Anya Cordell used to collect decorative boxes. She had hundreds all around her house and felt compelled to buy more.

Cordell doesn’t buy boxes anymore; now they serve as more of a metaphor for her work. She has dedicated herself to the task of not putting people into neat little boxes.

The Evanston human rights activist was recently awarded the Spirit of Anne Frank Award by the Anne Frank Center USA. The Center is a New York-based organization connected to the Anne Frank House that uses Anne’s diary and spirit to "advance her legacy, to educate young people and communities about the consequences of intolerance, racism and discrimination and to inspire the next generation to build a world based on mutual respect," according to its literature.

That describes Cordell’s work precisely.

Not only are her lectures, workshops and programs focused on identifying and erasing discrimination based on race, religion, ethnicity, gender and age, she has created a new name for an old injustice: appearance-ism.

It’s all part of her mission to prevent the designation of any person or group as "other." In pursuit of that mission, she has brought together an Evanston neighborhood after the murder of one of its own, Ricky Byrdsong, by a white supremacist; fought for and befriended the families of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims who were victims of hate crimes; written and published a clever two-sided book designed to challenge perceptions about race; and offered fresh insights on these topics to audiences from Skokie to South Africa.

The award is fitting in another way as well. "An important element of the work I’m doing is my being Jewish," she says. "I have to do this work to stand up against any kind of oppression. Jews should know as well as anybody else in the world why propaganda matters."

And she has done it all while facing health challenges of her own that at point left her temporarily legally blind.

The roots of her philosophy can be traced back in a circuitous way to her own upbringing, the soft-spoken but earnest Cordell says in a recent interview. She grew up in Elmwood Park in a Reform Jewish family that "was concerned with fashion and beauty. I very much bought into that. It was the way to be a good girl, to do what my family wanted me to do," she says.

"The culture plays a big part – it did in those days (Cordell is in her 50s) and it is many times multiplied now. At 17, I was poring over Vogue, putting on individual false eyelashes to go to high school, aspiring to be the next Twiggy," the stick-thin supermodel of the ’60s, she says.

When she read Anne Frank’s diary, she felt she had found a kindred spirit. "She was very concerned about her own looks, very wrapped up in the film stars of the day," she says. "She had clippings on the wall of film stars. Something about that really resonated with me. In that era, the film stars were kind of the equivalent of supermodels when I was growing up."

Something else struck her about the diary. "For a very long time after I read the book, I asked myself if I would ever have had the courage of the people who supported the family. They didn’t need to do any of that. They put their lives at risk, and it wasn’t their group that was under attack. That was a really core question I asked myself many times," she says.

When Miep Gies, one of the Dutch citizens who was instrumental in helping the Frank family while they were in hiding, died earlier this year at 100, Cordell says, she was reminded again of how much the story of the Franks’ supporters inspired her.

Meanwhile, the teenage Cordell was "busy with my hair, fashion, makeup, growing up. I was a good student and involved in other activities, but in the background was always the feeling that a huge piece of my value and worth was connected to whether I could be beautiful and fashionable enough. I slowly came to realize that was taking up a tremendous amount of my time, energy and resources."

The revelation didn’t mean that she decided to stop bathing and wear nothing but muumuus and sandals, she explains. (Cordell herself, a slight woman with cropped hair and a youthful face, would look appropriate in any crowd.)

"It wasn’t that people shouldn’t want to look nice. That is perfectly normal and appropriate," she says. "I’m not saying don’t take a shower for a week. We have to look appropriate, but when it gets taken to an extreme – you’re starving yourself to death or having endless plastic surgeries or you are bankrupting yourself by wearing the latest fashion" you’re a victim of appearance-ism.

She also discovered that "we are not just aspiring to make ourselves look good, we are out in the world making judgments about other people, and others are making judgments about us on the basis of our appearance. As I got older, I came to realize how almost universally wrong I am when I make those snap judgements of people based on appearance. I don’t want people judging me on that basis."

In college, Cordell trained to become a teacher and spent several years as a substitute when she found teaching jobs scare in the mid-’70s. With her husband, a scientist who is now retired from his teaching position at the University of Illinois (the couple has a grown daughter), she traveled to many countries, "seeing the world from many perspectives and meeting diverse people in their homes," she says.

But the issues she had begun thinking about earlier continued to bother her.

"As I became a young adult, it was a gradual process of dealing with this issue of beauty, fashion, appearance," she says. "Even the people who are really beautiful in our culture struggle around this issue. They are sometimes treated as objects and not seen as full-fledged human beings. They get put up on a pedestal, then torn down. Everybody is sort of involved in this issue, and I thought we needed a word. I thought the right word was appearance-ism."

As soon as she says the word to anyone, "everybody understands what it means. We all get it," she says. "The word needs to exist."

But Cordell went deeper. Soon she began to make connections between appearance and race. "The two intertwine," she says. "The way racism plays out in our culture is very linked to appearance-ism. With racism, people look at one another and make snap judgments based on appearance, what box the other person belongs in, what they associate with that stereotype."

It was around this time that Cordell experienced a revelation. She had joined an Evanston-based organization called Healing Racism and was undergoing a three-year program that she describes as "sort of peeling your own personal onion, (discovering) what we’ve ingested, accepted about ourselves, accepted as truth."

One night when the space the group usually met in was under renovation, they used Cordell’s living room instead, complete with her many collectible decorative boxes.

"A young black man looked around my house and said, why would you spend money on things that have no utility, like these little boxes? I don’t understand," she relates.

"After the program was over that night, I sort of said to myself, what is the deal with all these boxes? What are they good for? I opened up every box and left them open and went to bed, very agitated at the thought that they were all open."

As she fell asleep, thinking about her own boxes and the "boxes" we so often put other people into, the idea for a book and its design "just totally popped into my head," she says.

The eventual book was "Race: An Open and Shut Case," a slim double-sided volume that focuses on two families, the "Shuts" and the "Opens." The Shut family rejects all their babies because they aren’t like them; the Opens embrace each improbable child.

Cordell says she intended for the book to address "what is race, how many races are there, and the experience of what it means to be a family." The two families come to opposite conclusions on these questions and so might the reader, depending on what side he or she reads first. The stories meet in the middle and the reader is asked to turn the book over and start again, because "every story has another side."

For adults, Cordell says, the book "compels you to re-evaluate and think deeper about these questions." For children, "it’s a place to start the conversation." She has recently had the book reprinted, along with a guide to it and a discussion of how she came to write it, and distributes both when she speaks to schools, organizations and faith communities.

The notion of putting people in pigeonholes based on their race or appearance, she says, "was the reason I was so obsessed by the boxes. After I wrote the book, I still have the boxes but I never bought another one, I never felt the compulsion to any more. I think I got my answer. I found out what those boxes were good for."

Eventually, events would strengthen Cordell’s perceptions and turn her activism in new directions.

In July 1999, Benjamin Smith, a white supremacist, shot at Orthodox Jews in West Rogers Park walking home from synagogue on a Friday night, then drove to Skokie, where he shot and killed Ricky Byrdsong, a former Northwestern University basketball coach and an African American, as Byrdsong and his son walked down the street near his home. Byrdsong lived on the same block as Cordell and was murdered almost in front of her house.

Smith later shot at a number of other people, all belonging to minorities, and killed a Korean student before he shot himself in the head as police were closing in on him.

The shocking crimes galvanized Cordell and she organized nightly walks in her neighborhood.

"Every night at eight, people would meet and we would walk together," she says. "Soon people were coming from outlying suburbs. Sometimes the Byrdsong family came. It was like having a town hall meeting every night of the week. It created and forged relationships."

The walks went on for four months, until the weather turned too cold. Then Cordell began organizing real town hall meetings where participants talked about race and related issues. She would tell audiences that "we find ourselves making categories, labels, stereotypes. How do we help ourselves to reevaluate that, to look at old issues with fresh eyes?"

Then came Sept. 11, 2001, and soon Cordell found herself with a new cause that was related to the others.

"After the initial shock (of 9/11), I began to hear a little about various types of assaults being directed toward Muslims, Arabs, Sikhs, Hindus," she says. "There was little of it in the mainstream media, but it was a riveting story to me."

She began researching and found "kids being teased and bullied in schools, women wearing hijabs (head coverings devout Muslim women wear) having their scarves yanked off, being sideswiped in parking lots, businesses being vandalized. There were also murders."

One well-publicized tragedy occurred on Sept. 15, when a Sikh service station owner was killed in Mesa, Ariz. (Sikhs belong to a Hindu religious sect.) His killer had been drinking in a bar before the attack and bragged about his intention to "kill the ragheads."

"Other men were murdered that day around the country," Cordell says. "Almost nobody knew their names." But Cordell kept a list, and soon she felt compelled to call a gas station in Texas where an Indian man, Vasudev Patel, had been killed in his station by a Dallas stonecutter on a shooting spree similar to Smith’s.

"I called his wife and said, I wanted to tell you how sorry I am," Cordell relates. "She started to cry, I started to cry and we stayed on the phone for 40 minutes" as the woman, Alka Patel, continued to wait on customers at the gas station. "That forged an incredible friendship," Cordell says.

She later learned that the murdered man had been a well-liked, extraordinarily generous person who, if a customer told him he didn’t have the money to pay for his gas, would let him drive away without paying, not just once but many times.

Cordell also came in contact with the family of Balbir Singh Sodhi, the Sikh man murdered after Sept. 11, and was invited by Arizona’s large Sikh community to speak at his one-year memorial. She and her family stayed at his brother’s house at the invitation of his wife, pulling in, with trepidation, after midnight due to flight delays.

"They were so welcoming," she says. "Within 10 minutes we felt like long-lost relatives. I had never met a Sikh before, and I felt so completely comfortable and at home."

Soon Cordell was contacting media outlets she hoped would tell the story of these forgotten victims of Sept. 11 and lobbying the Red Cross for help for their families. She founded an organization, the Campaign for Collateral Compassion, to raise awareness of these issues and help her with her mission.

Because these victims weren’t officially categorized as Sept. 11-related deaths, none of their families qualified for money either from the government or private charities, she explains. She contacted many charities and politicians and found that for the most part, their responses "ranged from indifferent to hostile."

Eventually she was able to claim a few small victories, such as a bill passed by the House of Representatives granting permanent U.S. residence to the wife and children of one murder victim who had been preparing for U.S. citizenship when he was killed. The government had threatened his family with deportation.

"Each new experience galvanized me to a deeper degree," she says. "I had to tell these stories and let other people know."

Anti-Muslim rhetoric, she found, was especially rampant, as evidenced in a billboard that advertised "Safest Restaurant on Earth: No Muslims Inside" and a bumper sticker calling on everyone to "play cowboys and Muslims." Now she uses these and similar images in the workshops and programs she leads.

In them she tries to get across the message that "separation and misinformation are what keep the stereotypes alive. When you have experiences like being a house guest in a Sikh family – when you get into each other’s lives or living rooms, all of that misinformation gets corrected."

At the height of anti-Muslim sentiment in the country, she wanted others to see that "the vast majority of Muslims are like all people, concerned with their homes, their children’s education, the holidays. We’re all doing the same things. A very few people are doing horrible things, and sometimes they are white guys in blue jeans like Benjamin Smith and (Oklahoma City bomber) Timothy McVeigh, but we’re not smearing every white guy in blue jeans."

She had an "ah ha" moment when, after giving a program in a school, a young boy came up to her. "He said, ‘I’m Muslim, but nobody here knows it,’" she relates.

"That reminded me of Anne Frank," she says. "Like it wasn’t safe to be Jewish in the Holocaust, it wasn’t safe to be black in this country at different times and places. It isn’t a crime to be born into a particular religion. It’s not a crime to be born a Muslim, or the color, shape or size you are."

The post-Sept. 11 hate crimes "are not old stories. They’re not finished," she says, noting that an Indian man was beaten recently in New Jersey based on his ethnicity.

As Cordell continued to work on these issues, she faced some health challenges of her own, including diabetes and cataracts that left her legally blind for a time. (Successful surgery has given her back her vision.)

Because of those challenges, she says, "I had to expand and think about how this affects people who are aging or people who have had surgery or people with eating disorders. There is an endless audience who seems to appreciate" the message she brings.

Receiving the Anne Frank Award validated that message and made her more determined than ever to get it out to as many people as possible. Maureen McNeil, director of education at the Anne Frank Center USA, says that much about Cordell’s story resonates with Anne’s interior life.

"Anne really became creatively interested through her father’s photography," McNeil says. "She loved looking at pictures of herself – she had an interior world and an exterior world and they really didn’t match. She ended up writing a lot about that. The photos actually got her wanting to be a film star before the family went into hiding."

The award also honors "the spirit of Anne, that people are still good at heart," she says. "She really believed in developing her own character, becoming the best person she could even if she were going to have a short life. She was a role model for a lot of lessons on empathy, how we see ourselves, how others are treated. The Spirit of Anne Frank Award really promotes this and keeps Anne Frank’s spirit alive."

Cordell, meanwhile, now offers a full complement of programs, lectures and workshops with titles like "Appearances Are Misleading" (designed for grades 5-12), "Worthy ‘As Is,’" "Standing Up for the Other," "Finding Your Voice" and "Why is a Jewish Woman Speaking on Behalf of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims?"

Other programs are directed toward those who are facing changes in appearance due to medical procedures or aging. Her work has been featured on Chicago Public Radio, ABC-TV and a number of local and national publications. (Check out her Web site, www.Appearance-ism.com for more information.)

The message she tries to get across in all of them, she says, is that "everybody can agree that there is an injustice in what my value really is and the way I’m perceived and treated. Everyone knows how it feels to be judged on the basis of appearance, or race, age, disability, religious garb – the boxes we put people into. We learn that early on – the hero and heroine of movies are beautiful, the villain is ugly. We learn to make these judgments and we keep making them. I keep making them. That’s how deep it is."

So deep, in fact, that it takes an Anya Cordell to dig it up by the roots.