Sara Elizabeth Antoine Kaffer died on August 23, 2026, surrounded by books, music, the love of her four daughters, extended family and dear friends. She was 94.

Sara was born in 1931 on a dairy farm in rural Mobile County, an upbringing she described as idyllic. She thought of herself as a farm girl all her life, even when attending the opera, admiring paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art or traveling abroad.

Sara was relentlessly charming; anyone who came into her orbit fell under the spell of her sparkling eyes, sly wit, insatiable curiosity and musical laugh. She was a voracious reader, a statement that can’t convey her appetite for the written word.

She graduated from Huntingdon College in 1952 and taught school in Alabama and Florida while studying for a master’s degree at Florida State University. After her marriage in 1956, she lived briefly in California, where her husband was stationed with the U.S. Navy, and later in New Orleans.

She returned to Mobile in 1958, later working in the Civil Rights Movement as a community organizer. She wrote the grants that launched Mobile’s Head Start program, at that time the city’s first and only integrated preschool, and served as its first director.

Sara was a practitioner of social justice before it was a common term. She considered service to others and vigorous participation in politics nonnegotiable. She was an avid consumer of news, telling her children that interruptions during national and local news broadcasts were “verboten.”

Her life was defined by service. She volunteered for literacy organizations like Friends of the Public Library, Rolling Readers and WHIL’s Radio Reading Service, reading printed materials for blind or low-vision listeners. Until age forced her to stop driving, she took voters to the polls and volunteered for Government Street Presbyterian Church’s breakfast program for unhoused individuals and its Meals on Wheels program.

Sara had many gifts: a quick wit, a deep curiosity, an intelligence informed by compassion. Class, wealth and position mattered little to her. She embodied Christ’s command to love our neighbors as ourselves, a moral grounding she passed on to her children and grandchildren. She loved her family and friends unstintingly and was beloved by them in return.

She is predeceased by her parents, T.H. and Lillie Antoine, whom she missed every day and seemed, in recent months, eager to see again. She is survived by her daughters, Laura (Clyde) Anderson, Cecily Kaffer, Elizabeth Hannon and Nancy (James Rodesiler) Kaffer; her grandchildren, Alexander Knapp, William Hannon, Katherine Kaffer, Miles Bongiorno, Ronnie (Kris) Anderson and Adam Anderson; great-grandchildren, Erika (A.J.) Stanford and Brandon Anderson; great-great-grandchildren, Cheyenne Stanford, Jace Stanford and Alyra Anderson.

Family and friends are invited to celebrate Sara’s life Saturday, August 29, at Government Street Presbyterian Church, 300 Government Street in Mobile, AL, with visitation at 2 p.m., followed by a service at 3 p.m.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations to Government Street Meals on Wheels by check to Government Street Presbyterian, 300 Government St., Mobile, AL 36602 (please mark the intention of the donation in the memo line), or online via Realm.

Hughes Funeral Home, 26209 Pollard Road, Daphne, AL, is assisting the family. Online condolences for the family may be made at www.hughesfh.com.