Jazz Great Ellington Will Grace DC Quarter

Late jazz legend Duke Ellington has been chosen to appear on the District of Columbia's commemorative quarter, CNN reports. The composer and performer, a DC native who died in 1975, beat out abolitionist Frederick Douglass and surveyor and astronomer Benjamin Banneker in a vote of the capital's residents. Ellington becomes one of very few African Americans ever to appear on a US coin.  (More coins stories.)