Tackling the Tough Stuff

Libby is accused of racial discrimination

Yes, I’m diving right into one of the most difficult events in Libby Frank’s life.

Pages 164-166.

Libby had been Executive Director of the U.S. Section of WILPF for a couple years when Barbara Armentrout, the excellent full-time editor of the monthly WILPF national magazine, Peace and Freedom moved on from WILPF.

“We advertised the position and had lots of applicants. It took a while, but we finally hired one of the candidates, a Black woman. I gave Barbara’s notebook to the new editor and told her to use the info in it until she knew her way around. Then she could start using her own methods.”

Barbara’s notebook was the veritable GPS of editing Peace and Freedom. Unfortunately, the new editor was headed in another direction.

“I found that the editor was not living up to the job description. She wasn’t consulting with the Advisory Committee, following the previous editor’s manual, or meeting deadlines for the publication. Our staff contracts provided a process for letting people know when they were not meeting the job requirements and giving them an opportunity to improve. Following this process, I told the editor that she needed to follow the job description in order to keep the job and gave her a period of time to make improvements. All of this was done in cooperation with the Personnel Committee. My warning didn’t work. The editor refused to make the changes and didn’t meet the job demands. I had to fire her.

The editor immediately went to a Philadelphia civil rights agency and charged WILPF with racial discrimination and wrongful termination! The ex-editor claimed that I harassed her and then fired her because she was Black. She wanted WILPF to make a payment to compensate her for her suffering.”

The irony! This is Libby Frank, who defied her parents to attend “integrated dances” in college, broke laws to integrate public swimming pools in her 20s, protested for racial equality, included diverse images of people in her classrooms, and successfully advocated for Black people to be represented in the My Weekly Reader publication that was distributed to children across the nation.

How could she be accused of racial discrimination?

Libby felt like she had done everything right. She tried to mentor and support the new editor. She gave her the GPS. She provided constructive feedback and set expectations. And when the employee did not meet the role expectations, Libby had the support of the office—both Black and White employees—in firing her.

When we first wrote the book, the anecdote ended here: “…the board decided to pay the ex-editor what she asked. They wanted to avoid having WILPF publicly charged with being racist.”

Ugh.

That is not the happy ending that I was hoping for. (I’m partial to happy endings.)

But reading over the story while editing, Libby had more to add. She said, “Looking back about forty years, I can now understand her perceptions. Perhaps I could have handled it differently; I reacted to what she said rather than what she might have been feeling.”

Eureka?!

I found this moment—that happened over 40 years after the event—to transform the story completely. Moving from defensiveness to empathy felt… healing.

From Libby’s perspective, she was being a caring and supportive manager, making sure her new employee had everything she needed to succeed. But, not from the employee’s perspective.

Imagine you have just started a new job. You are excited about using your skills creatively in this role. And then, your new manager hands you a rule book and says, do it exactly this way (“where’s the room for creativity and ownership?”). The manager checks in on you first thing every morning (“is she checking to see if I’m here on time?”). It seems like almost immediately you receive feedback that you are not meeting the job requirements (“is she trying to get rid of me already?”).

Libby’s insight reminded me of how our drive to do everything right can lead to a defensiveness that prevents us from really hearing the experience of others. How could this experience have gone differently with empathy?

This was not the only time in the book that Libby reconsidered her own actions and experience. I loved learning this from her: We are not perfect, and we can choose to always keep learning.

A favorite book of mine about tackling racism is Our Problem Our Path. It provides practical steps for “how White people can take antiracist action today, exactly where they are and as they are.”

One of those steps is recognizing that you don’t need to be—you can’t be—perfect all the time.