June 15, 2025
Today, on the cusp of another celebration of Father’s Day, the organization continues to envision a future where Black fathers are celebrated.
Ryan Jor El, a Charlotte-based professional wardrobe consultant, author, speaker, and event host, founded Black Fathers Rock! (BFR) in 2017. Inspired by Black Girls Rock!, he created the organization to challenge negative stereotypes about Black fathers and provide them with the resources needed to support and empower their families.
Today, on the cusp of another celebration of Father’s Day, the organization continues to envision a future where Black fathers—no matter their vocation or station in society—are celebrated.
According to WCNC, this celebration, which will be held on June 14, takes the form of an awards ceremony held at BFR’s new event venue, Event Masterz, which will celebrate Black fathers and award them in several categories including: Father of the Year, Activist of the Year, Dapper Dad of the Year, Entrepreneur of the Year, and Comeback Father of the Year.
Honorees at the awards ceremony will also be afforded an opportunity to mix and mingle with some of Charlotte’s best and brightest after accepting their awards.
As Jor El told the outlet, core to BFR is the idea of reshaping the narratives concerning Black fathers, “Celebrating other Black men who are doing things in their community and in their home, is my way of changing the narrative. Not all of us are absent, not all of us are in jail,” he remarked.
He continued, “All dads need to be celebrated especially the ones who are unmarried and are great fathers, it’s important to change narratives and ugly stereotypes.”
As The Charlotte Post reports, originally, BFR was conceptualized as an awards show, but three months after its debut, Jor El, who was also inspired to create the organization after experiencing a fatherless childhood, recognized the potential for a larger impact within the Charlotte community, and turned it into a nonprofit organization.
Although the title of the organization is Black Fathers Rock! in a similar way to how the Black community celebrates mothers who have mothered without giving birth, the fathers Jor El’s organization wants to honor don’t necessarily have to be biological fathers either.
As he told the outlet, “I typically say the thing you lack in your childhood you tend to overcompensate for in your adulthood,” he said. “And so now, I went from having an absentee father to being an active, present father and honoring active and present fathers. Hearing stories of people over the eight years or seeing somebody with a T-shirt on in another country, you’re like ‘Wow, that is super cool,’” Jor El told the Charlotte Post. “People get really excited about this movement because we really don’t have many things like this, so I’ve heard a lot of great stories.”
One of those great stories involves Desmond Wiggan, who won BFR’s 2025 Father of the Year award. Wiggan told the outlet that dealing with the pandemic helped him see that he, as a father, needed to be able to give his children more grace as they all navigated uncharted waters and the children, in particular, leaned on digital devices to connect with family members.
“My son didn’t see or touch his grandparents for six weeks,” Wiggan said. “They weren’t there in the trenches or in the spaces, building relationships and learning how to communicate with people.”
He continued, “If you think about clay, pottery and stuff, we can just mold and develop the minds and emotions of our kids, it’s just that we want to be constructive and steer in the right direction. Having grace on [children] is also important, and when they fail, instead of just feeling like you got to yell and just punish them, allow it to be a conversation, so that they can really learn.”
Ricky Singh, an artist and the executive director of My Brother’s Keeper Charlotte, who was awarded Activist Father of the Year in 2024, agrees with Wiggan’s assessment that communication, not necessarily punishment, is an important piece of a Black father’s toolkit for connecting with their children, and that connection is part of a lifelong relationship between father figure and child.
“We have to find moments where we can laugh and find joy, even in the smallest things. There’s a beauty and a struggle there,” Singh told the outlet. “Fatherhood is beyond just providing for kids and families. It’s the experiences, so I encourage those to find moments and pause during the experiences and soak it up, because when your kids get grown, fatherhood doesn’t end, it evolves. But it’s different.”
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