Board of Directors
The Sojourn Board is strongly committed to expansion of the program while maintaining the integrity of the curriculum so that the program is always proactive in addressing historical instances of violence, inequity and injustice, and engages students in those lessons toward the accomplishment of societal change.
Myrlie Evers-Williams
Ms. Evers-Williams is an American activist and the widow of acclaimed civil rights leader, Medgar Evers, whose life was taken during the Movement in 1963. Following his death, Ms. Evers-Williams relocated with her three children to California where she graduated from Pomona College in California with a degree in sociology. She served as Director of Consumer Affairs for Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) and was the first African-American woman appointed to serve as Commissioner on the Los Angeles Board of Public Works. She became the first full-time Chairman of the NAACP, serving from 1995-1998 and is credited with spearheading the operations that restored the association to its original status as the premier civil rights organization in America. She has authored two books: For Us, the Living (1967) and Watch Me Fly: What I learned On the Way to Becoming the Woman I was Meant to Be (1999).
Christopher D. O’Sullivan, Ph.D.
Dr. O’Sullivan teaches history at the University of San Francisco. He is the author of several books, including Colin Powell: American Power and Intervention from Vietnam to Iraq (Biographies in American Foreign Policy, Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2009) and The United Nations: A Concise History (The Anvil Series, Krieger Publishing Company, 2005, 2009). His book, Sumner Welles: Postwar Planning and the Quest for a New World Order (Columbia University Press, 2008) won the American Historical Association’s Gutenberg Prize and was recognized as Humanities Book Selection by the Council of Learned Societies for 2008-2009. He is a fellow at the Center for International Studies at the London School of Economics and a former Fulbright Professor of American Diplomacy at the University of Jordan. In 2005 he gave the keynote address at the United Nations official 60th Anniversary event, and he has lectured at numerous universities and institutes including UC Berkeley, Stanford, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, the University of Ulster, and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, as well as in Britain, Bosnia, Japan, and Iran.
C. Duane Dauner
Mr. Dauner is President and Chief Executive Officer of the California Hospital Association. He has spent the past forty-four years providing leadership and vision to influencing and shaping healthcare policy in California and throughout the nation. His vigilant commitment to an optimally healthy society with adequate health care is manifest in his legislative advocacy in the areas of health reform, access to care, malpractice, tobacco tax initiative, and guidelines and standards for hospitals’ inpatient and outpatient services. He has held countless appointments to college and healthcare organizations including the Board of Trustees of the American Hospital Association and Chairman of the American Hospital Association Council on Federal Relations and its Political Action Committee.
Samuel Johnson, Jr., (founding Board Member)
Mr. Johnson is a Senior Associate with the ELS (Education Leadership Search) Group providing educational consulting nationwide. He is Chairman of the Provident Credit Union Board of Directors, former Board member of the Boys’ and Girls’ Club and the YMCA, and an active leader in the Sigma Pi Phi Fraternity, Inc. Mr. Johnson’s career in education spanned forty years culminating in his appointment to Superintendent of Schools of a large and ethnically diverse high school district in the San Francisco Bay Area. He was one of only thirteen African American Superintendents in the California Public School System. As a high school principal, he was the originator of Stanford University’s Study of the Family Structure Team. During his tenure as Superintendent he accomplished passage with the electorate of a major bond measure to provide for extensive new and modernized construction of the schools in his district and he pursued rigorous academic policies and standards that resulted in students performing better than at any other time in the school district’s rich academic history. His vision and leadership in education have received national and state recognition and legislative appointments to committee and panels. Under the auspices of the Western Association for School Accreditation, Mr. Johnson serves as chair for school accreditation teams throughout California, Hawaii, and the Pacific Rim.
