New quarters debut with famous poet
Writer and poet Maya Angelou has become the first Black woman to have her likeness depicted on the quarter, the first in a series of coins commemorating pioneering American women that began shipping this week, the U.S. Mint announced.
“It is my honor to present our nation’s first circulating coins dedicated to celebrating American women and their contributions to American history,” Ventris Gibson, the deputy director of the Mint, said in a statement. “Maya Angelou,” she added, “used words to inspire and uplift.”
Angelou’s landmark 1969 memoir, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” documented her childhood in the Jim Crow South and was among the first autobiographies by a 20th century Black woman to reach a wide general readership.
Angelou was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in 2011.
Angelou, who died in 2014 at 86, was “one of the brightest lights of our time — a brilliant writer, a fierce friend and a truly phenomenal woman,” Obama said at the time.
The coin is the first in the American Women Quarters Program, a four-year effort in which the Mint will issue five quarters a year to honor women in fields including women’s suffrage, civil rights, abolition, government, humanities, science and the arts. This year’s other honorees are Sally Ride, the first American woman in space; Wilma Mankiller, a Native American activist; Nina Oterowarren, a leader in New Mexico’s suffrage movement; and Anna May Wong, the first Chinese American film star in Hollywood.
The suffragist Susan B. Anthony was the first woman to be featured on a circulating U.S. coin.
On paper currency, abolitionist Harriet Tubman is expected to replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill by 2030, according to the Treasury Department.