SAN FRANCISCO – These eight women and their families fought in a war known as America’s Civil Rights Movement. Over the weekend, they gathered, perhaps for the last time, as former President Bill Clinton and others cheered their courage and their grace.
“Throughout the course of their lives, these women have proved that love and compassion are better than bitterness and hatred,” Clinton said in a videotaped message. “They have led with courage, strength, dignity and grace to help build an America that more closely lives up to our founding ideals of equality and justice for all. And through their actions and their example, they have inspired millions of people, including me.”
He wished four of the women happy birthdays: Minnijean Brown Trickey and Elizabeth Eckford, two of the Little Rock Nine who integrated Central High School in 1957; Reena Evers-Everette, whose father, Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers, was assassinated in Jackson in 1963; and Lisa McNair, whose sister, Denise, was among the four girls whose lives were stolen by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing.
Lisa McNair, Minnijean Brown Trickey, Elizabeth Eckford and Reena Evers-Everette celebrated their birthdays Oct. 17, 2026, in San Francisco at a Sojourn Project gathering for the women. Credit: Jerry Mitchell/Mississippi Today
“To the four of you celebrating your birthdays, I thank you for the life you have lived and continue to live,” Clinton told them. “We’re all better off because of you.”
The other women gathered at the event, sponsored by the Sojourn Project, included: Kim McNair, the other sister of Denise McNair; Bettie Dahmer, whose father, voting rights activist Vernon Dahmer Sr., died defending their family from a Klan attack in Hattiesburg in 1966; the Rev. Gwen Webb, who took part in the 1963 Children’s March; and Angela Lewis, whose father James Chaney was among the three civil rights workers killed by Klansmen in Neshoba County in 1964.
Salute from San Francisco officials
Bettie Dahmer, the daughter of Vernon Dahmer Sr., is honored by the city of San Francisco on Friday, Oct. 16, 2026. Credit: Jerry Mitchell/Mississippi Today
On Friday, the city of San Francisco, county supervisors and the sheriff’s office honored these women.
“Your courage changed history,” Mayor Daniel Lurie told them. “It changed the course of history, and your example continues to inspire generations and generations. I know we still have a whole lot of work to do, but your example will help guide us forward.”
Sheriff Paul M. Miyamoto praised the women.
“We know their names, the events and some of the photographs, but we don’t know the people,” he said. “You’ve helped change our history by being part of our history.”
The history of the Civil Rights Movement includes some in law enforcement “who failed to protect people at that time, who failed to protect you in our community, and, in some cases, were responsible for the very injustices that people experienced during this time,” Miyamoto said. “That’s not an easy part of our history to confront, but it’s one that we have to accept and understand and move on from.”
More than 20 Klansmen, including some Mississippi law enforcement officers, killed three civil rights workers, Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, on the first day of summer in 1964 and buried their bodies 15 feet down in an earthen dam.
Three years later, seven Klansmen were convicted of federal conspiracy charges, including a deputy sheriff. In 2005, a Neshoba County jury convicted Edgar Ray Killen of orchestrating the killings of the trio. He was sentenced to 60 years in prison, where he died.
Miyamoto has taken some of his deputies on the Sojourn trip, walking across some of the same ground that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once walked.
“He’s always been, from birth, an influence on my life,” Miyamoto said. “It meant something very special to me as a history major and also sharing Martin Luther King’s birthday.”
He said it’s important for young people and for those in law enforcement “to learn together, to remember the past and make sure that it’s our responsibility to make sure nothing comes close to repeating it again.”
District Attorney Brooke Jenkins praised Trickey and Eckford for “stepping up at that time to make that sacrifice. You were so strong and brave.”
San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins speaks to the eight women honored at a City Hall Ceremony on Friday, Oct. 16, 2026. Credit: Jerry Mitchell/Mississipi Today
She told Evers-Everette, who now heads the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Institute, ”Your father died doing the work to give us the chance to be here, to give people like me the chance to serve in these positions. Thank you.”
In 1994, his killer, Byron De La Beckwith, was finally convicted of murder. Beckwith was sentenced to life in prison, where he died.
Through photos of the children marching in Birmingham or the Black students entering school in Little Rock amid a screaming mob, “we see strength, and we see beauty,” Jenkins said, “but what nobody wants to talk about are their scars.”
She said she hopes “we can set aside all the many differences that so many of us have and make sure we continue to work together to maintain their legacy — people who lost parents, who lost siblings, who lost so much of themselves to give us the chance to just go to school together.”
‘Women Who Dared, Women Who Cared: Warriors of the Civil Rights Movement’
She noted the upcoming elections in November. “I’m not telling you how to vote,” she said, “but you have to vote because we have multiple people who lost their fathers trying to make sure we had the right to do so.”
Reena Evers-Everette and Elizabeth Eckford listen as the city of San Francisco honors them on Friday, Oct 16, 2026. Angela Lewis is sitting to the left behind them. Credit: Audra Gray
In 2023, Jenkins took her first of four Sojourn’s trips to civil rights sites in the South, where she met these women and visited landmarks where history was made. Through these trips, “we gain a deeper understanding of the courage it took, and continues to take, to change our country for the better,” she said. “These lessons matter.”
On Saturday, Sojourn celebrated these “Warriors of the Civil Rights Movement” with songs, speeches and birthday cakes with photos of the women.
Jenkins pointed toward the historic photos of the women and their families. She told them that she keeps a photograph of the four Dahmer sons dressed in military uniforms, standing over the rubble of what had been their home.
“Vernon Dahmer Sr. spent his life and lost his life over voting rights, over making sure that we could vote,” she said. A part of Medgar Evers’ work “was making sure that Blacks got the right to vote,” she said. “James Chaney and the others lost their lives to give us the right to vote.”
There is no more critical time than now, she said. “Their spirits are calling upon us to act, or else we will see this time again.”
Jenkins said when she walked inside the 16th Street Baptist Church, where the bomb killed four girls and injured dozens of others, “I had no idea how I would feel.”
But after hearing the McNair family speak, “I was overcome with emotion, not just because of their story, but because I, too, had buried my child,” she said. “When you think about losing your baby because of hate, there’s nothing worse.”
What led her to the path of becoming a prosecutor was the loss of her son, she said. “We have to look at these experiences of loss and of grief and of trauma, and use it as our purpose to act. Find the purpose out of our pain.”
When she thinks of Eckford and Trickey, she thinks of her grandmother, who graduated from a segregated high school in Texas and what it meant for her younger siblings to attend an integrated high school, she said. “It was because of your sacrifice that they had that opportunity.”
She praised Webb, who as a teenager faced the dogs and firehoses of Birmingham police to march for justice, only to later become one of the first Black police officers.
“She said, ‘I won’t be turned away by my experience,’” Jenkins said. “I’m going to come into this institution and make it change.”
Sojourn’s founder, Jeff Steinberg, said his nonprofit organization aims to amplify stories that people should know beyond King and Malcolm X — people such as Dahmer, Medgar Evers and the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, who was repeatedly beaten for his activism in Birmingham and whose home was blown up by Klansmen.
“They live up to America’s ideals,” Steinberg said. “They set the standard of what we all should aspire to be.”
Lewis said if people want the world to change, they need to become part of that change. “It has to start with us,” she said. “We all want to see things change in a major way, but the way things change is in small amounts over time.”
When it comes to voting, “a lot of people think that their vote doesn’t count, but it does count,” Lewis said. “It begins with us being responsible by voting, because we have to make sure that we have a say in how this country is being run.”
Eckford said she tells “young people today to use your voice, ’cause if you don’t use your voice, somebody else is speaking for you.”
