Rosa Parks latest to grace USPS stamp
The U.S Postal Service has continued to churn out more stamps scheduled for issuance in 2013 despite the busy holiday shipping and mailing conditions. The sixth stamp announced for the new year follows suit in the agency's trend of celebrating milestone achievements in civil rights by featuring Rosa Parks. Businesses that will use the stamp to honor her memory can also use postal mailing software to ensure speedy delivery.
Rosa Parks is best known as a hallmark figure of the mid-20th century civil rights movement in the United States. In 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks was seated at the front of a city bus. However, when a white man demanded she move to the back of the bus and offer her seat to him, Parks refused, and in the process, defied discriminatory race segregation laws of the time and forever changed the social culture in America.
The stamp features a side profile portrait of Parks "emphasizing her quiet strength." The painting, done by Thomas Blackshear II, was based on a 1950s photograph. The stamp is the second in a three-stamp set celebrating civil rights achievements and will be issued as a Forever stamp. The first was a stamp commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln's edict that freed black slaves in the rebel South during the Civil War.