The HistoryMakers

Singer, environmentalist, activist and survivor MaVynne Betsch was born on January 13, 1935 in Jacksonville, Florida. She was raised in one of the most preeminent black families in the South. Betsch is the daughter of Mary and John Betsch, and the great-granddaughter Abraham Lincoln Lewis, who founded Florida's oldest African-American beach, and Anne Kingsley, the African American wife of plantation owner Zephaniah Kingsley. Betsch was educated at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio. Upon completion of her bachelors' degree in 1955, she moved to Europe where she was an opera singer for ten years.

Since 1975, Betsch has made it her full-time mission to preserve and protect American Beach, her great-grandfather's investment, from development and destruction. She has been famously named "Beach Lady," for her many efforts and dedication to the beach and its' inhabitants. 'Beach Lady' has given her life savings, some $750,000, to sixty environmental organizations and causes, ten of which she is a lifetime member, and most of them involve animals. 'Beach Lady' has been featured on CBS and CNN and in such publications as Coastal Living, Essence, Southern Living, Smithsonian and over twenty-five others. Betsch has also dedicated part of her life in convincing others that nature and natural things are fine. 'Beach Lady,' who has natural hair that she has grown for over twenty years and is seven feet long in some areas, also has one foot long finger nails on one of her hands is trying to prove that things can grow naturally without protein from meat.

Even after being diagnosed with cancer in the 2002, which caused the removal of her stomach, 'Beach Lady' was still working hard for causes that would benefit others. She planned to open a museum that would contain the history of American Beach, the town where she lived many of the years of her life. Betsch never married and never had children. She was the older sister of Dr. Johnnetta B. Cole, the first female African American president of Spelman College, and president of Bennett College.

MaVynne Betsch died of cancer on September 5, 2005.