who is not a deadbeat dad,” he told Prism. 

While FFSC repairs damaging narratives, it also works to repair harmful policies. In Missouri, the organization helped pass a non-paternity relief law through lobbying and advocacy, allowing men wrongly ordered to pay child support to clear their records. FFSC also developed a child support court model that treats unpaid support as a solvable issue, connecting fathers to jobs, housing, mental health care, and visitation. These changes help stabilize families and reduce the rate of incarceration.

A dignified life  

What FFSC can confirm after providing decades of front-line service is that the systems surrounding Black fathers can be designed with dignity in mind.

“It all starts at the hospital,” said quality assurance manager Oge A. Oge. Having clear bedside discussions about paternity and DNA options prevents years of confusion, spares families trauma, and reduces costly litigation for cities.

Several staff members advocate for a co-response model in which clinicians and mental health practitioners respond alongside police to mental health and family distress calls. They also want FFSC involved in these responses, so when the team knows the father at the center of a call, they can help him navigate the aftermath. There are successful examples of these kinds of crisis response teams nationwide. Part of FFSC’s work is to provide interventions so that a call to the police is never made. 

FFSC’s Eddie McCaskill is often the first Black male therapist Black fathers in the organization’s network have ever had. Unlike many public narratives about Black men, his work starts with the premise that Black fathers love their children. In his office, he makes room for grief and regret over missed birthdays and lost years. He also helps men work through the anxiety and terror that comes with the daily calculation of being read as a threat. 

“Some communities have never been served at all,” McCaskill said.

McCaskill addresses trauma head-on in communities where post-traumatic stress disorder rates rival those seen in combat, yet access to care is scarce. FFSC responds with evening programs, such as Fathers’ Rap, where fathers can discuss issues affecting their lives in the community. In addition, trauma therapy is also available. Policy-wise, expanding access to Medicaid-funded counseling can reduce self-harm, domestic violence, substance use, and suicidal ideation among this demographic, while helping more men escape traumatic situations so they don’t have to live in silence.

Addressing mental health also goes a long way in setting up younger fathers to complete actionable steps to improve their quality of life, such as obtaining identification, attending school, regularly going to therapy sessions, and figuring out transportation.

At FFSC, Shan Keith focuses on youth reentry, allowing him to meet teens both inside facilities and again at the release door, where he coordinates school reenrollment, therapy intakes, and first-week transportation for probation check-ins and visitation. According to Keith, education within facilities and wraparound support reduce reoffending rates.

However, FFSC staff consistently cite steep barriers for young Black men reentering society: housing screenings, suspended licenses, and job portals that exclude those with records. An estimated 60% of formerly incarcerated people are jobless, and they are 10 times more likely than the general population to be unhoused. 

There are actionable steps that employers and institutions could take to make a tremendous difference in the lives of young Black men. This includes removing barriers such as tuition, extra training fees, and license suspensions. Guaranteeing week one essentials such as identification, housing, and transit would also make a world of difference, along with placing men with employers who prioritize parent-friendly schedules.

So many of the Black men killed by police have faced these kinds of barriers, and while they become the subject of countless news stories and headlines, the real stories of who they were as fathers and as people are rarely told. The Black men who walk through the doors of FFSC have the opportunity to control their own narrative and rewrite their own life stories—for themselves and for their children.

Harris said he wants his son to always know that his “daddy was a fighter,” and that it’s OK to cry, ask for help, and not always have an answer. He wants his son to know what it means to live a dignified life.

“It means … I can walk with my head high,” he said.

Disclosure: Lucy Grimshaw is a social services case manager at the Fathers & Families Support Center. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect those of the organization. 

Editorial Team:
Tina Vasquez, Lead Editor
Carolyn Copeland, Top Editor
Rashmee Kumar, Copy Editor

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