You probably don't know the name Blois Hundley but you might recognize T. C. Williams, especially if you're from Alexandria, Virginia, just across the Potomac River from where I live. You might know that T.C. Williams is a high school named after a longtime superintendent of Alexandria public schools.  You might even know that the school gained national prominence via the film "Remember the Titans, " a somewhat romanticized version of what happened in 1971 when an African American head coach led a newly integrated football team to a spectacularly successful season despite racial tensions on and off the field. At the end of 1971 the Titans were the second highest-ranked high school team in the nation. Especially in the film version, with the coach, Herman Boone, played by Denzel Washington, it's a feel good story.

It's Black History Month and this morning the Pre-Kindergarten classes at Miner Elementary School in Washington, D.C. celebrated with a presentation.  Of course I was there!  I arrived early so had a chance to chat with another grandma, a woman whose children had attended Miner.  Her granddaughter is in my grandson Leo's class. Then the children filed in, most wearing their school uniforms -- navy pants or dresses, white t-shrits -- but a few were in costumes. One girl was in a glamorous dress and there were a policeman, a fireman and a mail carrier. Leo looked like a doctor or a dentist with a light attached to his forehead, hospital scrubs and clear plastic gloves. He was very solemn. A teacher led them in some clapping exercises and everyone sang "The Eensy Weensy Spider." Then it was time for the show.

"From oysters to eggs, one black lawyer's quest to dine out in D.C," John Kelly's column in this morning's Washington Post t is about the day when Emanuel Molyneaux Hewlett went to a famous Washington eatery to get some oysters.

In observance of Black History Month my grandson's elementary school is asking for book donations. For me, the only question is which ones shall I give? I've been collecting picture books about Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald ever since I started research for my book.  I have some good ones! I can't part with any of them but I have already ordered copies.

Two new books have landed on my desk and they are on the same fascinating subject -- how school desegregation played out in different places.  Shade in the Sunshine State, Reflections on Segregation in Florida is by Elizabeth Huntoon Coursen.  Trails and Trailblazers, Public Education and School Desegregation in Lunenburg County, Virginia 1870 - 1970 is by Shirley Robertson Lee, who graduated in that county's first integrated high school class.  Each one has a wealth historical background and extensive quotes from oral histories of people who participated in school desegregation.

Claudia Stack says she came to her interest in sharecropping via the Rosenwald schools she had come to know near her home in southeastern North Carolina. "I knew that African American sharecroppers had contributed greatly to school building, and that these schools played a central role in their communities," she writes in the study guide that accompanies her new documentary film, Sharecrop.  As in her previous films, Under the Kudzu, about Rosenwald schools, and Carrie Mae: An American Life, about a woman educated in a Rosenwald school who went on to forty years of teaching, Claudia lets the story unfold in the words of the people who lived it.

He really IS doing good work!  Every time I visit schools, as I will tomorrow with 4th and 6th graders at Capitol Hill Day School, I tell the story Douglass writes in the Narrative of his life about the wife of his master who, when he was an enslaved boy of about 8, taught him to read. When he found out what she had done, her husband berated her saying, “If you teach this boy to read, he will not be fit to be a slave!”  He then added that the child would become “unmanageable.” Overhearing this, Douglass dedicated himself to becoming unfit for the degradation of slavery.  He learned to read.

When Terence Crutcher was killed last week in Tulsa I felt the sadness and anger and wish to know more exactly what happened that have become my standard reaction to the sadly all too frequent stories of black men dying in interactions with the police.  But this time I felt something more than that.  I felt a personal connection. My maiden name is Crutcher.

Reading in today’s paper the biography of a writer named Barbara Goldsmith made me think about Emmett Till.  Goldsmith, who wrote a best-selling account of the Gloria Vanderbilt custody trial in 1934, remembered that as a child of wealthy parents she was scared of being kidnapped.  The year after her birth in New York City, the baby of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne, was stolen out of his crib in a second story bedroom in the family home in New Jersey. The ensuing two month search,the discovery of the dead child, then the arrest, trial and execution of the abductor were all widely publicized.  Goldsmith is quoted as telling an interviewer that, “I used to go to bed a night and wait for the sound of the ladder plopping against my bedroom window. I’ve since found out that a lot of people who grew during the Depression had these same fears, because of the Lindbergh baby’s kidnapping.”