ANGELOU FIRST BLACK WOMAN DEPICTED ON QUARTER
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 Monday.
“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 recited a poem at President Bill Clinton’s first inauguration, in 1993, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in 2011. She died in 2014 at 86.
The quarter featuring her likeness — created by Emily Damstra, a designer, and Craig Campbell, a medallic artist — depicts Angelou with her arms uplifted, in front of a bird in flight and rays of sunlight streaking behind her. The images were both “inspired by her poetry and symbolic of the way she lived,” the Mint said.
Angelou is featured on the “tails” side of the 25-cent piece; the “heads” side includes a portrait of George Washington.
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 and a former La Jolla resident; Wilma Mankiller, a Native American activist; Nina Otero-Warren, a leader in New Mexico’s suffrage movement; and Anna May Wong, the first Chinese American film star in Hollywood.