The Ghost of a Father

In a speech he gave just before Father's Day this year at a church in Spartanburg, S.C., Obama told some stories. One was about Frasier Robinson, his late father-in-law, whose multiple sclerosis was diagnosed when he was 30 and who made it to work every day at a water-filtration plant, even if he had to rely on a walker to get there. He sent two kids to Princeton. To Obama, a model father.

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And then there was the story of 22-year-old Joshua Stroman, now a senior at Benedict College in Columbia, S.C., and president of the student body. His journey brought the church audience to its feet.

"Joshua never knew his father," Obama said, "and when he was very young, his mom and stepfather both died from cancer. . . . He was then taken in by family members who were involved with gangs and drugs. He experimented with that lifestyle for a bit, and his low point came when he went to jail at 18 years old. That's when he decided that his story would have a different ending."

Asked about his encounter with Obama months later, Stroman says he felt the pull of Obama's presence during the few minutes they shared in a holding room. He wanted more connection, but there was not enough time. It would have been "cool," Stroman says, to talk to Obama about what it meant to lose a father. "I guess we do share that link, and we're not the only ones."

W.E.B. Du Bois, Jackie Robinson, Ralph Ellison, Clarence Thomas, Al Sharpton, Shaquille O'Neal, Samuel L. Jackson. All are black men who grew up without their biological fathers. More than half of the nation's 5.6 million black boys live in fatherless households, 40 percent of which are impoverished.

"It's an enormous problem," Obama says, but one he has been willing to engage, including highlighting examples of good parenting, co-sponsoring a "responsible fatherhood" initiative in the Senate and sometimes prodding black men to do better.

"If we are to pass on high expectations to our children," he said in a 2005 speech on the South Side of Chicago, "we've got to have high expectations for ourselves. . . . It is a wonderful thing that you are married and living in a home with your children, but don't just sit in the house watching 'Sports Center' all weekend long."

Sometimes when Obama sees friends who have their fathers to rely on for support and advice, "I look at them with a little bit of envy," he acknowledges. But not remorse. The abandoned son is still working to carve out something positive from the legacy of the goat herder, who also dreamed of changing a nation.

A lot of Democrats offer programs, Obama says, but his personal history has given him something more: "the ability to connect with men who didn't have fathers themselves and to tell them, 'Your obligation is not to perpetuate that cycle of absence but to engage with your child.' " Maybe, he says, that's "something I can offer as a candidate and a president."

Research editor Alice Crites and staff researchers Madonna Lebling and Rena Kirsch contributed to this report.