Bette White

1939 - 2016

Bette Graham White
1939-2016
After a lifetime of service to others, especially some of the most needy in our society, Martha Elizabeth (Bette) Graham White passed away on April 9, 2016. Born Elizabeth Weatherford on March 22, 1939, Bette was raised in Robstown and in San Antonio, where she graduated from Alamo Heights High School in 1956. Frequenting her grandfather's holdings near Marfa, she grew up familiar with West Texas ranch life.
A childhood illness, and the isolation that went with it, helped to give Bette a lifelong empathy for those enduring suffering and alienation. Inspired as a child by the radio "fireside chats" of Franklin Roosevelt, she believed that one person can make a difference. Those sentiments were powerfully reinforced by her deep spiritual experience: she recalled sensing the "Presence," and thereby deriving personal strength, when she was as young as ten years old; subsequently, she believed that she herself had benefitted from miraculous healings. Bette attended Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, earning an Associate degree in liberal arts. In her later 20s, "God," as she put it, "fell down on my head"; she felt that her life was renewed, and she devoted herself even more intensively to community service, including work in troubled urban neighborhoods.
Active in the Episcopal Church and then living in Houston, Bette became deeply involved with the inner-city Church of the Redeemer and its many community projects, tutored by its then-Rector Graham Polkingham. She identified strongly with the Civil Rights movement, fighting valiantly to better life in the surrounding, predominantly African-American Fourth Ward. Working with churches and schools, she struggled to improve housing, rescue a clinic and a school under threat of permanent or temporary closure, aid residents in procuring medical services, improve mental health care, resolve difficult family and personal situations—and above all, encourage residents to find their own voice in city life. She established a relocation program for Vietnamese refugees, helping them find needed services in a completely unfamiliar environment, and encouraging their presence in Houston, which ultimately has left a strong and positive mark on the city.
Bette enrolled at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, where she coordinated campus service activities and earned a Bachelor's degree in theology and a Master's in religious education. Once run over by a truck when she stopped to aid at a highway accident, she was told that she was unlikely to walk again but experienced a spontaneous healing—one of numerous instances in which she felt directly "touched" by the Divine. Admired for her charisma, perseverance, knowledge of political life, and ability to work with a wide variety of people, Bette brought her concerns to a broader public as two-time candidate for mayor of Houston, in 1977 and 1979. Her efforts for the underprivileged carried her as far away as isolated communities in the Appalachian Mountains and northern Scandinavia, and brought her into personal contact with leaders whom she most admired, including Nelson Mandela—who encouraged her by telling her that she had "eyes to see"—and Hillary Clinton. In 1985, she published a book of poetry.
Bette returned to San Antonio in 1993, remaining active in Democratic Party politics and always responsive to those who called on her for assistance. Having spent much of her life as a devoted single mother, she is survived by her son Troy Graham of San Antonio. She will be gratefully recalled by many whose lives she has touched and is fondly remembered by a circle of friends, many of whom were in her Alamo Heights graduating class. A memorial service will be held at Christ Episcopal Church, 510 Belknap Place in San Antonio, at 11 a.m. on Friday, May 6.