by Tammy Ditmore | Feb 28, 2026 | Black History Month
Maya Angelou’s biography reads like a work of fiction. Angelou published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, and multiple books of poetry, in addition to plays, movies, and cookbooks. She danced with Alvin Ailey, acted with James Earl Jones and Cicely Tyson,...
by Tammy Ditmore | Feb 27, 2026 | Black History Month
Tom Bradley, the longest-serving mayor of Los Angeles, was born in 1917 to sharecropper parents in the small town of Calvert, Texas. His family moved to Los Angeles when he was seven, but his father soon abandoned Tom and his four siblings, leaving his mother to raise...
by Tammy Ditmore | Feb 26, 2026 | Black History Month
The 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion was the only all Black US Women’s Army Corps unit to serve overseas during World War II. The women were sent to Birmingham, England, in 1945 and asked to deal with a backlog of around 17 million pieces of mail! The...
by Tammy Ditmore | Feb 25, 2026 | Black History Month
My parents loved listening to Nat King Cole and frequently told me what a wonderful singer he was. Even today, my family still listens to Cole’s Christmas album because it’s just so pleasant and so classic. Cole was known for his smooth baritone and became...
by Tammy Ditmore | Feb 24, 2026 | Black History Month
Robert Smalls was born into slavery in Beaufort, South Carolina, in 1839. At the start of the Civil War, Smalls was an enslaved crewmember on a Confederate transport ship operating in the Charleston harbor. In May 1862, he and other crewmembers sailed away with the...
by Tammy Ditmore | Feb 23, 2026 | Editing
Alex Haley began his career as an author by ghost-writing love letters for his less eloquent shipmates while serving in the Coast Guard during World War II. After the war, Haley convinced the Coast Guard to let him work as a journalist, which he did until he retired...
by Tammy Ditmore | Feb 22, 2026 | Black History Month
Richard Allen, who founded the first African American denomination, was born into slavery in Delaware in 1760. As a teenager, Allen began attending a Methodist church, which was one of the few American churches that was open to Black worshippers, and he quickly became...
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...
