(6 of 7)
Pugh called Gwen the day after the march. "I told her that I was representing her as well as myself, us." But he told her too that he "wanted to make a stand for the black man. It took a lot for a man to trust that another 999,999 men were going to be there. That's what the whole concept is about. Black men standing up for black men. Learn to love ourself so that we can love our brother. It works back and forth." The march was virtually the culmination of Pugh's own spiritual rebirth. He admits to battling alcohol for the past 10 to 15 years, and now attends weekly Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. He is also a born-again Christian. "Black people have always been spiritual people, and that's our backbone, our spirituality. We've got to take it into our homes, take it into our workplaces, into all affairs that we do, even down at the gas station, anywhere." He feels so energized that he has talked to the United Auto Workers' president about taking a more active role in the union. The same kind of spirit possessed fellow marchers on Pugh's bus ride home. Says the former soldier: "One of the young fellows said he had never been in the military but he was coming back as a soldier. Soldiers go out and capture, and we're gonna capture each brother."
That is a new dream. As for the old one, Pugh says he is considering going back to school to study music. As for the high school incident: "You can't change what happened. I was very young and immature, and now that I have matured and grown up, I understand that I should have took that route, because that was my love. So now, here I am."
PHILIP BANKS JR. RETIRED POLICE LIEUTENANT, NEW YORK CITY
PHILIP BANKS DEVELOPED HIS BELIEF IN the "long arm of supervision" while growing up in Harlem and Brooklyn. Even when his father, a truck driver, was away on a trip and his mother was off cleaning other people's homes, neighbors would come over to supervise, scold and soothe. "You always felt like someone was watching," recalls Banks, 53. When he became a father of three boys, he kept close watch and joined the neighborhood block association to help others. His strategy for keeping his children out of trouble: Stick close. "I went to school on PTA night. If there was no homework, I'd get on the phone to the teacher and ask why," he says. "If discipline was necessary, then I disciplined."
"He was pretty tough on us," says his eldest son David. "And thank God he was." While other neighborhood boys in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn saw their futures disintegrate in a haze of drugs, crime and broken homes, the three Banks boys thrived. Today David, 33, is a lawyer who switched careers and became an assistant elementary-school principal; Philip III, 32, has followed his dad into the police force; and Terence, 30, has started a pest-control company. Banks' three sons all live in Queens, not far from their parents' three-bedroom English Tudor home. All four Banks men attended last Monday's march, and all four came away committed to launching a local, house-to-house voter-registration drive. Yet different life experiences led each of the Banks men to Washington.