[1] Her great-grandfather, George W. Washington, was an enslaved man from Sumter, South Carolina who served as a body servant to his enslaver's son, Lieutenant William Alexander McQueen, from 1862 to the last days of the American Civil War,[2] seeing the Battle of Antietam, the Battle of Gettysburg, and the Siege of Petersburg.
[2] As a child, she paid annual visits to her great-grandfather's gravesite, a four-foot high obelisk in Walker Cemetery.
[2][1] As a young woman, she was involved in the Civil rights movement in Port Wentworth, Georgia.
[3] Benton worked as a mathematics teacher in the Savannah-Chatham County Public Schools System.
[2] Benton is a court-appointed special advocate for abused and neglected children.