Betty Lou Griffin pushed the rock up the hill to create a movement for others to follow in her footsteps and uplift the abused people of Sampson County.
                                 India K. Autry | Sampson Independent

Betty Lou Griffin pushed the rock up the hill to create a movement for others to follow in her footsteps and uplift the abused people of Sampson County.

India K. Autry | Sampson Independent

<p>India K. Autry | Sampson Independent</p>

India K. Autry | Sampson Independent

<p>Betty Lou Griffin cuts the ribbon during the opening of U Care’s emergency shelter in 1997. Pam Gonzalez stands to her left.</p>
                                 <p>India K. Autry | Sampson Independent</p>

Betty Lou Griffin cuts the ribbon during the opening of U Care’s emergency shelter in 1997. Pam Gonzalez stands to her left.

India K. Autry | Sampson Independent

Betty Lou Griffin, 79, is the unsung hero of U Care, Inc., Sampson County’s non-profit dedicated to helping victims of domestic violence and sexual assault.

The former Clinton City Schools teacher and activist couldn’t stand by and watch her students suffer from domestic violence at home. One of her students had called every law enforcement agency he could think of to try to get help for his mother who was being abused by his mother, and nothing was done. “They watched his father kill his mother,” Griffin said. “And I was just in pure tears because this is the kind of thing I would hear with children I taught. You’d hear this, and your hands were tied.”

Griffin sought to fill the deficit of legal backing for the victims. By the late 1980s, the county was routing domestic violence calls to her phone line for years through a program called Citizen’s Alert.

“It was frustrating,” Griffin confided. “Because you get these calls, and you have no resources. All you can do is call to them and try to help them.”

She found herself apologizing to one woman she felt particularly futile in assisting and could only refer her to a shelter in a different county. The woman’s son had been born mentally challenged because her husband had beaten her while she was pregnant. Griffin recounts the woman’s response. “She said ‘Ms. Griffin, don’t apologize, you’ve told me more in 10 minutes than I have been able to find out in all this time.’”

By the early ‘90s, Griffin answered the call for more support in Sampson County. “We had nothing that answered to the problems for women or for the children. So we were in need of services.”

Griffin had long been active with the Democratic Women of North Carolina and the N.C. Council for Women. She managed to get the promise of state grant money from the women she worked with, conditioned on her being able to get an organization off the ground.

The earliest seed money was used to hire Pamela Gonzalez as a part-time program director, Griffin said. Gonzalez passed away last month after more than two decades as U Care’s executive director.

Former District Attorney and judge Albert Kirby remembers Betty Lou putting U Care together during a time when he said women were treated like second-class citizens in this area. “That was her baby. She struggled. She took her own resources — she did. Not many people would have done that. She got it all started. It was 24/7, that project for her, and so many people said she couldn’t, that she’s wasting her time, that it’s just not worth it. She wouldn’t say no,” Kirby attested. “She kept on every day. It was one thing after another.”

She didn’t let any obstacles stop her, as noted by her friend and fellow CCS teacher Cynthia Shell. “She’s like a bull. You tell her she can’t do any thing, and she will not stop until it gets done and gets done right,” Shell insisted. “She’s just a relentless worker.”

Kirby and Shell both gave an anecdote about their friend renting a U-Haul truck and going to pick up a 40-piece furniture donation she had resourcefully procured for the shelter.

They also recall how Griffin gained a reputation as the local enforcer for domestic violence victim’s rights. During a time when the courts didn’t take such charges seriously enough, Griffin made sure U Care got the respect it deserved from the legal system.

Shell took a fellow teacher to the magistrate to press charges against her husband, also a teacher and a long-time abuser. Shell said the woman had red marks all over her face and neck. “She said, ‘I’m tired of being beat up,’” as Shell told the story. The magistrate, who was good friends with her husband, refused to write up the charges.

Well, that didn’t sit well with Betty Lou Griffin. Shell called her enterprising friend and told her what was happening. It was a Sunday morning, but since no one at U Care felt able to help, Griffin hopped in the shower. As Kirby remembers, she had a touch of the flu and a fever.

Shell and the battered woman came back to the magistrate’s office. He snapped at them, “I told you, lady, I ain’t taking out any papers,” Shell said. The women just sat down quietly and waited.

Then the five-foot-wide metal doors of the facility parted. “The story was the doors just flung open — boom, and she walked through,” Kirby mused.

Shell witnessed Betty Lou’s stunning entrance herself. “She was wearing bright orangey-red Bermuda shorts and a fire engine red shirt that went with it,” she said. “She looked like a ball of fire.”

The magistrate started babbling, “I swear for God, Betty Lou, I was going to get the papers, but she wouldn’t cooperate,” Shell recounted.

Griffin told the magistrate that she was going to stand right there until he filled out every word. She even checked them over when he was done. Griffin explains her methods this way, “I kept right on doing that until they knew Betty Lou Griffin didn’t have to be there.”

Griffin said that it was her knowledge of the justice system and her connections to the people in it, including then Democratic Clerk of Court Charlie McCullen, that gave her the ability to protect the women who relied on U Care. “I had already done the research. I was in the all the political things. So I had already figured out why everything was so mixed up between the court system, the clerk of court’s office and the sheriff’s office,” she stressed. “I saw what I had to do, and I have inroads by being head of Democratic women, you see, and I could deal with their heads, the judges, and they worked with us, and we got their people on board and got their people trained.”

Kirby emphasized the influence Griffin had in making U Care an effective entity. “The magistrate was in that good ole’ boy mentality, like ‘what’d you do to make him mad?’ Long story short, the magistrate got the idea that when U Care called, it was something serious.”

Shell made a similar observation about the men of yore. “Their time was coming to an end.”

Ms. Griffin was Kirby’s eighth grade teacher, and he attests that she had the same temperament back then. “If she ever got it locked in her mind — it was almost like General Ulysses S. Grant, the Union general in the Civil War — if he ever got something in his mind, it ain’t going out,” Kirby said. “And she was that way.”

Many of the prominent men in the county, including the state legislator who represented Sampson at the time, tried to discourage her from forming the non-profit, Kirby described. “They said you’re wasting your time. It’s not going to happen — we don’t have the funding for it,” he retold. “Betty Lou’s idea was ‘as long as there’s breath in my body, I’m not going to see women anymore subjected to the horror of abuse. They don’t have to go through that. It’s not fair.’”

After coordinating the Women’s Assembly at the state level, the task force found that domestic violence was the most pressing issue facing women in North Carolina. In order to be eligible for N.C. Council for Women funds, Griffin had to create a local chapter of the council for Sampson County. She ensured an equal number of Republican and Democratic women on the council, and they reported their results from the assembly to the county commissioners.

Billie Eure, who was teaching at Sampson Community College, helped her coordinate and form the first board for U Care.

At the time Griffin went to the offices of Clinton attorney Ben Warrick to file the 501(c)(3) papers in 1995, she wanted her and Eure to be listed as co-chairs because Griffin was inundated with personal problems that temporarily kept her from being fully available to U Care. Her father was dying of cancer, two of her daughters were going through a divorce, her husband had already been diagnosed with cancer and her childhood best friend had just passed away but she was too stressed to be able to attend her funeral. Griffin herself was still dealing with physical ailments stemming from a debilitating car accident.

Still, Warrick insisted that they have one person designated chair and one as vice chair. Forced to make that choice, Griffin said she took the vice chair role on a temporary basis, just until her life had balanced out more. After her father passed away in December of 1995, she took over as chair.

She convinced the city to give U Care a house that they could turn into an emergency shelter. They were in competition with the Catholic church for the property. “You know how much money the Catholic Church has got,” Griffin mentioned. “This man who went to the Catholic Church is telling the commissioners, ‘It’s our understanding that these women don’t have a dime of money.’ And I was saying, we may not have a dime of money, but if I can’t get the money, I will pay for it myself.” They got the house.

But it was in bad shape and in much need of renovation. Eure had interviewed and hired Gonzalez as program director as a recent social work graduate, and the organization that had promised the grant money sent a representative to U Care. After speaking with Gonzalez while Griffin was out of the office, the N.C. Council for Women denied U Care the grant.

“Pam was learning during that time, you see. Right on for several years because Pam didn’t have the finesse to deal with public officials and to go into grants and to do things that I could do. She didn’t have the background,” Griffin recounted.

The trailblazer said she wanted to differentiate her organization from the typical domestic violence program where the people who ran them were often victims themselves who hadn’t had much education or experience in managing budgets. Griffin, with three master’s degrees and a resume including director of finance for the state Democratic women’s organization, commanded more confidence.

Griffin graduated first in her class from Campbell University, and, as a teacher, she specialized in exceptional children and academically gifted mathematics, often volunteer tutoring college math students following her retirement.

The NCCW representative came back to meet with Griffin, and U Care was awarded the grant, given enough money to bring the historic house it back to its original state, according to the U Care founder.

Another thing that differentiated Griffin from most domestic violence shelter executive directors is that she was never paid. Most executive directors relied on the income, and that led to problems, Griffin said. Griffin had retired from teaching after 27 years following her car accident in 1985.

Griffin trained Gonzalez and praised her as a good worker, but she would not let Gonzalez handle the finances, instead opting to hire a separate bookkeeper. Griffin observed that her employees resented her business practices. “They were scared of me because I kept a tight rein on things. I could walk in any time of the day or night. Nobody else could,” Griffin said.

Griffin said she routinely checked the books to see what was coming in and what was going out.

Gonzalez never applied for another job, and it wasn’t long before Gonzalez told Griffin that she needed to rotate off of the board as all of the other board members had done, leaving her to assume the title of executive director. “I just stepped back,” Griffin said. The two women never discussed the matter after that.

In November 1996, The Sampson Independent ran an editorial praising Betty Lou Griffin for her involvement in U Care after she won North Carolina Equity’s Carpathian Award for Personal Advocacy. By the end of the decade, she was out of the organization.

Griffin surmises that many people today are unaware of her founding U Care. “Getting credit for stuff has never been my goal,” she shares. “If I see something that needs to be done, I’m a person who gets started getting it done. Heavens knows what I have done, so it doesn’t matter to me about anything else.”

Kirby doesn’t like seeing anyone other than his former teacher getting credit for starting U Care. “Pam was a sweet girl,” he said. “She did so much, but Pam was so far down the line.”

Griffin has noticed a decline in the services at U Care over the years. She has had a couple of interactions with the facilities when taking women for help, including one of her daughters who overcame intellectual disabilities.

One of Griffin’s other daughters, Cheryle Griffin, who has a degree in criminal justice, corroborated. “When I went in there four years ago, no one knew who I was, who my mother was.”

Cheryle said that her sister’s anonymity was not kept toward her abuser, who was her live-in daughter. “I can tell you that her daughter called there, and someone told her that she was there,” Cheryle revealed.

Teacher Cynthia Shell in her interview mentioned that sometimes abusers do find out where the victim is located, in which case U Care will transfer the person to another county and not necessarily a neighboring one.

In another instance, the mother and daughter pair encountered a man hitting his wife over the head with a bottle while they were driving through Clinton. Cheryle often drove her mother to various appointments after the 1985 car accident made it very difficult for her to get around on her own.

The Griffins stopped the car and managed to get the woman away from her husband so they could take her to the hospital. They called U Care, but the woman who showed up spoke to the victim and left without taking any action.

Betty Lou fears that women in Sampson County are in more danger now than they were before she started U Care. “We have so many cultures that have no respect for women. Besides human trafficking and all this other stuff that’s taking place on the streets, ” she warned.

Betty Lou chalks up the perceived fall of U Care to a matter of when the cat’s away the mouse will play. “If I had stayed I would have been supervising enough that I would have caught things,” she insisted. “And I would have had input on who was doing the work and what kind of work was being done.”

Griffin’s no stranger to implementing changes. When she first became president of the Democratic Women of Sampson County, there were no black women involved. “I couldn’t believe it,” Griffin exclaimed. “Here these women are organized in the churches and everywhere doing the work, and we don’t even had them in here in our organization.”

She went to work bringing in her black teacher friends and putting them into leadership positions in the group. She laments that nowadays, Sampson County Democratic is once again segregated, the white women having departed because they disagreed on racial political matters.

Betty Lou, a professed Democrat until her dying day, rejects this kind of divisiveness. “There are so many people who are so narrow thinking, it’s sectioned off like it was before,” she complains. “It’s gone backward from what it was, almost to Civil War times — that’s what it feels like to me.”

Her daughter Cheryle shared her own experience of losing custody of her child in 1994 in Sampson County because she was living with a black male partner. “Judge sat right in that courtroom and said he would not see an African-American man as a father role model for a white child,” she recounted.

Griffin continued working with the Council for Women and the Democratic Women of North Carolina for a long time after leaving U Care until health issues, including heart problems, forced her to take a rest from her life of activism.

Her husband, Jack, passed away from a rare form of leukemia at the age of 74. He had been diagnosed more than four decades earlier. “I had the most loving husband you could ever imagine, and my father was that way.”

Never a victim of domestic violence herself, Griffin still understood the dynamics of the cycle of abuse and how to stop it. This is what inspired her to implement treatment for abusers through U Care, as well as the Bee Hive thrift store model that would allow abuse victims to connect with U Care staffers without their abusers suspecting they were doing anything more than shopping for bargain items. “It’s a cover,” Griffin intimated.

Griffin pulled strings with the owners of the original College Street location to secure the space for the store, and she based the naming of it on numerology, the occult study of the correlation between numbers and events. “I do a lot of things with numbers. Numbers — it’s just like names. There is success in what numbers are involved in things.”

The letters in “Bee Hive” add up to the number 11. “That’s 11, which is teaching,” Griffin instructed. “11/2, which is love and balance. You’ve got to have love from all sides to have the support you need.”

She kept the method to her madness secret at the time. “People around here at that time, they knew nothing of things like that,”she declared. “I believe in things that are beyond and much bigger.”

Griffin states that she does what she believes is right, popular or not, and she doesn’t cut corners. “I would never take something that did not belong me because I don’t have to do that. All I have to do is to earn it. I have to work for it — I’ve worked for it all my life. It’s our children and our family’s legacy because we know the work that has been done all through the years.”

Griffin, who turns 80 next month, was born with a horseshoe kidney and never expected to make it through her twenties. She shares that she was a born teacher, imparting knowledge from the time she was a child growing up on a farm. “I was like a little old person,” she jokes.

The U Care name itself is numerologically based. Griffin originally wanted to name the organization I Care, but that was already copywritten. She chose the letter “U” based on its correlation to the number three and creativity. “You want it to survive like a business, to be creative and not fizzle out.”

Griffin gives credit were credit is due. “Pam was responsible for a lot of the growth of things because she worked hard at it,” she stressed.

There was even a Bee Hive in Garland, in addition to the existing location in Newton Grove and the Clinton location awaiting its delayed reopening in its new building in the Roses shopping center.

Cheryle notes that her mother’s “secret power” has been her schooling. “You can lose everything in a blink of an eye, but the one thing no one can ever take away from you is your education,” she says, passing on her mother’s wisdom.

Betty Lou Griffin pushed the rock up the hill to create a platform for others to come after her and uplift the abused people of Sampson County. As veteran attorney Albert Kirby recalled, “Vividly, I do know that this was her brainchild, and she started it. It was a one-man show when it all started, a one-woman show. She ate, slept and drank U Care — she really did.”

Shell reiterated that sentiment. “She worked like a Trojan on that place,” she remarked. “It just pissed her off when they said it can’t be done. Sure has changed a lot of lives, hasn’t it?”

India K. Autry can be reached at 910-249-4617.