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Posts tagged as “Edmonia Lewis”

“We Got Game”: Who Was the 1st African American Person to Appear on a U.S. Postage Stamp? (LISTEN)

“We Got Game”: Who Was the 1st African American Person to Appear on a U.S. Postage Stamp? (LISTEN)

By goodblacknews on April 7, 2022

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:

You can follow or subscribe to the Good Black News Daily Drop Podcast through Apple Podcasts, Amazon, Spotify, Google Podcasts, rss.com or create your own RSS Feed. Or just check it out every day here on the main website (transcript below):

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…

  1. W.E.B. DuBois
  2. Frederick Douglass
  3. Harriet Tubman, or
  4. 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.

Beats provided by freebeats.io and produced by White Hot.

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Black History Month: Google Doodle Salutes Pioneering Sculptor Edmonia Lewis

By goodblacknews on February 1, 2017

Google Doodle of sculptor Edmonia Lewis (image via Google)

article by Michael Cavna via chicagotribune.com
To kick off its celebration of Black History Month, Google turns to a 19th century artist who burned so bright that her twin gifts of blazing talent and steely determination could not be denied even in the face of her era’s discrimination. Time and again, sculptor Edmonia Lewis — nicknamed “Wildfire” — faced obstacles and setbacks, yet she persevered as if her greatness were already cast.
Lewis was orphaned at age 9, when she was adopted by maternal aunts and joined their Mississauga tribe.  She endured bitter racial bias at Oberlin College, which she began attending at age 15; she was falsely accused of poisoning classmates and was beaten, and was ultimately denied the chance to graduate.
She then was refused apprenticeships in Civil War-era Boston, until she encountered the well-connected sculptor Edward Brackett, whose clients included well-known abolitionists.  And she would then run a small art studio in Rome (a space formerly used by neoclassicist Antonio Canova), eschewing assistants because she was often without the means of fellow expat artists in Italy.
Yet she would shine as the first woman of American Indian and African-American descent to discover international renown in the arts.

Wednesday’s Google Doodle, by artist Sophie Diao, salutes Lewis and her great work “The Death of Cleopatra,” which rests today in Washington at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. (Her work “Forever Free” resides nearby, with the Howard University Gallery of Art.) And the ribboned “Google” wording shines bright, befitting Lewis’s nickname.
To read more: Google Doodle salutes pioneering sculptor Edmonia Lewis to kick off Black History Month – Chicago Tribune