Lillian Pride

Lillian Pride is recognized as a 1999 inductee of the Contra Costa Herstory Project. She holds a singular place in the Project's founding narrative: Sunne Wright McPeak — herself a future County Supervisor and California Cabinet Secretary — names Lillian as her first boss in a paid position after receiving her Master of Public Health from UC Berkeley, and credits her by name as a "true mentor, role model, and my champion."

In the early 1970s, Lillian was Executive Director of the Health Policy Board, a Model Cities Project housed at the Community Health Center in Pittsburg — itself a sister Model Cities project sponsored by the Pittsburg Community Hospital District. Federal Model Cities funding, an LBJ-era Great Society program targeting urban renewal and integrated services, gave Lillian both the platform and the authority to build a community-based health-policy infrastructure in a part of the County whose working-class and Black and brown communities had historically been under-served. Lillian was, in McPeak's words, a strong woman "with a passion for making the world better" and an "acute attention to accuracy and precision in writing" — the kind of executive whose written record could withstand auditors, federal reviewers, and skeptical city councils alike.

It was Lillian who championed McPeak's appointment as the founding Executive Director of the Community Health Center itself. When McPeak was sent by U.C. Berkeley School of Public Health to do her field work at the Contra Costa County Health Department, her mentor Jim Henderson sent her to Joe, who in turn sent her to Pittsburg to work with Lillian — a chain of mentorship that McPeak later described with the lesson "there are lots of intertwined relationships within a community — pay attention and respect everyone." When the Center launched, Lillian engineered the public ceremony — closing Railroad Avenue in front of the building so that Congressman Jerry Waldie, Senator John Nejedly, and the Pittsburg City Council could share a public stage. Lillian understood early what later organizers would have to relearn: that institutional legitimacy is built one ceremonial endorsement at a time.

In 1974, Lillian ran for and won a seat on the Pittsburg Community Hospital District Board, attending a fall 1974 NWPC luncheon hosted by Elaine Jegi on Salem Street in Concord — across the street from Bette Boatmun and next door to Jane Emanuel — as a candidate. McPeak, recalling the luncheon vividly decades later, calls out the quiche Elaine served and Lillian's place in that room as a candidate as one of the foundational political memories of her own early career. Lillian's election placed a Model Cities executive directly on the elected board of the hospital district that had sponsored the work she had been doing inside the bureaucracy — a textbook NWPC trajectory of inside-out organizing.

Her induction in 1999 acknowledged both the institutional work — Health Policy Board, Hospital District — and the generational mentorship work that placed McPeak, and through her a generation of Contra Costa women, on the trajectories from public health into elected and appointed office. It is no exaggeration to say that without Lillian Pride, the political career of Sunne McPeak — and therefore the Herstory Project itself — would have looked very different.