When Ty’Sheoma Bethea wrote to Congress to plead for help for her crumbling junior high school, she was just “a little girl from Dillon” trying to make a difference. She never dreamed it would earn her an invitation to President Barack Obama’s first State of the Union address.
Ty’Sheoma’s initiative not only earned her national acclaim, it got the ball rolling to finally fix her old school in South Carolina’s so-called “Corridor of Shame.” And it taught the eighth-grader how words can make a difference, just as they had in the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” a rallying cry for the civil rights movement.