Seize the Day

After reviewing my last entry on the history of Haiti and Haitian stamps, I thought of ways you might, if you’re into stamp collecting, want to arrange your valuable stash. Since it’s Black History Month, I thought I’d use the artful Black Heritage Series of stamps to offer a few suggestions towards that end. (Besides, I was thinking of taking up the hobby myself, and I needed a starting point.) But , of course, you can always use my suggested methods for any collection that contain items with both a common theme and a human focus.

As you can see from the display at ESPER (the Ebony Society of Philatelic Events and Reflections), one stamp of this series has been issued every year since 1978. Therefore, as of today, the set contains 32 postage pieces. (In June 2010, Oscar Micheaux the filmmaker will be the 33rd person to be honored in this array by the United States Post Office.)

The simplest way to obtain all of the current stamps of the series (since many of them are hard to come by), as well as stamps depicting other notable African Americans plus a collection binder for storage, is to shop at the Black Heritage Commemorative Society. (Caveat emptor – I personally have not purchased from this organization, so I make no claims as to the validity of their offers. If you do buy from them, you do so at your own risk.)

There are two things you should keep in mind before we look into arrangements (the purpose of this article). First of all, you can either treat the following sorting options like a restaurant menu wherein you select an item from a “Column A” and one from a “Column B”, or you can look at the suggested classifications as a buffet and take items liberally from both sections.

Secondly, several of these suggestions are made with tongue firmly planted in cheek. The point of this exercise is mostly to have fun and enjoy the action, which is what the act of collecting and displaying should be about. And wouldn’t it be nice to throw a viewer of your album collection for a loop as they try to decipher what organization system you employed? (Okay, maybe it’s just me…)

How to Group Your Black History Stamps (”Column A”)

You can broadly sort your Black Heritage stamps in one or several of the following ways:

Grouping I: by vocation. They who are depicted in this series come from all walks of negro life. I thought I’d take a stab at this grouping (and this one only), just to get my feet wet as a stockpiler. The particulars of the rest of the groupings I will leave to your own ingenuity.

Grouping II: geographically. You can file these historical figures, according to their birthplace, into North, South, Midwest, and West categories or some variation thereof. If you adopt this grouping, you can arrange lineups even further by state and/or city. More on that later…

Grouping III: by artist. Jerry Pinkney, Thomas Blackshear, Higgins Bond, Chris Calle, Richard Sheaff, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Albert Slark, Tim O’Brien, Paul Davis, Kazuhiko Sano, and Kadir Nelson have all created graphics for the items in this philatelic project. (Pictured below are a few of the more prolific designers.) Each illustrator name can be a heading unto itself.

Grouping IV: by scholastic achievement. Here are some classes (pun intended) for the boojie-in-spirit: College Graduate, No Formal Schooling, and Academic Dropout. Something you might want to contemplate is how to categorize people who were “self-educated” or “self-taught.”

You’ll notice – it’s impossible to miss when reading the respective biographies of these notables – that there has been many an historical black person who can fall into more than one category, especially when you group figures by trade. For example, G. W. Carver was both a renowned botanist (and thus a member of the scientist category) and he taught others (as an educator). Also, J. W. Johnson started out as a principal (an educator), but went on to become an author as well as a musician.

But these slight incongruities are all part of the organization process. To reiterate, trying to pigeonhole the names on a list to fit into specific categories, and coming up with more inclusive or (alternatively) more exclusive categories are both just plain fun.

How to Order Your Black History Stamps (”Column B”)

Here are several ways to arrange the Black Heritage postage in a given assembly, or in your entire set as a whole. You can arrange the pieces by:

• Date of Issue, chronologically by year of stamp release. This is probably the default manner to arrange your collection. (But for more unconventional methods, read on…) The stamps are displayed in this way at ESPER.
• Name, alphabetically by subject (African-American figure) surname. This method, of course, may also be one of the more natural ways to do things. Or if you feel that comfortable with these prominent black personages, place their seals by forename.
• Year of Birth, chronologically by subject date of nascence. Alternatively, you can begin with the man or woman born most recently and end with he/she that was born earliest in time.
• Longevity, numerically by subject lifespan. This list can be in either ascending or descending order.
• Height, numerically by subject vertical stature. Only try this if you’re especially enterprising, and believe you are the greatest researcher who ever lived. Again, archive in order of either increasing value or decreasing value.
• Year of Death, chronologically by subject date of demise. Feeling particularly morbid? This one’s for you – store from the earliest moment one of these Afro American stalwarts passed away to the latest moment, or vice versa.
• Place of Birth, alphabetically by subject hometown. You can tackle this one of two ways (at least) – the first method is to group by state, then alphabetize by city name within each state grouping. On the other hand, you can just order all 32 stamps by subject city, regardless of state considerations.

These are just a few grouping and listing ideas to get you started. If you play around with concepts and themes and also look closely at the lives of these Black Heritage honorees, you might be able to come up with other conforming standards. (As a matter of fact, when I thought long and hard enough, I came up with a system that might be a little too grim for this relatively lighthearted topic. If anyone asks me for the details of this system under the Comments section, I’ll be more than happy to share it with you…)

If you do read extensively about all of these great men and women, yet no organization ideas come to mind, at least you would’ve learned a history lesson or two. And I ask you, “What’s wrong with that?”

For more stamp collecting tips and resources, visit Learn About Stamps.

Jerry Pinkney

Thomas Blackshear

Higgins Bond

Richard Sheaff