When Perabo learned about that August 2017 march, it was already underway. Soon, she was on a train from her home in New York to D.C.; a few of the march’s organizers picked her up in Virginia the next morning. “It was a revealing aspect of a person to come down on a whim and basically defer to these folks who she didn’t know, and roll with the punches, and be down for whatever it took,” said Kumar Rao, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Popular Democracy and one of the organizers who brought Perabo to the march that day. Rao can be wary of celebrity activists; he says the stereotype of a famous person who wants to walk at the front, give a speech, and appear in every photo has some basis in reality. At the march against white supremacy, that wasn’t an option. White people, including Perabo, were asked to walk toward the back, behind marchers of color. “Piper was very much respectful of that and understood intuitively why that made sense,” Rao said.

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