by Tammy Ditmore | Feb 21, 2026 | Black History Month
Mary McLeod Bethune was born in 1875 near Mayesville, South Carolina, the fifteenth of seventeen children. She moved to Daytona Beach, Florida, in 1904 with $1.50 in her pocket and founded a school for Black girls, with five students, using discarded crates for desks...
by Tammy Ditmore | Feb 20, 2026 | Black History Month
When my then-four-year-old grandson chose to give a report on John Coltrane in his transitional kindergarten class in 2025, I decided it was time to learn a little more about this jazz saxophonist. Lucky for me, I got access to a video of that presentation, and I...
by Tammy Ditmore | Feb 19, 2026 | Black History Month
Born in 1941, Jesse Jackson grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, and came of age just as the Civil Rights movement was gaining a foothold in the U.S. A star athlete, Jackson earned a scholarship to the University of Illinois but left when he discovered that a Black...
by Tammy Ditmore | Feb 18, 2026 | Black History Month
When Ronald McNair was 9 years old, he tried to check out some science textbooks from the public library near his home in South Carolina. A librarian refused, telling him the library was only for white residents. Ron persisted, so the librarian called the police, but...
by Tammy Ditmore | Feb 17, 2026 | Black History Month
Scott Joplin was the “king of ragtime,” a musical genre popularized in the U.S. in the early 20th century. Born in the late 1860s somewhere around Texarkana, Joplin began playing the piano as a child and was a traveling musician by the time he was a teen. Over the...
by Tammy Ditmore | Feb 16, 2026 | Black History Month
In November 2016, I managed to get a reservation to visit the Smithsonian’s newest museum in Washington, D.C.: the National Museum of African American History and Culture. I lined up on a cold, damp day in the shadow of the Washington Monument with hundreds of others...
