What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [124]
And change monumentally she did, mentored by minister Aaron Gilmartin, the agnostic socialist leader of the Mt. Diablo church. At first, she became active in the civil rights movement and then, gingerly, in the Black Revolution. She cautiously participated in protests and, with Gilmartin driving her into Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco in his Volkswagen bus, occasionally delivered money raised by the mostly white church members for support of Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panthers. “I was a well-dressed, station-wagon-driving dilettante,” Betty appraised. “I didn’t really know anyone in the Panthers but served as a conduit, the vessel through which the congregation could express its activism.”
Betty’s political development was hastened by the race riots in Detroit and Newark in 1967, when disenfranchised African-American communities reacted violently to acts of police brutality. In the after-math, a major rift developed in the Unitarian church. Some black intellectual leaders, supported by whites, including Gilmartin, called on black Unitarians to forge their own agenda and abandon the immediate goal of racial integration. “Gil” urged Betty to enter the debate and represent Walnut Creek’s Unitarians when African-American Unitarians held their first national black caucus in Chicago. With no college degree and no real job experience, Betty felt ill equipped and went reluctantly. But there, she met and mixed with people like Carl Stokes, the mayor of Cleveland; poet Gwendolyn Brooks; the Reverend Jesse Jackson; and historian and editor Lerone Bennett Jr. She became particularly close with Henry Hampton, who would one day make the definitive PBS documentary on the civil rights movement, Eyes on the Prize. Initially excited by the brilliant black intellectuals she met in the Black Movement, she grew disillusioned by the reverse racism, the increasingly violent rhetoric, and the sexist hypocrisy she witnessed over the next couple of years. She walked out of her third and last black Unitarian conference in Cleveland. “On the way home, I kept thinking, It’s not about race. It’s not about color. Something else is going on here. When I lived in suburbia, I was not quite white enough. When I went into the Black Movement, I was not quite black enough. I had the sense of being nothing until I realized I was ahead of everybody else. I was everything.” She decided she would affirm her blackness, but in a multiracial perspective. On the plane ride back to California, she penned a song with the lyrics, “And someday, it shall be the blackness and the white of us/ are just the day and night of us.” It was one of several of her own poetic and political songs she began to sing at college concerts with unique and captivating folk jazz phrasing. She briefly considered offers to make a career of singing.
She ultimately rejected the idea and, at fifty-one, found herself back in Walnut Creek, alone. By then, Rick had his own place in Berkeley, Bob was becoming a professional folksinger, and David, still in high school, was traveling in Europe. Dorian was in a boarding school several hours away. “Here I am, in this four-bedroom house with a senile black rabbit, a fifteen-year-old turtle, and three cats,” she said.
Politics rescued her from despair and bolstered her ego. She was elected—in the same white community that had threatened her two decades earlier—to serve as a George McGovern delegate at the 1972 Democratic National Convention in Miami. It was a bizarre convention, but a heady time for Betty. Actors Shirley MacLaine,