This Booker T. Washington stamp was part of a series depicting influential educators. (Smithsonian National Postal Museum)

How Booker T. Washington Became the First African-American on a U.S. Postage Stamp
At the time, postage stamps usually depicted white men

By Erin Blakemore
smithsonianmag.com

The person in question was Booker T. Washington, the legendary educator and author who went from slave to esteemed orator and founder of the Tuskegee Institute. Washington’s inclusion on not one, but two postage stamps during 1940 represented a postal first—one that was hard-fought and hard-won.

To understand just how important it was to see a person of color on a U.S. postage stamp, you need only imagine what stamps looked like during the first half of the 20th century. Daniel Piazza, chief curator of philately at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum, tells Smithsonian.com that at the time, the only subjects thought worthy of being depicted on stamps were “presidents and generals and such,” white men whose national stature was deemed significant enough to rate inclusion on the nation’s envelopes.

By 1940, women had only appeared on stamps eight times—three of which were depictions of Martha Washington, and two of which were fictitious women. In the 1930s, controversy broke out over whether the Post Office Department should issue a stamp that portrayed Susan B. Anthony and celebrated women’s suffrage as opposed to stamps that portrayed military figures. Anthony’s supporters prevailed, and the struggle in turn inspired a black newspaper to ask why there were no African-American people on U.S. postage. “There should be some stamps bearing black faces,” wrote the paper.

smithsonianmag.com

July 17, 1959: With Police Armed Outside Her Hospital Room, Billie Holiday Died  by Carletta Smith

July 17, 1959: With police armed outside her hospital room, Billie Holiday died from pulmonary edema and heart failure caused by cirrhosis of the liver.

Almost 2 months prior to her death, on May 31, 1959, Holiday was taken to Metropolitan Hospital in New York suffering from liver and heart disease. She was arrested for drug possession as she lay dying, and her hospital room was raided by authorities. Police officers were stationed at the door to her room til her death.
In the final years of her life, she had been progressively swindled out of her earnings, and she died with $0.70 in the bank and $750 (a tabloid fee) on her.

Her funeral mass was held at Church of St. Paul the Apostle in New York City.

Gilbert Millstein of The New York Times, who had been the narrator at Billie Holiday’s 1956 Carnegie Hall concerts and had partly written the sleeve notes for the album The Essential Billie Holiday (see above), described her death in these same 1961-dated sleeve notes:
“Billie Holiday died in the Metropolitan Hospital, New York, on Friday, July 17, 1959, in the bed in which she had been arrested for illegal possession of narcotics a little more than a month before, as she lay mortally ill; in the room from which a police guard had been removed – by court order – only a few hours before her death, which, like her life, was disorderly and pitiful. She had been strikingly beautiful, but she was wasted physically to a small, grotesque caricature of herself. The worms of every kind of excess – drugs were only one – had eaten her … The likelihood exists that among the last thoughts of this cynical, sentimental, profane, generous and greatly talented woman of 44 was the belief that she was to be arraigned the following morning. She would have been, eventually, although possibly not that quickly. In any case, she removed herself finally from the jurisdiction of any court here below.”
Billie Holiday (born Eleanora Fagan) was a jazz singer and songwriter. Nicknamed “Lady Day” by her friend and musical partner Lester Young, Holiday had a seminal influence on jazz and pop singing. Her vocal style, strongly inspired by jazz instrumentalists, pioneered a new way of manipulating phrasing and tempo. Critic John Bush wrote that Holiday “changed the art of American pop vocals forever.”

 

On April 7, 1961, President John F. Kennedy sends a letter to Congress in which he recommends the U.S. participate in an international campaign to preserve ancient temples and historic monuments in the Nile Valley of Egypt. The campaign, initiated by UNESCO, was designed to save sites threatened by the construction of the Aswan High Dam.

JFK believed that America’s participation in the project would reflect “the interests of the United States,” as well as the country’s interest in ancient Egyptian culture “from which many of our own cultural traditions have sprung” and the U.S.’s “deep friendship for the people who live in the valley of the Nile.” Kennedy possessed a personal interest in the sciences and history and, from the beginning of his presidency, set out to promote American scholarship in these areas. His administration also wanted to develop diplomatic ties with the Arab nations in the Middle East and North Africa.

Citation Information

Article Title: JFK lobbies Congress to help save historic sites in Egypt

Author: History.com Editors

Website Name: HISTORY

URL: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/jfk-lobbies-congress-to-help-save-historic-sites-in-egypt Date April 7, 2023

Publisher A&E Television Networks

Last Updated April 5, 2022

Original Published Date November 16, 2009

1712 – A slave revolt broke out in New York City.

1798 – The territory of Mississippi was organized.

1862 – Union General Ulysses S. Grant defeated Confederates at the Battle of Shiloh, TN.

1864 – The first camel race in America was held in Sacramento, California.

1888 – P.F. Collier published a weekly periodical for the first time under the name “Collier’s.”

1922 – U.S. Secretary of Interior leased Teapot Dome naval oil reserves in Wyoming.

1927 – The first long-distance TV transmission was sent from Washington, DC, to New York City. The audience saw an image of Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover.

1930 – The first steel columns were set for the Empire State Building.

1933 – Prohibition ended in the United States.

1940 – Booker T. Washington became the first black to be pictured on a U.S. postage stamp.

1943 – British and American armies linked up between Wadi Akarit and El Guettar in North Africa to form a solid line against the German army.

1945 – The Japanese battleship Yamato, the world’s largest battleship, was sunk during the battle for Okinawa. The fleet was headed for a suicide mission.

1948 – The musical “South Pacific” by Rogers and Hammerstein debuted on Broadway.

1948 – The United Nations’ World Health Organization began operations.

1953 – The Big Four met for the first time in 2 years to seek an end to their air conflicts.

1953 – IBM unveiled the IBM 701 Electronic Data Processing Machine. It was IBM’s first commercially available scientific computer.

1957 – The last of New York City’s electric trolleys completed its final run from Queens to Manhattan.

1963 – At the age of 23, Jack Nicklaus became the youngest golfer to win the Green Jacket at the Masters Tournament.

1963 – Yugoslavia proclaimed itself a Socialist republic.

1963 – Josip Broz Tito was proclaimed to be the leader of Yugoslavia for life.

1966 – The U.S. recovered a hydrogen bomb it had lost off the coast of Spain.

1967 – Israel reported that they had shot down six Syrian MIGs.

1969 – The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously struck down laws prohibiting private possession of obscene material.

1970 – John Wayne won his first and only Oscar for his role in “True Grit.” He had been in over 200 films.

1971 – U.S. President Nixon pledged to withdraw 100,000 more men from Vietnam by December.

1980 – The U.S. broke diplomatic relations with Iran and imposed economic sanctions in response to the taking of hostages on November 4, 1979.

1983 – Specialist Story Musgrave and Don Peterson made the first Space Shuttle spacewalk.

1983 – The Chinese government canceled all remaining sports and cultural exchanges with the U.S. for 1983.

1985 – In Goteborg, Sweden, China swept all of the world table tennis titles except for men’s doubles.

1985 – In Sudan, Gen. Swar el-Dahab took over the Presidency while President Gaafar el-Nimeiry was visiting the U.S. and Egypt.

1985 – The Soviet Union announced a unilateral freeze on medium-range nuclear missiles.

1987 – In Oklahoma a 16-month-old baby was killed by a pit bull. On the same day a 67-year-old man was killed by another pit bull in Dayton, OH.

1988 – Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to final terms of a Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. Soviet troops began leaving on May 16, 1988.

1988 – In Fort Smith, AR, 13 white supremacists were acquitted on charges of plotting to overthrow the U.S. federal government.

1989 – A Soviet submarine carrying nuclear weapons sank in the Norwegian Sea.

1990 – In the U.S., John Poindexter was found guilty of five counts at his Iran-Contra trial. The convictions were later reversed on appeal.

1990 – At Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center a display of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs went on display. On the same day the center and its director were indicted on obscenity charges. The charges resulted in acquittal.

1994 – Civil war erupted in Rwanda between the Patriotic Front rebel group and government soldiers. Hundreds of thousands were slaughtered in the months that followed.

1998 – Mary Bono, the widow of Sonny Bono, won a special election to serve out the remainder of her husband’s congressional term.

1999 – Yugoslav authorities sealed off Kosovo’s main border crossings to prevent ethnic Albanians from leaving.

2000 – U.S. President Clinton signed the Senior Citizens Freedom to Work Act of 2000. The bill reversed a Depression-era law and allows senior citizens to earn money without losing Social Security retirement benefits.

2002 – The Roman Catholic archdiocese announced that six priests from the Archdiocese of New York were suspended over allegations of sexual misconduct.

2006 – The Boeing X-37 conducted its first flight as a test drop at Edwards Air Force Base, CA.

2009 – Former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori was sentenced to 25 years in prison for ordering killings and kidnappings by security forces.

Source: on-this-day.com