Who Was the 1st African American Person to Appear on a U.S. Postage Stamp? (LISTEN) – Good Black News
by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (@lakinhutcherson)
Today’s Daily Drop is based on the Thursday, April 7 entry in the “A Year of Good Black News” Page-A-Day®️ Calendar for 2022 and is the year’s third foray into our Black Trivia category called “We Got Game.”
All due respect to Chuck D, some of our heroes actually did appear on stamps, the first doing so 82 years ago #onthisday. Question is, who was the first one? To read the choices, read on. To hear them, press PLAY:
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Hey, this is Lori Lakin Hutcherson, founder and editor in chief of goodblacknews.org, here to share with you a daily drop of Good Black News for Thursday, April 7th, 2022, based on the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar” published by Workman Publishing. It’s in the category for Black Trivia we call “We Got Game”:
Okay, so I’m going to read a multiple-choice question that you will get time to think about and answer.
What I’m going to do is read the question, read the choices — and they’ll be four of them — and then I’ll prompt you to pause the episode if you want to take longer than the 10 seconds that will pass before I share the answer.
Sound good? Ready to see if you got game? All right, here we go:
Who was the first African American to be featured on a U.S. Postage Stamp? Was it…
- W.E.B. DuBois
- Frederick Douglass
- Harriet Tubman, or
- Booker T. Washington
Now go ahead and pause the episode if you want to take more than 10 seconds before you hear the answer. Otherwise, I’ll be back in 10… Okay, time’s up.
The answer is… D: Booker T. Washington.
Although the other three have since been featured on USPS stamps — 1992 for DuBois, 1967 for Douglas and 1978 for Tubman — Booker T. Washington was the first Black person to be honored in this way 82 years ago on April 7, 1940.
After several petitions from African American supporters, President Franklin D. Roosevelt pushed to make Washington’s stamp happen.
Issued at a cost of 10 cents and celebrated with a ceremony at the Tuskegee Institute, Washington’s stamp was part of the U.S. Postal Service’s Famous Americans Series.
The most recent African American person celebrated on a postage stamp is sculptor Edmonia Lewis, who is the 45th subject of the USPS Black Heritage stamp series, issued in January of this year.
To learn more about the history of African Americans on U.S. postage stamps, check out the links provided in today’s show notes and the episode’s full transcript posted on goodblacknews.org.
This has been a daily drop of Good Black News, based on the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar for 2022,” published by Workman Publishing.
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