I will always remember the warm summer evening. My David and I were sitting on a bench in Madison Square Park, our English Bulldog Mary Lou at the end of her leash in front of us, when Irene Hirano, chair of the Ford Foundation’s board, called to share the news: The trustees had elected me to serve as the foundation’s 10th president.

We were immediately and completely overwhelmed. We hugged. We cried. Even Mary Lou wagged her tail and beamed with her signature bully smile. 

This was more than an honor, more than a privilege. This was a culmination, because my entire life’s story is inseparable from the Ford Foundation’s.

Everything that made my unlikely journey possible, the Ford Foundation made possible first—a seat in the inaugural class of Head Start, an outstanding public education in rural east Texas, the Pell grants and scholarships that defrayed the cost of college and law school. Everything I am is because of our institution. And to be part of it, to share in writing its story—to work alongside our stalwart Board of Trustees and dedicated staff, who I forever appreciate—is, I know, the defining achievement of my life.

A dozen years ago, at the outset, I noted that leadership in service of equality and justice is not a marathon, but a relay race. We each run our leg as hard and fast as we can, pursuing the more perfect. Sometimes we gain ground, sometimes we lose it. And then, we pass forward the baton.

This week, with pride and gratitude, I pass the baton of leadership to the extraordinary Heather Gerken: brilliant scholar, champion of the rule of law and democracy, the right leader at the right time for the Ford Foundation and its mission.  

With change comes renewal—and renewal is essential for an institution like ours, as we approach the 90th anniversary of our founding in January and our centennial beyond. 

I cannot wait to see how Heather, her team, and our community answer the question anew: “How does the Ford Foundation meet the challenges and seize the opportunities of the next decade, as it has for the nine decades before?”

As I reflect on my own tenure—where we started, where we are, where we’re going—two painful truths are inescapable: In the United States, we have arrived at a crossroads. And in our interdependent world, the cascading consequences matter for everyone; for many, they are a matter of life and death.

This is profoundly material for a global foundation, with colleagues, partners, and grantees managing the rolling, roiling repercussions every day and all around the world.

For my part, my love of America—my love of the American idea—is unwavering, unyielding, unfaltering.

Twelve years ago, I could not have imagined that, in my lifetime, this country—our country—would nurture strains of populism and illiberalism that seemed only to take root in other places. I thought them too anathema to our best traditions and aspirations—wholly inconsistent with our civic convictions and civic creed. In the America I know, red and blue, we believe in equal representation, equal rights, and equal opportunity—in tolerance, and generosity, and reason. 

And yet, as one can plainly see, the United States is not immune to these infectious tendencies. To the contrary. Our pluralist democracy is dangerously out of balance—in grave, existential peril. 

Together, we must decide, what kind of nation are we? What kind of leaders? What kind of citizens?

I have long observed that inequality fuels a vicious cycle that produces anxiety, resentment, and grievance. Through the decades, America’s mobility escalator has slowed and halted for many, entrenching a pernicious form of distrust and hopelessness among people of all communities. We, collectively, have lost grip of the shared identity that binds us together as Americans. 

As a result of all this, we are turning against each other when we should be turning toward one another—when we should be finding common cause, and common ground, and a common good. Indeed, we have accepted, normalized, the opposite: a suffocating toxicity; contempt, hatred, malice, mendacity; a culture of outright nihilism.

A half century ago, James Baldwin cautioned that the most ferocious enemy of justice is power allied with ignorance. Today, I would posit an emerging corollary as well: The most ferocious enemy of democracy is impunity allied with indifference.

Simply put, we have become indifferent to rank injustice of every kind. And we know, to invoke the wisdom of the valiant Elie Wiesel, that indifference always “benefits the aggressor, never the victim.” It always benefits the strong at the expense of the weak, the powerful at the expense of dignity and justice, and these truths we ought to hold self-evident even still. As Wiesel affirmed upon accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, “Action is the only remedy to indifference, the most insidious danger of all.” 

To be sure, the shock is acute. The fear is well founded. The grief is pervasive—and I grieve, too, for all we have lost. Yet, we have not lost everything—not yet—because we, all of us, still have the power to choose something better.

At this defining crossroads, we can still choose courage over despair—moral leadership and active, engaged citizenship. This is our time to save and strengthen our pluralist democracy: to shake off the stupor and reject the indifference; to lean in, not hunker down; to organize and mobilize; to reach across the breach and to heal the breach, even and especially when we disagree; to build longer bridges rather than higher walls.

Among the most meaningful, memorable experiences of my life was March 7, 2015, the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. At the invitation of my hero, Congressman John Lewis, I marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, with him and tens of thousands of others.

These days, Congressman Lewis’ perspicacious voice echoes in my head: “Ours is not the struggle of one day, one week, or one year. Ours is not the struggle of one judicial appointment or presidential term. Ours is the struggle of a lifetime, or maybe even many lifetimes, and each one of us in every generation must do our part.”   

The work of building bridges—the work of pushing forward, onward, across them—this is who we are. If we are driven back one day, we regroup, we realign, and we try again the next—and again the next. Each one of us, in every generation, does our part to the best of our abilities, come what may.

Says scripture, I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, and I have remained faithful. I have—and I remain replete with the faith, the hope, of generations who came before us and for generations who will follow. 

Like all faith, our faith in our shared future may be tested; faith’s very definition, after all, is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.

But, together, especially now, let us renew our faith in the radical optimism that we shall overcome. Let us reclaim the hope that has sustained us—the hope that remains the oxygen of democracy.  And let us resolve that across the bridge, over the horizon, we will emerge with greater fidelity to our values, more American, not less.