This is Part 1 of the article, stay tuned for part 2 soon! 

Patriotism, a groundbreaking and honored author, architecture important to the heyday of the railroads and designs that combine modern artwork with an action roller sport comprise four new issues in March from the U.S. Postal Service.

The stamps include a single definitive stamp meant for use by nonprofits and a commemorative honoring author Toni Morrison, plus a set of five featuring historic railway stations and four stamps featuring original artwork on skateboards.

All except the nonprofit Patriotic Block are pressure-sensitive first-class domestic Forever stamps.

Patriotic Block

The Patriotic Block stamp used by nonprofits is sold in long coils but strips of 25 can be ordered for a limited time from the USPS Stamp Fulfillment Services.

The colors red, white and blue with a couple of stars and a half dozen stripes fill the Patriotic Block stamp issued March 1. The stamp is a nondenominated, nonprofit stamp intended for business mailings by authorized nonprofit organizations. (You should see it soon on those mailings seeking your charitable donations.)

Carol Beehler designed the stamp with art direction by Antonio Alcalá and you couldn’t mistake this for anything but a patriotic stamp.

The stamp displays the components found on the American flag — the stars and stripes — arranged in a four-quadrant block on a white background. The two identical quadrants at the top left and bottom right contain a white star on a blue field. The other two each hold three red stripes, which run vertically in the top right quadrant and horizontally in the bottom left.

The stamp – with an initial cost of 5 cents and sold only in coils of 3,000 and 10,000 – was issued March 1 with a formal first-day location of Liberty, New York. No national ceremony was planned and I could find no indication that a local group created one.

OK, the Postal Service clearly picked the right post office to designate for the first day of issue, but is there any true patriotic link to this place? Yes, there is, according to a little research.

The village of Liberty in New York’s Catskill Mountains and within the town of the same name (formed in 1807 and inspired by patriotism only 24 years after the end of the Revolutionary War; 2020 population est. 10,100). It sets about 75 miles northeast of Scranton, Pennsylvania. The heavily forested area was occupied for many centuries by segments of the Lenape people, who left by about 1730 after encroachment from Europeans, according to the Sullivan County Historical Society.

The land was settled during the Colonial era primarily by settlers from Connecticut. Known first as an area for timber and tanneries, dairy farming and agriculture became the main occupations. When the railroad arrived in 1873, the area also known for its natural beauty, became a magnet for tourism, including large hotels and resorts. Grossinger’s, in Liberty, was one the Catskills’ grandest Borscht Belt resorts in the post-World War II era until it closed in 1986. The hotel is said to have inspired the ambience of the hit movie “Dirty Dancing” (1987).

Earlier, the Liberty House was the area’s grandest resort there and was the site of many Lincoln Dinners and reunions of the Grand Army of the Republic. Ah, now we have some patriotism.

Founded in 1866, the Grand Army of the Republic was a fraternal organization composed of veterans of the Union Army, Union Navy, and the Marines who served in the American Civil War. The group had posts, or camps, across the country and held local, regional and national encampments for many decades. It dissolved in 1956 when its last member Albert Woolson, died at the age of 109. Liberty did not hold a national encampment, according to Library of Congress records.

The U.S. Postal Service offers strips of 25 Patriotic Block stamps with plate numbers for both coil roll sizes. Sale of the strips of 25 is limited to four per order, according to Linn’s Stamp News. I am unsure if can make that order via the website; but I ordered mine by calling the Postal Store at 844-737-7826.

A strip of 25 with plate number from the coil of 3,000 is item 751403; a strip of 25 with plate number from the coil of 10,000 is item 761603.  The printer is American Packaging Corp. / Banknote Corporation of America so the stamps from each coil should be identical, according to specs from the USPS.

Toni Morrison

The Toni Morrison stamp can be purchased here.

Esteemed novelist Toni Morrison (1931-2019) – whose works received the Nobel and Pulitzer prizes – was honored March 7 with a commemorative stamp issued March 7 in Princeton, New Jersey.

Photographer Deborah Feingold, whose portrait of Morrison appears on the stamp, joined the first day ceremony. The stamp features Feingold’s photograph of Morrison, who had been a professor at Princeton, against a bright yellow background. Ethel Kessler, a USPS art director, designed the stamp.

“It was a privilege to photograph Ms. Morrison, an amazing author who contributed so much to the world through her works,” said Feingold. “However, it is an absolute honor to know that the same photograph capturing a moment in time is now the subject of a Forever stamp. I am delighted that my photograph was used as a source to design the stamp and to participate in today’s unveiling and celebration.”

A letter of tribute from former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama was read and a video tribute from Oprah Winfrey was played during the ceremony. Barack Obama awarded Morrison the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012.

Morrison’s novel, Beloved, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988. In 1993, Morrison was the first African American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was awarded for her body of work, which at the time comprised the trilogy that started with Beloved as well as the critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977).

The Nobel Prize citation praised her as an author “who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.” She was the first Black woman of any nationality to win the prize. In her acceptance speech, Morrison said: “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

The Postal Service offered a detailed summary of Morrison’s career. Here is part of that summary:

Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford on Feb. 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, where she would later recall growing up in a family filled with storytelling and song. After graduating from high school in 1949, she enrolled at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and began using the name Toni, a reference to Anthony, the saint whose name she took when she was confirmed in the Roman Catholic Church at age 12. After graduating from Howard, she earned a master’s degree in English at Cornell University and later taught English at Texas Southern University and at Howard.

In 1965, she began working as a textbook editor. In 1968, she was promoted and moved to New York City to become the first African American woman senior editor at Random House, where she prioritized the publication of books by African American authors.

Eager to see the previously untold stories of African Americans portrayed in fiction, Morrison published her first novel in 1970 while working full time as an editor and raising two children. The Bluest Eye is an important inquiry into the life of an 11-year-old African American girl grappling with internalized negative racial stereotypes. The Bluest Eye is a mainstay of high school and college literature classes and a canonical novel about society’s neglect and mistreatment of African American girls.

Published in 1973, Morrison’s second novel, Sula, dramatizes the relationship between two intelligent women who grow up poor in small-town Ohio. The novel explores themes of escape and living outside the confines of conventional society. Sula was nominated for a National Book Award.

Her next novel, Song of Solomon, was a national bestseller and recipient of tremendous critical acclaim. Considered one of her masterpieces, Song of Solomon invokes generations of folklore as it follows a young man’s search for identity. The novel on the National Book Critics Circle Award and was the first African American selection in the Book of the Month Club since Richard Wright’s Native Son in 1940.

The decade that followed brought the author widespread recognition, beginning with President Jimmy Carter appointing her to the National Council on the Arts in 1980. After the publication of her 1981 novel Tar Baby, a study of racism and conflicting social identities on a Caribbean island, Morrison was the subject of a cover story in Newsweek. In 1983, she left her full-time job as an editor to continue teaching.

The publication of Beloved in 1987 brought Morrison a new level of critical success. The novel tells the story of a woman who escapes enslavement but murders her infant daughter to prevent her from the same fate she did. A harrowing rumination on trauma and the lingering, even haunting nature of the past, Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize and secured Morrison’s reputation as a great American writer.

In 1988, Morrison became the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. There she taught American literature and creative writing classes and co-founded the Princeton Atelier, a seminar program to foster collaboration across multiple disciplines.

The 1996 inclusion of Song of Solomon in Oprah’s Book Club brought even broader public awareness of her work. Three other novels were later included in the club, further increasing sales and attention.

Morrison died on Aug. 5, 2019, at the age of 88, from complications from pneumonia in New York City.