Founding a Nation & Fighting For an End to Slavery - The Black Experience on Stamps

Since the founding of the United States, African Americans have played a pivotal role in American history and heritage. This series of exhibits showcases the black experience in the United States through the lens of American postage stamps.

Early Pioneers

A self-taught mathematician and astronomer, Benjamin Banneker was probably the most accomplished African American of America’s colonial period. In 1753, he constructed the first wooden striking clock made in America. His studies and calculations in astronomy allowed him to successfully predict a solar eclipse in 1789 and to publish farmer’s almanacs in the 1790s. In 1791 he helped design and survey the city of Washington, D.C.

"The color of the skin is in no way connected with the strength of the mind or intellectual powers" -Benjamin Banneker.

Fighting For An End To Slavery

Born a slave, abolitionist Harriet Tubman was the first African-American woman to be honored on a U.S. postage stamp. After escaping slavery in 1849, Tubman returned to the south many times to bring other slaves to freedom, including members of her own family. This dangerous work made her a conductor for the famed Underground Railroad, which helped many slaves escape to freedom before and during the Civil War. She served the Union Army during the Civil War as a scout and spy.

Harriet Tubman was the first honoree in the Black Heritage series.

Fighting For An End To Slavery

Sojourner Truth was one of the most inspirational and widely known African-Americans of the 19th century. She was born Isabella Bomefree (also spelled “Baumfree”) in 1797, a slave in New York, but received her freedom in 1828. In the 1830s, she became involved in evangelical movements, and in 1843 she changed her name to Sojourner Truth and began traveling and preaching. Her autobiography, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave, was published in 1850, and her speeches against slavery and for women’s suffrage drew large crowds. In 1864, President Abraham Lincoln received her at the White House, and from 1864 to 1868 she worked with the National Freedmen’s Relief Association to advise former slaves as they started new lives.

Fighting For An End To Slavery

Frederick Douglass argued against slavery and for equal rights with such clarity and precision that he earned a reputation as America’s predominant African-American abolitionist and agitator during the 19th century. As founder and editor of the North Star and a leading proponent of the antislavery movement, he convincingly expressed the moral issues of human freedom and equality. He believed that the status of African-Americans was the touchstone of American democracy. Because of these beliefs, he became known as the “father of the civil rights movement.”

This Frederick Douglass stamp was issued February 14, 1967 as part of the Prominent Americans Definitive stamp series.