She began teaching social studies at a Harlem junior high school and received her master's degree in education from Columbia University in 1961.
[1] In 1963, as she said later, she was "recruited into the civil rights movement by Sheriff 'Bull' Connor of Birmingham [Alabama]."
Appalled by media accounts of Connor's use of dogs to subdue civil rights demonstrators, Becker went South to teach in the summer Freedom Schools.
[3] In 1977, after the Vietnam War ended, Becker helped create the Mobilization for Survival, which linked the emerging movement against nuclear power to opponents of nuclear weapons and the wider antiwar movement.
On June 12, 1982, the "Mobe" drew some 700,000 people to Central Park, in what The New York Times later described as "a boisterous and festive call for the end of the nuclear arms race."