SNCC 60th

...among other student activities. However, it was while she was chair of UC/Berkeley’s Friends of SNCC chapter that James Forman, SNCC’s executive secretary, convinced her to leave grad school to direct SNCC’s Friends of SNCC department in the Atlanta national office.

She recalled that earlier, “In Nov. 1963, I was invited to go to the Howard University conference that SNCC held. At that moment, I fell in love with SNCC: the passion of the singing, the intensity of people’s commitment and care and love for each other.”

After leaving SNCC staff, she worked with the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and in the anti-war and women’s movements. In D.C., she helped found the New Thing Art and Architecture Center. In 1972 she moved to Baltimore to work in factories in order to organize workers.

She then worked for 18 years at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health as a researcher in occupational medicine and HIV-AIDS studies (she loved research).

In 2003 she received a coveted Open Society Institute Community Fellowship, focused on popularizing the history of Baltimore’s social justice organizing. She was the Lead Organizer for the Citizens Planning and Housing Association (CPHA)...

...which organizes Baltimore area communities around quality of life issues. She worked with SURJ, a national organization of white people who work for racial justice as allies with people of color organizing in local communities.

She was also appointed to Baltimore’s Civilian Review Board.     Throughout her life, Betty was passionate about organizing against injustice and she used whatever tactics seemed most appropriate.

She also stressed that organizers should be guided by the issues the communities themselves identified as their priorities… that they should be careful listeners.