Betty Burston

Betty (Rush, Collier, Watson, Arrington) Burston "skipped" 2nd and 12th grades and entered college at the age of 16. Almost immediately, she met now Congressman John Lewis and became active in the Civil Rights movement. Subsequently, she became an active member of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM). During her senior year as an undergraduate, she enrolled in the 16 credits that comprised her last semester at Fisk University and in 19 semester hours at Tennessee State University in order to...See more

Betty (Rush, Collier, Watson, Arrington) Burston "skipped" 2nd and 12th grades and entered college at the age of 16. Almost immediately, she met now Congressman John Lewis and became active in the Civil Rights movement. Subsequently, she became an active member of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM). During her senior year as an undergraduate, she enrolled in the 16 credits that comprised her last semester at Fisk University and in 19 semester hours at Tennessee State University in order to take courses that were simply fulfilling to her interests. She was awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Cornell University. She subsequently accompanied her husband, one of the first African American graduates of Vanderbilt University, to Maryland when he enrolled in the University of Maryland Medical School. At that time, despite being the mother of two children and pregnant with a third child, she simultaneously enrolled full-time in a doctoral program at American University and in a full-time M.A. program in African Studies at Howard University. These experiences led to her decision to become a transdisciplinary researcher. She credits her familiarity with multiple disciplines and her experience in two different "movements" in the 1960s as the foundation that allows her to view Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion from a uniquely different set of lenses. See less