They will come by the tens of thousands. They will be young and old, women and men. They will be of all races, clothed in many colors. But mostly they will be women and they will be wearing pink. In what has become an annual rite of spring, on June 2 they will be running in the Race for the Cure for breast cancer, starting on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., And those racers will save lives.

Marking its 25th anniversary this year, the Susan G. Komen Foundation, which cooked up the idea of races to raise money in the fight against breast cancer, grew out of a promise from one sister to another. As Susan Komen lay dying, her sister Nancy Brinker vowed to work to find a cure for this killer of more than 40,000 American women every year. She hasn’t succeeded yet but, along with many other cancer-battling groups around the country, the Race for the Cure proves that grassroots advocacy works.

Cokie first started advocating against breast cancer one wintry day in January 1992, when she went to the funerals of two friends. Both women in the prime of life, senselessly deprived of decades with their husbands and children, never meeting their grandchildren, decades when they could have continued making significant contributions to the community. The statistics were startling then as they are now, one in eight women can expect to contract breast cancer over the course of a lifetime.