As a Democrat in a state with a Republican supermajority, Arkansas State Sen. Jamie Scott must reach across the aisle when she is looking to pass legislation, and she has found an unlikely ally in her Republican colleague Sen. Breanne Davis. “Almost everything I’ve passed, I do with bipartisan support,” said Scott while in conversation with Davis at “We the People: Finding Common Purpose,” a summit hosted by the Hillary Rodham Clinton Center for Citizenship, Leadership, and Democracy at Wellesley College.
Held November 1 in the Diana Chapman Walsh Alumnae Hall auditorium on Wellesley’s campus, the summit brought together an all-star group of policymakers, artists, scholars, and faith leaders who discussed ways to foster connection and communication and to find common purpose across political and other divides. The program included a conversation between playwright, professor, and actress Anna Deavere Smith and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton ’69; a discussion featuring Hahrie Han, political scientist and 2025 MacArthur Fellow, and Troy Jackson, pastor and executive director of UNDIVIDED; a powerhouse panel of Wellesley faculty, moderated by Stacie Goddard, with Kellie Carter Jackson, Jennifer Chudy, Chipo Dendere, and Ismar Volić; and a conversation between U.S. Rep. Emily Randall ’08, of Washington’s 6th Congressional District, and journalist Arielle Mitropoulos ’19.
Nearly 400 Wellesley students, alums, faculty, and staff attended, including this year’s cohort of Clinton Fellows, who participated in the HRC Center’s summer Civic Action Lab, and hundreds of people watched the livestream of the program.
During the panel “Coming Together to Fight Discrimination,” moderated by Afiya Mbilishaka, assistant professor of Africana studies and psychology, Scott told the audience that after she heard about a coach who discriminated against a local college basketball player because of his dreadlocks, she knew she wanted to pass the CROWN (Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair) Act in Arkansas to protect young people like him. She reached out to Davis for help.
“Breanne’s a pretty blonde who’s probably never been discriminated against because of her hair,” joked Scott about the assumption she made at the time; Scott, who is Black, has heard her share of comments about her own hair. But she soon learned that wasn’t the case: When Davis first ran for office, she said, she received a lot of criticism—often from other women—about her hair being blond, or not blond enough. When Scott explained what was happening in their state, Davis was on board immediately. “She was upset like me,” said Scott. The two decided to take action.
Scott and Davis bonded over their belief that no child, teenager, or young adult should ever experience discrimination, and they worked together to get their respective caucuses to approve the bill. The CROWN Act was signed into law in Arkansas in April 2023, and since then, Davis and Scott have continued to collaborate. They have worked to pass a bill that helps postpartum mothers obtain easier access to long-acting reversible contraceptives and another that uses money from medical marijuana sales to provide universal free breakfast for kids in the state. Currently, they are working to simplify the process for parents of disabled children to access services: “We’ll keep fighting. We haven’t gotten there yet,” said Davis, nodding at Scott, “but I feel confident we’ll get there.”
Scott said that she is always on a quest to find others to “help [her] carry the light,” and that since working with Davis, she has started off each session of the Arkansas senate by setting a goal to pass a bill with someone “as far away politically [from her] as possible.” “If you get to know people, you have more in common than you think,” she said.
That sentiment was echoed by many of the speakers at the summit, who also called the attendees to action.
“We have to restore the humanity and connection to our political engagement,” said Troy Jackson, who has helped the 50,000 people who attend his megachurch in Ohio and the half a million people who stream its services online find “spaces of belonging” to work together to create “multiracial healing, solidarity, and justice.” He emphasized that “so much of our politics is filled with disdain … all people just want to be seen and respected” and said “we need to lead with curiosity, respect, and empathy.”
Han said she admired UNDIVIDED’s work to end racial harm and injustice through experiential programming designed for businesses, organizations, and churches because it didn’t just focus on people protesting and expressing outrage. “It was people grounded in their own interests, connected to each other, with their hands on organizations and levers of change,” she said. “To me that is really different than ‘I am mad, I’m going to throw myself out in the street.’ It’s like they’re negotiating differences across faith, across race, building this kind of multifaith, intergenerational coalition in the cities.”
“If you are not there to participate, democracy dies,” said Dendere, who studies the impact of migration and death on elections, during the faculty panel. “If you care about American democracy, you have to stay [in America] and stay engaged.” Kellie Carter Jackson also made this point, noting that the title of her book We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance was very intentional: “It’s we refuse. We have to do it together … it’s an all-hands-on-deck approach.”
“Politics is so much about relationships, and that includes relationships with Republicans,” said Randall, a Democrat, while speaking with Mitropoulos. She traveled to Alaska over the summer with a group of fellow representatives specifically to connect with her Republican colleagues “away from the C-SPAN cameras.” Randall noted the importance of having these conversations not as one group versus another, but as individuals: “We have to bring openness and reach for each other."
Smith and Clinton talked about the need for people from both parties to see the other as a “you” and not an “it,” and also not to fear talking to those whose beliefs differ from yours. Smith said that since the 1990s, people have been practicing “affiliation politics” as part of what she referred to as “the belongingness project.”
“We have to come out of what I call our safe houses of identity,” continued Smith. “We come to education thinking we have to be smart, but I think we should come to education with our questions, with a profound respect for the unknown, and to know we have the opportunity to make something new.”
Smith asked Clinton to talk about her 1969 commencement speech. “I stayed up all night [editing it] because my classmates all had things they wanted to add,” said Clinton, and at 4 or 5 a.m., she even inserted a poem a classmate had written. “I felt like I was their voice more than my own … I was trying to be the ‘we.’”
“Places like this,” said Smith, gesturing toward the walls of Alumnae Hall, “are small enough and intimate enough to take some chances. And truly, leadership—real leadership—has to come out of Wellesley College.”
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Members of the class of 2029 who are interested in being 2026–27 Clinton Fellows can visit the Clinton Fellows Program page or the Hillary Rodham Clinton Center, which is part of the Wagner Centers for Wellesley in the World, for more information. Applications will be open February 1, 2026.