Making All Lives Count

Underneath my name, on my website, I have a tagline that reads, "Making All Lives Count." Those words hold powerful meaning for me. They are an adaptation of a phrase ("make your life count for us") that I heard in my mind, repeated by the voices of the thousands of souls who had gone through the Elmina slave castle in Ghana, and the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau. Though my visits to both places were separated by nearly thirty years (Elmina in 1968, Dachau in 1996) the experience I had was hauntingly similar. I've written about hearing these voices in several books, most recently in Think Black. I left both places feeling that whatever I did in my life, I needed to make it count for those who had gone and sacrificed before me; hence, the phrase, "making all lives count."