But Norris had already taken her own dramatic plunge. “The discussion about race within my own family was not completely honest,” Norris wrote in her book. She had grown up unaware that her family had secrets. It stunned her to learn as an adult that her father, when he was a young World War II veteran, had fled Birmingham, Alabama, in 1946. He had an altercation with a police officer, had been shot, and, fearing dire consequences, left for Minnesota. He never told his children what had happened.

“I was furious. Confused. My head hurt, and I wanted to scream. I needed details,” she wrote. After all, her father was a mild-mannered, book-loving postal worker. He carried a pocket-sized copy of the Constitution in his back pocket wherever he went. A born optimist with a broad grin, he taught her to look for the good in everyone. “Wake up and smell the opportunity,” he told her.

Norris, the winner of an Emmy and a Peabody award, applied her journalistic instincts and investigative shoe leather to learn the details of the event. Her father had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He tried to stop a policeman from pulling his gun from his holster. When the officer finally did, he pointed the gun at her father’s chest. At the last instant, the gun got knocked away, and the shot grazed her father’s leg.

“Don’t let this make you bitter,” an elderly relative told her.

“Rise. Rise and shine. Rise to the occasion. Rise above it all,” her parents had taught her.

Now Norris rose above her consternation over discussions about race. She had a shining idea — the thunderbolt moment that would change her life. She went to Kinko’s and had postcards printed. Each read “Race. Your thoughts. 6 words. Please send.” She handed them out at events. Thirty percent came back. Soon her publisher, seeing the results, took over the printing. Three years later, she had 150,000 responses. Today more than 500,000 people from all 50 states and 96 nations have submitted entries (and personal stories) to The Race Card Project, which Norris calls “a trusted space that excavates hidden truths and questions hardened narratives.” The project allows viewers to see people as they see themselves. Its purpose? To encourage discussion and understanding in a time of heightened racial tension.

As its founding director, Norris oversees a team of four whom she calls “my tiny little army.” They manage an ongoing tsunami of emailed entries and help the project partner with corporations, government entities, and colleges that use its materials in diversity and inclusion efforts.

“I think it’s excellent,” says Professor Jennifer Edgoose, who heads diversity, inclusion, and equity efforts in the UW’s Department of Family Medicine and Community Health. Its doctors and staff are each creating race cards, which are then posted online for all to read. “It’s a great opportunity for people to write very thoughtfully and concisely in this space,” she says.

The submissions spill into commentary on religion, sexual orientation, heritage, and disability. They deal with every “difficult, dirty, prickly, complicated, and intricate emotion you can imagine,” says Norris. They include such confessions as:

“Being conspicuous is a daily struggle.”

“Black Vietnamese. Speak Spanish. Eat rice.”

“White female born in America. Blessed.”

“Apparently I’m Jesus or a terrorist.”

“White. Not allowed to be proud.”

“The plantation haunts my gay marriage.”

“Native Americans, America’s invisible invisible invisible.”

“I’m only Jewish when it’s safe.”

“Hated for being a white cop.”

One recent entry came from the great-grandchild of a conductor on the Underground Railroad.

“The everyday stories that land in my in-box every day allow me to talk to people I might never have otherwise met,” says Norris, who is now a national affairs columnist at the Washington Post and a storytelling fellow at National Geographic.

“How else would I talk to a cop in Nacogdoches, Texas; a trans teen in Wyoming; or a mom in Arizona who years ago figured out how to open her heart and her home to a child of color long before we saw multiracial families in ways we do now?” she asks.

Norris says she’s able to reach out and have in-depth conversations that help her understand an issue “that most often is examined on a huge national platform where people are debating or screaming at each other, as opposed to in the private and much more intimate spaces where people wrestle with these issues quietly. And that’s where I get to go, thanks to this project.”

“Snap out of it.”

That’s what Norris’s mother, who was also a book lover and postal worker, said when chastising her as a child. “My mother’s tough. Rock of Gibraltar tough. … She has no patience for ‘Woe is me,’ ” wrote Norris, who added, “I was raised by a model minority to be a model minority.”

But woeful is how Norris felt at the UW. She didn’t know how to snap out of it. She struggled in class. Her major was electrical engineering, a decision she made thanks to her prowess in a high school math and science program for minority students. “I wasn’t burning up the world to be an engineer,” she recalls. She was “very lonely” because there were few women (and even fewer women of color) in the program.

The turning point came when she overheard two friends in the library. “They were saying, ‘She studies so hard, but she’s just not a very good student. She just doesn’t do that well in school.’ That really shook me, because I was like ‘That’s not who I am. I’ve always been a really good student,’ ” she recalls.

With input from a UW dean and other professors, Norris took a political science class that got her excited about other options. Due to a speech impediment she suffered as a child (“My brain worked faster than my mouth,” she says), she had questioned how good a communicator she could be. But she changed her major to pre-journalism and soon transferred to the University of Minnesota. Back in the Twin Cities, she came alive. She took three jobs. She waitressed, wrote for the student paper, and held down the weekend graveyard shift at WCCO-TV, where she listened to police and fire radios and dispatched camera crews to cover breaking news scenes.

She benefited from insightful mentors. “You’re a pretty good writer,” her WCCO boss told her. “You just need to use fewer words, because it’s broadcast.” After graduation, at the Los Angeles Times, her editor said, “You have a way with words. If you work at your craft, you’ll be able to punch above your weight.” Norris entered the heavyweight ranks when the Chicago Tribune took her on. Then when she was 26, the Washington Post hired her to cover education. After visiting a first-grade classroom, she took the bus home with Dooney Waters, “a thickset six-year-old missing two front teeth.” She found herself holding the reins of a multiday story that became national news. “6-YEAR-OLD’S MD. HOME WAS A MODERN-DAY OPIUM DEN,” read the Sunday edition’s front-page headline.

President Bush mentioned it. The Today show and other outlets wanted access to the boy and his family. “I remember at the time being very careful in protecting him and his family,” says Norris. She has kept up with Waters, who she says is a college graduate and “doing well.”

Then ABC News called. She found herself in 1993 covering the Clinton White House, an experience she calls “a high-wire-act platform. Once again, I was jumping into the deep end of the pool never having been on air.”

The experience frustrated her. “You have no access to the president other than waiting for him to walk by — usually on the tarmac — and yelling to try to get a one-line statement or going in the gaggle where he’s sitting down with a foreign dignitary. And the foreign dignitary is looking at the U.S. press corps like, ‘Oh, my gosh, you are the most uncouth and impolite group of humans I’ve ever seen,’ because you’re totally ignoring the dude in the chair next to the president and yelling questions at the president that have nothing to do with the country this leader represents.”

Norris says she has “yelled at both [President] Bushes trying to get answers.”

She found more satisfaction doing features for Nightline, Good Morning America, and World News Tonight. One producer taught her key storytelling techniques. “She always said, ‘Good TV is radio, because half the people who are listening to the evening news are doing just that. They’re chopping carrots and doing other stuff.’ I learned so much about how to punctuate a story with silences and ambient sound to make someone feel like they’re in an environment.”

Such lessons were priceless in 2002 when Norris became host of All Things Considered. “I had never ever worked in radio, and I walked in the door as a host. I had to learn how to put my ego in my back pocket and realize every single person I encountered could teach me something,” says Norris, who stepped away from her position in 2011 (and also refrained from covering politics) when her husband, Broderick Johnson, joined President Obama’s reelection campaign.

Norris interviewed notables who ranged from Afghanistan’s president Hamid Karzai to Robert De Niro. In 2008, she cohosted a presidential debate with NPR host Steve Inskeep. A candidate avoided answering her question. “So she asked a second time,” Inskeep recalls. “It seemed to me like it was time to move the debate to the next thing, but she jumped in and said, ‘I’m going to try this one more time.’ I thought that was Michele in essence, because she is gracious. She was courteous. She was precise, and she was tough. She wasn’t going to take a bunch of obfuscation, and I think that is what has marked her as a journalist and as a person.”

On other occasions, Norris displayed empathy that made her a better journalist, according to NPR executive producer Madhulika Sikka. When Norris interviewed a roomful of potential 2008 voters, she knew there would be tension. “She told me the best way people will talk together is when they break bread together,” Sikka recalls. “Let’s make sure we have a meal for everybody to get to know each other and just chat with no recording. To me, that was quintessentially her — her understanding of how to make people feel comfortable.” Her most unforgettable stories more often came when she talked with everyday people. “Some of the more memorable interviews that live inside me were talking to people after Hurricane Katrina. Those are interviews I will never ever forget,” she says. “I tried to make my approach to journalism to figure out how to walk through a different door than every other journalist would, to find stories or people at the margins who can illuminate an issue or enlighten us about something because they’re looking at it or experiencing it from a different vantage point.”

One such moment came when she spoke with a local politician who had come out as trans and was losing her job as a result. “I talked to her the day this was happening,” says Norris. “It was an emotional roller coaster to give her the objectivity and dignity to tell her story, explore her employer’s point of view in a respectful, rigorous way, avoid sensationalism — and do it on deadline.

“That’s a real skill, but also a real thrill when you’re in the moment and your producer and director are in your ear,” she adds. “It’s like riding a rodeo bull.”

Today The Race Card Project has Norris on another wild ride. Besides producing spin-off podcasts, she is writing a book about collecting candid stories about race during the Obama–Trump years that will be published by Simon & Schuster. In the future, she hopes to partner with data scientists to catalog her vast collection to make it accessible to scholars.

Her sprawling, fast-growing project is not unlike gardening, Norris’s stress-reducing pastime — a hobby her father also pursued. “There are all kinds of metaphors in gardening,” she muses. “You’re taking care of something. You’re keeping something alive. You realize some things that are big and showy like peonies are beautiful but can’t even hold themselves up, and there’s a metaphor in that. The garden teaches you life lessons all the time, and it humbles you, and it surprises you, because you think something that shoots up out of the ground is going to be one thing, and then it changes.”

Of the more than 500,000 entries in The Race Card Project, Norris has changed one submission, the one closest to her heart — her own. Her first was “Fooled them all. Not done yet.” More recently, she says, “The one that I land on over and over again is ‘Still more work to be done,’ because we often want the sense we’re rounding the corner to being done, and we won’t talk about race anymore and won’t think about race anymore. That’s perhaps where the idea of America moving into a post-racial society was supposed to come from, but there’s no finish line on the horizon, I don’t think.” •

Gee: “I want people to think about the world differently by hearing a voice that’s trustworthy.” Shalicia Johnson, Arrowstar Photography

On the podcast Black Like Me with Dr. Alex Gee, Alex Gee Jr. ’85 shares his perspective and interviews an array of guests such as Judge Everett Mitchell JD’10, Senator Tammy Baldwin JD’89, former NFL player Terrell Fletcher ’98, and UW–Madison scholars. In an introduction to the podcast, which debuted in 2018, Gee said, “My fear is that in our society today, we live in an echo-chamber … I want people to think about the world differently by hearing a voice that’s trustworthy, and hopefully that will make it relatable.”

Black Like Me was recently named the Favorite Podcast for 2020 by the Wisconsin Podcast Association. In his acceptance speech, Gee stated, “We have about 100 episodes up right now because about two years ago, I said, ‘I want someplace to take my voice as a Black man, a Black Wisconsinite — lifelong Madisonian, basically — navigating my world of predominant whiteness.’ I don’t know where I would’ve taken my voice, my concerns, my thoughts, during this pandemic if I didn’t have the platform of Black Like Me.” The podcast has gained listeners across the nation and the world.

Gee is the lead pastor of Madison’s Fountain of Life Covenant Church. He has spearheaded a nonprofit, the Nehemiah Center for Urban Leadership Development, and launched a movement, Justified Anger, that addresses racial disparities in Madison and stems from a 2013 Cap Times article he wrote under the same name. He has also earned the city’s Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award and the Madison Community Foundation’s “Outstanding Contributions to the Community” honor.

Black Like Me is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and alexgee.com.

Louise Butler Walker as a young Chicagoan: while she was growing up and as a UW student, she identified as Black. Later in her career, facing the limitations Black Americans experienced, she began to pass as white. Courtesy of the authors

During the Great Depression, Louise Butler Walker ’35 completed her bachelor’s in French and earned a library diploma from what is now UW–Madison’s Information School. Walker had been an outstanding student, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, and completed a prestigious internship at the American Library Association (ALA) headquarters in Chicago. The school’s career placement office said her assets were her “brilliant mind” and “excellent academic background.” Her limitations, they said, were “racial (she is a mulatto).”

Although Walker was not privy to the egregious behind-the-scenes machinations and handwringing about her being Black, she knew that her race was detrimental to her career, so she eventually passed as white to work as a librarian in rural Wisconsin. Her story reveals the extraordinary pressures that African Americans faced.

As a local librarian, Walker (at right in photo) became a prominent figure in Fort Atkinson. Courtesy of the authors

Walker was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1914, to Elizabeth Beasley Thompson, a respected clubwoman and educator, and James Henry Butler, an Atlanta University graduate and editor of the Savannah Tribune, the city’s oldest Black newspaper. Walker’s paternal grandfather, J. H. C. Butler, served for nearly 50 years as principal of the local West Broad Street School and was known as “Prof. Butler” in the Black press. Education was important to the Butlers, and they made sure young Louise received the best education possible. In 1928, she graduated as valedictorian from Cuyler Junior High School, at the time considered “one of the finest Negro grammar schools in the south.” Shortly after her graduation, the Butler family migrated to Chicago, joining thousands of African Americans who moved from the Deep South to Midwestern cities. She matriculated at Hyde Park High School, where she graduated in 1931 with honors — 10th in a class of 360 — and arrived at the University of Wisconsin that fall.

Although previous Black students had been forced off campus into substandard housing, Walker managed to get a room in Chadbourne Hall. The dean of women congratulated herself on this arrangement, noting that Walker had been accepted by all, including Southern students who usually objected to the presence of Black women.

Walker was a member of both the French and Spanish clubs. In the spring of 1932, she was one of 190 women inducted into the local freshman honorary sorority, Sigma Epsilon Sigma.

Walker would continue to challenge rigid expectations prescribed because of her race and gender. During the spring 1934 semester, she married University of Chicago graduate Cyrus Weber Walker, whose race was described on his birth certificate as “multiple.” On the 1910 census, he was listed as “mulatto,” and in 1930 as “Negro (Black).” She soon applied to the Wisconsin Library School, and she was accepted in fall 1935, when Mary Emogene Hazeltine was the director. The descendant of a grandfather who had a station on the Underground Railroad, Hazeltine considered herself to be liberal and supportive of African Americans.

Walker returned to Chicago to complete the required fieldwork for her diploma. She worked variously at the ALA headquarters, the Woodlawn Branch of the Chicago Public Library, and the Schools Division, where she cataloged books for high school libraries.

During Walker’s fieldwork in 1935, Hazeltine received a letter from Hazel Timmerman, the assistant in charge of the personnel at ALA, accusing Louise of “passing.”

“I noticed Mrs. Walker had filled in on the registration card that she was of the white race,” Timmerman wrote to Hazeltine. She asked, “Will you kindly tell me what you are saying to prospective employers in regard to Mrs. Walker’s race? I know that she is in a very difficult position and I want to help her in every way I can.”

Hazeltine responded in the racist language of pseudoscience. “In the case of Mrs. Walker, we say very frankly that she is mulatto (she may have even a lesser strain than a mulatto but I have used that term rather than saying ‘negro’ because it is milder). The Placement Bureau, instead of saying directly what her race was, says that the party might be interested to investigate her race. But I have learned to save one letter by stating frankly that a candidate is a mulatto, or a Filipino, or a Chinese.” The year after Walker received her degree, the American Library Association decided to hold its annual meeting in Richmond, Virginia. Black librarians were allowed to attend but were seated in separate sections and were not invited to any events where meals were served. The event led to protestations, and the ALA decided to never again hold their annual meetings in segregated locations.

Back in Chicago, Walker worked on a Works Progress Administration project, at the Board of Education, and for the supervisor of the Organization of Rural Libraries in Cook County. In 1946, her husband was briefly assigned to work in Nebraska, and for the first time they lived in an area where no one knew them. Did people assume that they were white? Was this the first time that they experienced what it was like to live without personal, housing, or occupational restrictions due to their race? Their Nebraskan experience seemed to create a turning point — an opportunity.

The Walkers briefly returned to Chicago and then moved to an 80-acre dairy farm in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, in 1947. There they raised two sons while Louise worked as a children’s librarian at the local Dwight Foster Public Library. She quickly became known throughout the community, often visiting local schools to instruct children in the uses of the public library. In addition to her work, she lectured regularly at local social organizations and PTA meetings. When their eldest son, Cyrus “Mike” Michael Walker, decided to attend college at the University of Chicago, they revealed their racial heritage to him, claiming they never told the citizens of Fort Atkinson that they were white, but allowed people to assume that they were.

“My mother always said that she never passed, that she never said she was white, that she never made any reference to it,” Mike says. “I said, ‘Oh, come on. You obviously lived as white and presented yourself as white.’ And she said, ‘Well, it doesn’t matter what I did. I never did anything wrong. It was how people took it. It was up to them.’ ”

The Walkers in middle age: when they lived in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, they never told locals they were white but did not correct assumptions. Courtesy of the authors

For Mike, the revelation left him with a sense of confusion. “I had literally no idea of my own racial background,” he says. “I obviously had some questions. I occasionally met relatives. But a large part of the passing meant that we did not see relatives very often. So, I really grew up in a white community acting as white with these kinds of questions. … I spent a couple of years in Chicago sort of running after every Black person I could find saying, ‘Hey, me too, me too,’ and they would look at my perfectly white skin, blondish hair, and light brown eyes and say, ‘Yeah right, not in this lifetime.’ ”

In 1969, after Mike went to college, Walker and her husband grew discontented with the United States’ role in the Vietnam War and moved to a 167-acre sheep farm near Montreal to begin again. Some thought they were running away, but Cyrus said, “We’re leaving for a very simple moral reason: by continuing our American citizenship, we would be putting our stamp of approval on the immoral acts of our government. Since we can no longer love America, we’re leaving it.” Walker remained in Canada until her death in 2000.

Jessica Stovall ’07, who started work toward her doctorate at Stanford University last fall, previously spent more than a decade teaching at Oak Park and River Forest High School in the Chicago area — the setting of the documentary series America to Me, which premiered on the subscription streaming service Starz this past August. Justine Nagan ’00 was an executive producer of the series.

Jessica Stovall Photo: Donald Stovall

America to Me was created by Academy Award–nominated filmmaker Steve James. Filmed over the course of the 2015–16 school year, the series looks into the lives of the school’s students, teachers, and administrators as they work through racial and educational inequalities.

Stovall, a UW Chancellor’s Scholarship graduate and a Fulbright Distinguished Teacher Award recipient, starred as a subject in the documentary. In an interview with UW–Madison last summer, she said the series provides an example of what is going on in schools across America.

When asked what steps society can take to help close the racial achievement gap in the U.S., Stovall pointed out the importance of talking about race and how race has impacted lived experiences and outcomes. “We need to have some really honest conversations about what’s going on in the classroom, which is why I wanted to be part of the documentary,” she said.