SNCC 60th

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.

In 2010, at a large event she put together in Baltimore for Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC — a book she co-edited with 5 other SNCC women — the room was packed with representatives from the various campaigns she’d been involved with.

As she called the name of each campaign – focused on affordable housing, police brutality, educational equity, immigrant rights, or mass incarceration – one group and then another stood up. Sometimes those in each group knew each other, sometimes they didn’t.

But Betty knew them all, because she had joined in their struggle… or had helped bring them together. They were part of her vast network, people with whom she had developed deep and lasting personal bonds.

Organizing and enjoying those around her were integral parts of who she was; they were the inseparable parts of her life that brought her joy. She loved being with people: attending potlucks where she’d try out new recipes with vegetables from her garden...