Most of us are dead.

But five of us are not.  We are among the 20 African American women chosen by a group of educators and black history experts to be featured in a traveling exhibition called "Freedom's  Sisters."

And on a Friday night in mid-March at the Cincinnati Museum Center, the five of us whose lives intersected with historic moments in the struggle for freedom and dignity for African Americans got together to celebrate a long over-due tribute. It was a tribute not merely to us as individuals, but to us as symbols of the countless women who were the backbone of the Civil Rights Movement.

My flight from Johannesburg was a flight from hell.  I had a lingering sinus infection, and I missed my connection in Paris, which then resulted in me missing the connection that would have put me in Cincinnati in time for the small, intimate dinner that kicked off the weekend. I arrived in Cincinnati seven and a half hours late, and I was still exhausted the next morning when I arrived for a preview of the exhibition.

My fatigue and frustration fell away, however, when I met up with the four other living "Freedom's Sisters": Dorothy Height (1912-) now 95 years-old and in a wheel chair, but with a mind as sharp as her broad-brimmed, velvet crimson hat was chic; Myrlie Evers(1933-), who built her own legacy of fighting for justice following the 1963 murder of her husband Medgar in their driveway in Mississippi; Kathleen Cleaver (1945-), the radical revolutionary turned prominent legal scholar and educator; and Sonia Sanchez (1934-) , the renowned poet and  scholar, who, realizing as soon as we spoke that morning that I was suffering from a sore throat, promptly handed me a ginger candy from her bag and made me a cup of green tea.

That gesture said it all about the "Freedom Sisters," the women who had inspired me during my own brush with history, when I walked onto the campus of the University of Georgia, under court order and through hostile white mobs, to enroll as the first black woman student in the school's 175 year-old history. Freedom's Sisters earned their stripes, not by not doing what they had to do, but doing anything necessary to do to be of service.  Or as Dorothy Height said that morning: "This exhibit reminds us that African American women have seldom done just want they want to do."

I reiterated that sentiment later, during the tear-jerking ceremonies before a rainbow-colored crowd of Cincinnatians, saying: "…She faced the raw acts of hatred, even as her head was lashed with blows from a policeman's stick, took a back seat to the brothers, but… pushed from her position of interior strength, … went to jail without bail for freedom … did it all in the face of what may have seemed like impossible odds."

Later, Dorothy gave us some insights into one woman's way of getting her due. She told us that she actually was the one female included, along with the male leaders, in many of the important civil rights meetings with presidents and others. But she said it took awhile to realize that when picture-taking time came, she was always on the end, making it easy for her image to be always cropped out of the publicity photos in newspapers and magazines. Finally, she said, she decided to take matters into her own hands: "I just started moving to the middle." And to be sure, Dorothy Height was almost always the lone woman in the middle of the action. But however alone she was, did she ever REPRESENT.

As I walked ever so slowly through the 20 interactive kiosks that make up the exhibition, I was struck anew by the courage of my sisters -- those on whose shoulders I stood, and those with whom I shared our moment.

There was one display for Rosa Parks (1918-2005). The space featured several seats against a wall looking like the inside of a bus.  I was prompted by the guide to push a button and look forward.  As I did, the first image I saw was of myself in a mirror. The second was Rosa Parks looking back at me from what looked like a seat on the bus in front of me on the other side. It took me to Birmingham and  that now historic day in 1955 when  Parks refused to give up her seat after being ordered to get up to make room for a white man. On that day she was arrested, and she became the Mother of the modern Civil Rights Movement, opening a door that I and other college students would walk through six years later, when we spilled from our classrooms into the streets shouting "Freedom Now."

As I made my way to all white classrooms where no one would talk to me, or along walkways where fraternity boys would yell "Nigger go home!" the Southern black students, joined soon by black and white students from the North and other parts of the country, were confronting more deadly and immediate danger and, as Kathleen Cleaver recalled, going to "jail without bail" until the walls of segregation came tumbling down.

I walked on after Rosa Parks and found Constance Baker Motley (1921-2005),  the lawyer who was cited for winning nearly every landmark civil rights case of the 50's and 60's, including the one against the State of Georgia where I sat in the courtroom as one of two plaintiffs (Hamilton Holmes was the other).

I saw Harriet Tubman(circa 1820 -1913)…who was acknowledged for owning and conducting  the Underground Railroad; Francis Watkins Harper (1825-1911), who, her biography said, "used stirring poetry and prose to inspire social activism and integrity."

-Mary Church Terrell,(1863-1954), a "gifted orator for women's rights who forced Washington, D.C. restaurants to open their doors to black people."

-Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862 to 1931), a fearless investigative journalist [who] risked her life to expose the evils of lynching.

-Mary McCleod Bethune (1875 to 1955), college president and founder of the National Council of Negro Women.

-Septima Poinsette Clark (1898-1987), a passionate educator  who taught thousands of African Americans, including Rosa Parks, how to achieve personal and political empowerment at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee.

-Ella Jo Baker, (1903 -1986), who "built a network of civil rights organizations and was a co-founder of the Student Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee (SNCC).

-Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977), who helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and was known for  her fighting words, "I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired."

-Shirley Chisholm,  (1924-2005), the first black woman elected to Congress and first the African American to run for president, who declared herself "unbought and unbossed.

-C. Delores Tucker (1927-2005), co-founder of the National Black Congress of  Black women and crusader against offensive hip hop lyrics.

-Coretta Scott King (1927-2006), wife of Martin Luther King who earned the title "First Lady of the Civil Rights Movement."

-Betty Shabazz (1936-1997), educator and widow of Malcolm X.

-Barbara Jordan (1936-1996),  the first African-American congresswoman from the South.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Charlayne Hunter-Gault (1942-), and I was almost too overcome to approach it.  I could not believe that I was positioned in such company, but  finally, I made it over and was immediately touched by the obvious time and care that went in to creating my space.