Tony Dungy, the first black coach ever to win a Super Bowl, might have escaped notice this week had he merely supported Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s “Responsible Fatherhood Initiative.” His real sin was to explain why.
Dungy, a Christian father of eleven, recounted a conversation he had years back with the Rev. Abe Brown about Brown’s prison ministry. At Brown’s request, Dungy accompanied him to prison. Expecting to find hardened criminals, Dungy found instead “19- and 20- and 21-year-old kids who looked like my boys.” When Dungy asked what accounted for the young men’s incarceration, Beown told him told him, “It’s not socioeconomic. It’s not racial. It’s not education. It’s none of that. Ninety-five percent of these boys did not grow up with their dad.”
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