By
Bob Phibbs
This blog is not about retail sales training. Or marketing. Or attracting customers to your shop.
It’s about how we are more alike than different.
It’s personal.
It's a window into what makes me me.
It’s about my dad.
It’s about the March on Washington.
It's about why we celebrate the life and achievements of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Before I was born, my dad had been a Brethren preacher from a very poor area in the southwestern mountains of Virginia. He took up the role of civil rights activist in the late '50s. He made the front pages when he forced the Air Force to change a training book that said communists had infiltrated the Council of Churches.
By the time I was born, he was on a public journey of civil disobedience, working for social justice and a personal mission to make the world a better place.
If you were born in the past 30 years, it might be impossible to imagine there were segregated areas to eat at lunch counters, ride in buses and even take a drink of water. It's hard to imagine when black people were denied the right to work, live where they wanted, and vote.
But that's the way it was in the '50s and early '60s...and as civil disobedience was used to push the establishment to tear down the "separate but equal" world created to keep the races apart, police were using fire hoses and German shepherds to keep the marchers at bay. Freedom riders were shot, and buses were torched. It was one of the most traumatic eras in the Nation.
When I was six, I didn’t really understand what my dad did or why. I just knew that Civil Rights was the better-looking fourth brother in my family. Civil Rights always came first. Civil Rights always came before our family. It always came before holiday celebrations. It always came before good night stories. I hated it.
What I did understand was that people didn’t like my dad and what he was trying to do. I knew that from the telephone calls I’d answer and hear someone tell me you’ll never see your dad alive again.
I knew it from the postcards scrawled in red that came in the mail calling us n-lovers.
I knew it from being beaten up after school and the words they used.
Eventually, the civil rights movement drove a wedge between my dad and my mom, ending in divorce and estrangement between him and the rest of his family.
But we were still a family on August 28, 1963…
My father knew the March on Washington would be historic, so he organized a busload of fellow clergy leaders to go from where we lived in Toledo to the nation’s capital. As the day approached, news reports quoted the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover saying, “Violence is expected: some of you will be shot and killed.”
My dad rewrote his will and ensured his life insurance was paid up. Then he drove my mom, two brothers, and me to the Shenandoah Valley to stay with our grandparents. When he said goodbye to us that day, he fully understood that he might not ever see any of us again.
He met the bus from Toledo in Hagerstown, Maryland, for the ride into Washington. When he got there, there were hundreds of buses lined up. He told me he never saw so many angry people out on sidewalks – holding brooms, baseball bats, or whatever kind of stick they could get their hands on. He told me, “They didn’t want us there.”
My dad stood 20 feet from the stage. He vividly remembered that when King walked to the podium, "You could hear a pin drop – even with 250,000 people. As he reached his I Have a Dream crescendo, the crowd stirred like a giant thunderstorm that rolled through everyone. It took several seconds for that thunderous noise to reach the front and the stage. When King let loose, that crowd went wild."
Wiping his eyes, my dad said, “August 28, 1963, was the best day of my life.”
But the little boy in me who’s now a man still wonders...
How could a husband leave his wife and small sons knowing he might never come back?
I can’t imagine doing that.
While I believe that we can and must continue to change the world through hard work, I’m not that passionate. I could never say to my partner, “I may never see you again,” and walk out the door.
When I leave for a speaking engagement, it is because I know I’m coming home that I can leave in the first place.
When Obama won, I called my dad on election night and asked how he felt. Greatest day of my life, he said. "People often asked me if it was all worth it - losing my family, my home, and my career, and for a while, I thought no, as there hadn't been much progress. But I never thought I’d see this during my lifetime." He passed away a year later.
At my dad's funeral, a man made the trip down the mountain to tell me my dad went out of his way to visit him during his travels. Dressed in threadbare jeans and shirt, missing teeth, and looking every bit like a hillbilly, he said at the graveside, "Your dad never made me feel small."
While I couldn’t see it as a boy, my dad’s passion for treating everyone the same was in the right place. The struggles and battles were worth it.
We still have to find a way to say we’re more alike than different. This is especially true in retail.
Millions of American citizens wouldn’t have been allowed in your store back then. But now it’s our job to be welcoming to everyone.
To notice racism, sexism, and all the other isms.
And not just to notice but to act or say something when you hear it.
To call them on it.
To tell them you are uncomfortable.
We’re Americans; we’re better than that.
We’re more alike than different.
That's the lesson I take with me onto every stage.
Thanks to my dad.
