Betty Wallace

Wilmer Amina Carter Foundation

Abstract

Ratibu Jacocks interviews Betty Wallace, a woman of deep faith who loves to help her community. Wallace was born on August 26, 1933, in Casa Grande, Arizona, on the Pima Reservation that her grandfather lived on. She was raised in the Imperial Valley as her father was a farmer there but moved to San Bernardino when her father retired from farming and her parents bought land in the latter city. While she graduated high school from the Imperial Valley, her college education started in San Bernardino where she attended San Bernardino Valley College. There, she studied nursing and would later work in the county hospital. When Wallace arrived in San Bernardino, she did not join a church for many years as she was busy trying to raise her children after a divorce. After joining the Greater Bethel Missionary Baptist Church in San Bernardino later on, she still is a dedicated member of that location. Wallace then talks about working from a young age, from which she explains that she was able to get a job in a bank at 17, worked in a juvenile hall, and as a community aid for her children’s school. The interviewee mentions that after twenty-seven years in the school system, she felt a religious calling to go into ministry work. She returns to continue her education in a more theological direction to qualify for ministry work. After working in ministries, both different ones and her own, she made a difference by being the first Black woman to be a chaplain for the Fontana police department. In that position, she helped with crisis intervention and the aftermath of tragedies. Jacock then reads her a quote about leadership and asks Wallace about a testing or trying experience, to which Wallace talks about helping her daughter with cancer as well as her estranged husband with the same illness. Disturbingly, Wallace tells about a time when the Ku Klux Klan wanted to march soon after she was hired, to which the police chiefs denied them and supported Wallace. The interview ends with Wallace explaining how a new person in charge of the chaplains wanted to educate her on how to “properly” pray. She rejects the idea and even prays in front of Jacocks to show him the way she continues to pray.