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To console does not mean to take away the pain but rather to be there and say, “You are not alone, I am with you. Together we can carry the burden. Don’t be afraid. I am here.” That is consolation. We all need to give it as well as to receive it.

—Henri Nouwen Turning Mourning into a Movement

They radiated strength. They were proud women who had seen a lot, cried a lot, and prayed a lot. I walked around the room, introducing myself one by one to the dozen mothers who had come from all over the country. I listened to their stories and took in their quiet, fierce dignity.

It was November 2015. We were in the homey Sweet Maple Cafe on Chicago’s West Side. Each of the mothers around the table had lost children to gun violence or in encounters with police officers. They had come to talk about what happened to their kids and to see if I would do something about it—or if I was just another politician after their votes.

Later, some of these mothers would form a traveling sisterhood: the Mothers of the Movement. They told their stories in churches and community centers and onstage at the Democratic National Convention. Their courage, their generosity of spirit, their refusal to give up—all of it inspired and motivated me.

Thanks in part to the Mothers’ example, I ended up speaking frequently and forcefully throughout the campaign about gun violence, racial justice, police reform, and mass incarceration. These are complicated issues, substantively and politically, but listening to the Mothers’ stories and watching the steady drumbeat of mass shootings and deadly police incidents that continued throughout 2015 and 2016 convinced me that they were too important to ignore. So I made criminal justice reform a priority with my very first policy speech, stressing the need for communities to respect the police who protect them and for the police to respect the people they serve. I also criticized the powerful National Rifle Association for its extreme opposition to commonsense gun safety measures. Going after the NRA is dangerous for candidates, but I felt compelled to speak out on behalf of the dead and injured victims of gun homicides, accidents, and suicides. If I had won, we could have made progress toward keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and domestic abusers and making sure fewer parents have to bury their children the way the Mothers of the Movement did. My profound disappointment that I couldn’t deliver that outcome will never go away.

The Mothers’ stories, and the stories of others who lost loved ones to gun violence, deserve to be told and heard. We’ve got to keep saying their names. In that first meeting in Chicago, there was no press and no audience—just us. I was accompanied by my senior policy advisor Maya Harris and director of African American Outreach LaDavia Drane.

Sybrina Fulton, whose unarmed seventeen-year-old son Trayvon Martin was shot and killed outside a convenience store near Orlando, Florida, in 2012, kicked things off. “We’re just regular moms,” she said. “We don’t want to be community activists, we don’t want to be the mothers of senseless gun violence, we don’t want to be in this position—we were forced into this position. None of us would have signed up for this.”

Trayvon was killed while wearing a hooded sweatshirt and taking a walk to buy some Skittles candy at the corner store. Jordan Davis was shot in Jacksonville, Florida, while listening to music in a car that a white man thought was too loud and too “thug.” Twelve-year-old Tamir Rice was playing in a Cleveland park with a toy gun when he was shot by a police officer. Eric Garner was choked to death by an officer after selling loose cigarettes on a Staten Island street. Some of the stories were about criminal gun violence; others, excessive force by police officers. These issues require different policy solutions and different political responses. But the common theme that ran through all the stories was race. And the anguish all these mothers felt was the same—anguish that no mother, no parent, should have to bear.

Jordan’s mother, Lucia McBath, remembers comforting her son after they heard about Trayvon’s murder on the news. Jordan didn’t know Trayvon. They lived in different parts of Florida. But the news hit him hard. “Mom, how did this happen to Trayvon? He wasn’t doing anything wrong,” he asked. Lucia didn’t have a good answer. Nine months later, Jordan was dead as well. Now Travyon’s and Jordan’s moms were sitting at the same table.

“We lay in bed, and on our bad nights, our dark nights, we stare at the ceiling and cry,” Gwen Carr told me. She’s the mother of Eric Garner. “We replay in our heads over and over what happened to our children.”

Hadiya Pendleton was a fifteen-year-old honor student when she was randomly shot in a Chicago park. Just a week before, she had performed with her high school band at President Obama’s second inauguration in Washington. “There are no words for what we go through every day just waking up,” her mother, Cleo, told me. “I didn’t have a voice after Hadiya passed. For like three or four days, the only thing I could do was open my eyes and scream, literally at the top of my lungs.”

My throat tightened as I listened to the Mothers tell these stories, watching them remain composed despite the shattering pain behind their words. The writer Elizabeth Stone says that having a child is like deciding to have your heart go walking around outside your body. The thought of something happening to your kid is unimaginable to any parent. These mothers had lived that nightmare.

They also faced different, deeper fears that I never had to think about. My daughter and grandchildren are white. They won’t know what it’s like to be watched with suspicion when they play in the park or enter a store. People won’t lock their car doors when they walk by. Police officers won’t pull them over for driving in the “wrong” neighborhood. Gangs aren’t likely to settle their feuds on the streets where they walk to school.

“As people of color, we feel the greatest impact of this injustice, of this inhumane treatment,” Gwen Carr said. “Some people say that we’re racist because we say ‘Black lives matter.’ We know that all lives matter, but we need people to understand that black lives matter also. So treat us as such. Don’t just treat us like common animals. We’re not. We’re American citizens, and we deserve fair treatment.”

Treating everyone with care and respect is especially important for the men and women charged with keeping us all safe. I feel strongly about this: the vast majority of police officers are honorable, brave public servants who put their lives on the line every day to protect others. As a Senator, I spent years fighting for first responders who served at Ground Zero and later suffered lasting health effects. They paid a terrible price for serving the rest of us. I also have the unique experience of being guarded around the clock for more than twenty-five years by highly trained men and women committed to take a bullet for me if a threat ever came. If that doesn’t teach you to respect the courage and professionalism of law enforcement, nothing will. The officers I’ve known have been proud of their integrity, disgusted by the use of excessive force, and eager to find new and better ways to do their jobs. Every time a police officer falls in the line of duty—something that happens with sickening frequency—it’s a reminder of how much we owe them and their families.

Throughout the campaign, I had many meetings and discussions with law enforcement members to hear their views about what we could do better. In August 2016 I met with a group of retired and current police chiefs from across the country, including Bill Bratton from New York, Charlie Beck from Los Angeles, and Chuck Ramsey from Philadelphia. They stressed the importance of building relationships between their officers and the communities they serve. They also stressed that part of what we owe our officers is honesty and a willingness to confront hard truths.

One hard truth we all have to face is that we all have implicit biases. I have them, you have them, and police officers have them: deeply ingrained thoughts that can lead us to think “Gun!” when a black man reaches for his wallet. Acknowledging this during the campaign may have cost me the support of some police officers and organizations, who seemed to think my concern for dead children and other victims showed a presumption of wrongdoing by police. That stung. But I was grateful for the support of other law enforcement officers who wanted to rebuild bonds of trust that would make them and all of us safe and who thought I was the best candidate to make that happen. Dallas Sheriff Lupe Valdez said at the Democratic National Convention, “We put on our badges every day to serve and protect, not to hate and discriminate.” She and other officers believe, as I do, that we can work together to improve policing without vilifying the men and women who put their lives on the line to do it.

As a candidate, I worked with civil rights advocates and law enforcement leaders to develop solutions that would help, from body cameras to new training guidelines for de-escalating tense situations. I also spoke often about the importance of trying harder to walk in one another’s shoes. That means police officers and all of us doing everything we can to understand the effects of systemic racism that young black and Latino men and women face every day, and how they are made to feel like their lives are disposable. It also means imagining what it’s like to be a police officer, kissing his or her kids and spouse good-bye every day and heading off to do a dangerous but necessary job.

This kind of empathy is hard to come by. The divisions in our country run deep. As Maria Hamilton said to me, “It’s been like that for five hundred years, Hillary. People just haven’t been talking about it.” Her unarmed son Dontre was killed in 2014, shot more than a dozen times by a police officer in Milwaukee after a scuffle in a public park, where he had fallen asleep on a bench. Her words were a reminder that for these mothers and generations of black parents before them, the killing and mistreatment of young black men and women was tragic but not shocking. This has been the reality of life in America for a long time. But we can’t accept it as our inevitable future.

Maria’s words pointed to the complex relationship between race and gun violence. It is not a coincidence that it is the leading cause of death for young black men, outstripping the next nine causes of death combined. That is the result of decades of policy choices, neglect, underinvestment, gangs and thugs, and adversarial policing in communities of color. That said, it’s a mistake to think that gun violence is a problem just for black people or poor people or only in cities. Gun violence touches every class, color, and community, with thirty-three thousand people dying from guns each year—an average of ninety a day. That’s a particularly devastating fact because gun violence is largely preventable. Other developed nations don’t have this problem. They have commonsense laws to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people. Those laws work. They save lives. The United States has made a cruel choice as a country not to take simple steps that would help prevent—or at least lessen—this epidemic.

The Mothers know this all too well. Consider the story of Annette Nance-Holt. She worked hard to rise through the ranks of the Chicago Fire Department, becoming a battalion chief. She and her ex-husband, Ron, a Chicago police commander, did everything they could to give their son, Blair, a safe, comfortable, middle-class life. They taught him to be generous and humble, and to feel grateful for all he had. By the time he was sixteen, Blair was a kind, hardworking, music-loving high school student on the honor roll. He was planning to go to college to study business, the first step to accomplishing his dream of being in the music industry.

Even though Annette and Ron devoted their lives to keeping their city safe, in the end, they couldn’t protect their beloved child. One day in 2007, Blair was riding a public bus from school to his grandparents’ store, where he sometimes helped out. A young gang member opened fire on a group of teenagers, aiming for someone in a rival gang. A friend sitting next to Blair jumped up to run to the back of the bus, but Blair pushed her back into the seat. He saved her life, but was killed himself.

All the mothers around the table with me that day in Chicago had stories like that. And they each had decided to do whatever she could to protect other children from suffering the fate of their own. They were focused intensely on curbing gun violence, reforming policing, and ensuring accountability for these deaths. Sybrina Fulton founded the Trayvon Martin Foundation to support families and to advocate for gun safety reforms. Geneva Reed-Veal, whose twenty-eight-year-old daughter, Sandra Bland, died after being jailed for a minor traffic violation, redoubled her community work through her church. All of the mothers were discovering that their stories and moral authority could make them powerful public advocates. As Cleo Pendleton put it, “When I found my voice, I couldn’t shut up.”

But progress was far too slow. They were understandably frustrated by how hard it was to even get a hearing from local authorities and the U.S. Justice Department, let alone action. Too many of them had been brushed off or insulted, and even attacked in the media. Sybrina and her ex-husband had to listen to their son’s killer tell the press they “didn’t raise their son right” and later make a small fortune auctioning off the gun that killed Trayvon.

“We need better laws,” Gwen Carr told me. “If there’s a crime, there should be accountability, whether you wear blue jeans, a blue business suit, or a blue uniform. We need accountability across the board, and we’re not getting that.”

The others agreed, and they clearly weren’t sure I’d turn out to be any different from the other politicians who’d already let them down. Still, they had accepted my invitation to this meeting in Chicago and were generous with sharing their stories. Now they were waiting to see what I’d do.

Lezley McSpadden was direct with me. Her eighteen-year-old son, Michael Brown, was shot and killed in 2014 by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. “Are we going to see change?” Lezley asked. “Once again we’re around a table, we’re pouring our hearts out, we’re getting emotional, we tell you what we feel—but are we going to see any change? Are we going to see some action?”