Sadie R. Benham has a fold-out display of photographs and news clippings from her life that she puts up whenever she's asked to speak to a group.

Opening the display, she pointed to a photo of herself at about age 6, when she was a poor but happy small-town Georgia girl. She's not sure how that girl became the woman in another photo, shaking hands with President Jimmy Carter.

The Farrell woman's road from "welfare to the White House" was bumpy, marked by personal tragedy, failed romances, the loss of an arm in a meat grinder accident, racial prejudice, a nervous breakdown and political failure followed by political triumph.

She has weathered the change in times, just as the term for her race has changed from one of derision to one of pride.

"I've come from colored to Negro to black to African-American," she said.

While proud of her accomplishments, Ms. Benham hopes others will see themselves in her failures and find encouragement to strive for something better.

She tells her story in the self-published autobiography "From Welfare to the White House: I Know Who Holds My Hand."

Ms. Benham said she persevered through tough times by holding the hand of God.

"Just as surely as I felt my fingers for years after my accident, I feel his presence and I see his work," she said.

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Ms. Benham was born Nov. 3, 1930, likely in South Carolina or Georgia -- she has no record of her birth -- to Annie "Pinky" Ward. Ms. Benham's biological father, Frank Germany, had left before she was born.

Ms. Ward died when her daughter was very young of a painful disease called pellagra, brought on by a protein deficiency.

Initially taken in by her mother's sister-in-law, Marie Ward, and husband, Robert, of Savannah, she ended up living with Robert's sister, Adele Mifflin, and husband, Hezekiah, in Townsend, Ga., when the Wards went to Detroit to make a new home.

"I spent my childhood in a rural Georgia town so poor there was but one automobile in town," she wrote. "We used wooden pencil stumps at school."

Ms. Benham considers the Mifflin farm her first real home, and came to look upon the Mifflins as her parents and their sons as her brothers.

"My family grew up in the shadow of the Depression but as kids we thought we were rich," she wrote. "We depended upon nature, each other and God. We gave our neighbors from what we had -- fish, corn, squash or blackberries -- and they shared with us."

The children walked seven miles to a one-room school, which was attended by 100 children of all ages.

"We didn't learn fast under those conditions," said the Farrell Area School Board member. "It took us two years to learn as much as a city kid learned in one, but we loved school and we learned about surviving and working together."

But, when she was 8, the Wards, whom she barely remembered, returned to take her with them back to Detroit.

"I cried most of the way to Detroit."

The tears continued as she settled into the city's Black Bottoms section, which she called "one of Detroit's poorest and darkest ghettos."

At school, the children made fun of her country accent, which they said was "Geechee," a form of broken English. She refused to answer questions or speak in class, and was declared retarded at age 9.

Although Ward was injured in a serious accident -- his skull was fractured by a falling elevator -- the accident signaled a change for the better for the family. Ward used the settlement money to buy a home in a better section of Detroit, and Ms. Benham improved in school.

At age 13, she learned that she had a brother and sister. Mrs. Ward had vowed to keep that news from her.

Ms. Benham stole money from Mrs. Ward and hopped a bus south in search of her siblings.

"I realized that I must have been consumed by the devil because never before in my life would I have taken money from anyone's purse," she wrote.

She found her sister, Margaret, in Savannah.

Mrs. Ward apologized to Jesus for keeping the secret, and asked Ms. Benham to return, which she did.

To reward her for winning a Junior Achievement award, Ward sent her south to visit Margaret and meet her brother, Frank.

Although often poor throughout her life, Ms. Benham has always wanted to look good.

"Through my entire life, that was the one thing that I insisted on -- Dignity. We might not be eating right, but we looked like we were. When you don't have nice things, you begin to believe that you deserve only rags and poverty. You begin to feel like a lesser class citizen. Not me, I have always believed in looking as good as I could. If you look poor, you act poor. If you act poor, you are poor -- poor in spirit."

When a girl bragged about having separate dresses for graduation, baccalaureate and a graduation party -- Ms. Benham had only one dress -- she got a job as bookkeeper at a chili factory, working 10 hours a week for 50 cents an hour.

One day, she offered to clean the meat grinder when a co-worker, whose daughter had become seriously ill, had to leave.

"I still don't know how it happened," Ms. Benham wrote. "One moment I was cleaning, the next I was in shock. I saw, I felt the grinder suck in my right arm past my elbow. The last thing I remember was seeing my fingers coming out the bottom."

She was in the hospital during graduation.

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Although Ms. Benham dreamed of a happy-ever-after marriage, she ended up in the 1950s divorced, a single mother of three daughters, and on welfare, in Farrell

"Welfare is like childbirth: Unless you've been through it, you really have no idea what it means," she wrote, calling the experience "absolutely dehumanizing."

Subject to strict rules and unannounced visits by social workers, "The message came through loud and clear -- you're no good. You can't be trusted to run your own life."

She became reliant on the welfare system, even though it never provided her enough to survive, she said. Only through the graces of family and friends was she able to feed her family.

Just as she came to rely on welfare, she relied on men, often to her detriment. One man took what little money she had and she lost her house.

Ms. Benham had shunned God since the accident, but found her faith again in Farrell. Her church singing voice attracted a fair amount of local notoriety, which led to appearances on a radio show.

She started a singing group with her daughters, and they appeared on the "Strike it Rich" radio show with Dinah Shore, winning $500, a record player and Dinah Shore records.

She opened a record store in an attempt to sell the Shore records, but the black customers she was trying to sell to wanted nothing to do with them, and it failed.

Ms. Benham was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown, then returned home and decided she needed a new start. She packed up and loaded her children into her boyfriend's car and headed for Detroit, never mind the fact she didn't know how to drive.

But her luck in Detroit proved to be no better than Farrell, and she fled to California, only to end up on welfare again.

Her outlook improved when she stormed into the welfare office one day to complain about her case manager. A new one was assigned to her who encouraged her desire to better herself and played a key role in her getting away from the system.

"There always seemed to be someone to give me hope," she said.

A second failed marriage aside, she became involved in Creative Day Care, a non-profit center opened by volunteers and private donations in 1968, and became a licensed child care consultant.

She was the first black appointed to the Santa Ana Human Relations Committee, and led workshops on teaching the disadvantaged and guiding intellectual development in the black child.

Politically active, she failed in her bid to be elected to a host of posts, including Santa Ana City Council.

Eventually elected to the Santa Ana School Board, she wasn't afraid to go against the popular will for what she thought was right.

In 1976, California was behind Gov. Jerry Brown's campaign for president, but she campaigned for Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter, drawn to Carter's religious faith.

She was elected Orange County delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1976, and she received five invitations to Carter's inauguration, which she attended.

A black, liberal Democrat, Ms. Benham ended up marrying the Santa Ana School District's controller, a white, conservative Republican.

John Benham, her third husband, died three years later, in 1989. Ms. Benham moved to Farrell in 1995 to be closer to family members who lived there and in Detroit, and adopted two children.

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Many of the parts of Ms. Benham's life are painful and she doesn't like talking about them. But she believes others can find inspiration to carry on in her ability to do the same.

"My main reason is to try to inspire women," said the member of Community Missionary Baptist Church, Farrell. "I know a lot of women are feeling a lot of pain."

Ms. Benham said she knows what it's like to be a single mother on welfare and feel hopeless. But was able to persevere.

"I've had some really hard times, but my faith has allowed me to go on," she said. "The message I want to get out is to always maintain hope."

Even though Ms. Benham still goes through times when her bills need to be paid and she's not sure how to pay them, she believes she's much better off than she used to be.

In a sense, its challenging," she said. "I don't call it struggling."

Ms. Benham said she traces her compassion for children to the fact that she never knew her father. She has opened her home to a hundred foster children since 1986 -- she has three foster children now, ages 6, 3 and 6 months -- and two school-age adopted children.

The children who come into her home often have suffered, and she wants to make them as comfortable and loved as possible.

"If I'm going to impart anything, I don't want it to be hate," said the member of the Mercer County Foster Parents Association and the state Foster Care board. "I want it to be love."

Any money Ms. Benham makes from the sale of the book will be used to create a fund for foster families to be able to travel with their foster children.

Ms. Benham will speak to the Women Christian Council and Young Women Christian Council of Greater Mount Zion Church of God in Christ, Farrell, at 6 p.m. today at the church, 1825 Roemer Blvd.

You can e-mail Herald Staff Writer Joe Pinchot at jpinchot@sharonherald.com