by Tammy Ditmore | Feb 13, 2026 | Black History Month
As a Los Angeles Dodgers fan, I get to claim some amazing history that comes with this team. Jackie Robinson became the first African American player in Major League Baseball when he started for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Robinson became the star the Dodgers were...
by Tammy Ditmore | Feb 12, 2026 | Black History Month
By Robert Hayden Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking....
by Tammy Ditmore | Feb 11, 2026 | Black History Month
Mavis Staples began singing with her family in churches when she was 8 years old. At almost 87, she is still out there singing. After several hit gospel albums in the 1950s, the Staple Singers became the voice of the Civil Rights movement in the1960s. Mavis marched...
by Tammy Ditmore | Feb 10, 2026 | Black History Month
On February 1, 1960, Ezell Blair Jr., Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond bought a few items at a Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, North Carolina, and then sat down at the store’s “whites-only” lunch counter and tried to place orders. Staff...
by Tammy Ditmore | Feb 9, 2026 | Black History Month
Katherine Johnson was a brilliant mathematician who helped make NASA spaceflights possible. Johnson was one of the “West Area Computers,” Black, female mathematicians who did complicated calculations by hand that were essential for developments in flight and...
by Tammy Ditmore | Feb 8, 2026 | Black History Month
Fred Gray is a “lawyer by trade” and a Church of Christ “preacher at heart” who won the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2022 at age 91 for his boundary-shattering Civil Rights work. Gray represented Martin Luther King Jr., Claudette Colvin and...
by Tammy Ditmore | Feb 7, 2026 | Black History Month
The Snowy Day was the first children’s book featuring an African American character to win the Caldecott Medal, one of the most prestigious awards for children’s literature. This beautiful, simple little book by Ezra Jack Keats follows Peter as he explores...
by Tammy Ditmore | Feb 6, 2026 | Black History Month
I frequently travel through the Austin airport and whenever I do, I always try to stop at least briefly at the statue of Barbara Jordan to honor her remarkable life. Jordan was the first African American woman in in the Texas Senate (1966-72) and the first African...
by Tammy Ditmore | Feb 5, 2026 | Black History Month
I didn’t know anything about Ida B. Wells until fairly recently, but as a former journalist, her story inspires me so much. Wells was an outspoken, African American, female journalist in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when those things just did not go together....
by Tammy Ditmore | Feb 4, 2026 | Editing
I’ve heard lots of great speakers at Pepperdine University over the years, but Ruby Bridges was definitely one of the most inspiring when I heard her in 2016. Ruby was sent to a previously all-white school in New Orleans when she was six years old. Every day for...
