I’ve been enjoying digging through history to find people and stories that deserve a little more study than they tend to get. This month, my personal goal to seek out these amazing people coincided with a professional goal of promoting and providing context to my library’s digital collections. For this ‘Every Month is History Month’ post, and in honor of Black History Month, I am going to refer you away from the Bean to check out my post on Digital Dialogs: Celebrating Black History Month with a Portrait of Blanche Armwood.

Blanche Armwood [was] a prominent figure on the national stage, known for her dedication to education and social reform…[She] has been compared to Booker T. Washington, both by her contemporaries and by historians. Her seeming to accept the white power structure while at the same time working toward interracial cooperation on local issues would later gain her criticism for accommodating whites (Hooper, 2011). Yet, other contemporaries described her as a ‘rebel’ who demanded equal rights and did not ask for favors (Jones, 1999). It could be said that Armwood used the methods she deemed necessary to obtain her goals in any given situation.

Schmidt. (2021) Celebrating Black History Month with a Portrait of Blanche Armwood. Digital Dialogs. USF Libraries.