ORLANDO, Fla. — With a smile and a compliment, Brenda Bolton welcomes fellow church members into Sunday service every week at Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church in Eatonville. 

“It’s just wonderful to put on a smile and say hello to everybody,” Bolton said. “It just starts my day.”

But greeting people at church is just one part of Bolton’s outreach in the community.

She works to provide scholarships for young people in the church, as well as through her alma mater, Tennessee State University and her sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha.

“I never had a white teacher until I went to grad school,” Bolton said.

Bolton grew up in Louisville, Ky., during the 1940s and 1950s — a time of segregation when she could only go to a school that lacked basic necessities.

“We didn’t have any running water,” Bolton said. “We didn’t have a cafeteria, and when it rained, rain would come through upstairs — so that’s why our parents picketed to get us a better school.”

Bolton eventually joined the civil rights movement when she was in college at Tennessee State.

“We opened the lunch counters, the movies, everything in Nashville,” she said. “We were with John Lewis and all the young people.”

Bolton spent decades teaching in the Los Angeles area, where she included lessons about Black history in her curriculum, with personal stories from her experiences. Now retired and living in Central Florida, it’s a history she’s determined to continue passing on to young people through her work in several scholarship organizations.

“There is no U.S. history without slavery and sit-ins because we are part of U.S. history,” Bolton said.

For Bolton, good grades are key to receiving the scholarships for which she helps select recipients. She said her father didn’t have much money left after paying monthly rent for the family, but her mother would clean homes to make money to pay for her education.

“All my mother told me is, ‘You get the grades, and me and God got the rest,'” Bolton said.

Now Bolton wants to make sure a younger generation takes advantage of their opportunities — ones she helped fight for.

“It’s important for me because I know what it means not to have money to go to school, so that’s one reason why I try to encourage and help all young people to go because I know they can have a better life,” she said.