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Booker T. Washington Fan, ca. 1945
Booker T. Washington MNH Plate Block, 1940
U.S. Commemorative Half Dollar―Booker T. Washington, 1946 (obverse)
U.S. Commemorative Half Dollar—Booker T. Washington, 1946 (reverse)
Coins: 1 3/16 in. diameter
Stamps: 3 5/16 x 2 1/4 in.
Collection of Civil Rights Archive/CADVC-UMBC, Baltimore, Maryland, 2005.1, 2005.54, 2005.27
In the early 1940s, the U.S. Congress chose Booker T. Washington, the acclaimed author and educator, as the first black person to be depicted on an American postage stamp, and coin, a “commemorative,” noncirculating silver half-dollar. While acknowledging the need to cast African American accomplishment in a positive light, Congress chose a relatively conservative leader, known as much for appeasing white power as for resisting it; Washington called for compromise rather than protest, rejecting the forceful activism of such early civil rights leaders as the abolitionist orator and statesman Frederick Douglass.
While Congress authorized a stamp in 1948 to honor the botanist George Washington Carver, Washington’s loyal colleague at the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, it would take it decades to honor less conciliatory figures: Douglass (1967), Harriet Tubman (1978), the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. (1979), Whitney M. Young, Jr. (1981), Du Bois (1992), and Malcolm X (1999). To date, no African American has appeared on U.S. circulating legal tender, either on printed currency or coins.
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