Download e-book for kindle: Delta Rainbow: The Irrepressible Betty Bobo Pearson (Willie by Sally Palmer Thomason,Jean Carter Fisher

Betty Bobo Pearson (b. 1922), a seventh-generation, plantation-born Mississippian, defied her cultural heritage�and prompted nice own discomfort for her mom and dad and herself�when she grew to become an activist within the civil rights stream. by no means fearing to wreck the mildew in her look for the �best,� in her nineties she is still a robust, powerful chief with a fun-loving, beneficiant spirit.

When Betty used to be eighteen months outdated, a teach smashed into the automobile her mom was once riding, killing Betty�s liked grandfather and critically injuring her grandmother. Thrown onto the engine�s cow catcher, Betty lived and didn't take into account the twist of fate. She did, even though, develop as much as satisfy her grandmother�s prediction: �Betty, God reached down and plucked you from in entrance of that teach simply because he has whatever very specified he wishes you to do along with your life.�

In 1943, twenty-one-year-old Betty, quickly to graduate from the collage of Mississippi, bought an entire school scholarship to Columbia Graduate college in manhattan urban. Ecstatic, she rushed domestic to inform her mom and dad. �ABSOLUTELY now not. there is not any means I�ll enable my daughter to reside in Yankee Land,� her father spoke back. After fierce argument and lots more and plenty door slamming, Betty couldn't defy her father. yet she needed to convey him she was once her personal individual. Her state used to be at war�so Betty joined the Marines.

After the battle, Betty married invoice Pearson and have become mistress of Rainbow Plantation within the Delta. In 1955, she attended the Emmett until trial (accompanied through her shut buddy and budding civil rights activist Florence Mars) and was once stunned through the virulent measure of racism she witnessed there. Seeing her international in a brand new approach, she turned a brave and committed supporter of the civil rights flow. Her actions critically fractured her shut courting along with her mom and dad. but, as a hot pal and impressive, persuasive chief, Betty made an indelible mark in her church, within the Delta groups, within the lives of the folks she hired, and in her attractive backyard at Rainbow.