more often, and to offer hope that it is worth the effort to do so. I am
blessed that so many readers have taken the time to let me know that
they have found both courage and hope in these pages.

When I cast my message on the water, I did not know that my
action would coincide with President Clinton's call for a national con-
versation about race or that it would connect me to others whose
courage and hope would both humble and inspire me. I never imag-
ined that my message would wash up on the shores of the White
House. I was surprised and thrilled when I came home from an after-
noon of running errands one November day in 1997 and was greeted
by my husband with uncharacteristic agitation. He told me that a
member of the President's staff had called twice that afternoon looking
for me. The caller offered an invitation to participate along with two
other authors and a gathering of students and community leaders in
President Clinton's first Town Hall meeting on race in Akron, Ohio.
That December 3 event was personally very exciting and symbolically
very important. As I looked out at the thousands of people gathered in
the auditorium, and imagined the millions of people watching the tele-
vised event, I thought of my students back at Mount Holyoke College
and the need they express for models of antiracist action and leadership.
Though there are those who criticized the President's Initiative as "idle
talk," I knew it offered hope for my students to see a powerful white
man using his power to try to interrupt the cycle of racism. While acts
of bigotry like the murders of James Byrd in Texas or of Matthew
Shepard in Wyoming are usually well publicized and easy to spot, efforts
to oppose bigotry and discrimination often go without notice in the
media. In Akron, the power of the Presidency was making visible the
work of community activists and concerned citizens participating in
the forum who, in their daily lives, were trying to counteract racism. I
was delighted to be a part of that process.

Just a few months earlier, in September 1997, I had been invited
to participate in a conference commemorating the 40th anniversary
of the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas,
a landmark event in civil rights history. This conference, one of the
first involving the advisory panel of the President's Initiative on Race,

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