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pacific northwest

When Cherie Buckner-Webb was 5 or 6 years old, someone burned a cross in the front yard of her Boise home.

Buckner-Webb and her family had every reason to leave the neighborhood, or even Idaho, after that. Instead, her mother turned an act of bigotry into a powerful teachable moment.

"My father would've liked to taken it and hidden it away," Buckner-Webb says, "and my mom was saying 'Put it on the front porch. We've been living here a year in this neighborhood, and they are late.'"

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