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Description
This listing is for 2013 USA Philatelic (Limited Edition) Courage Magazine Featuring Rosa Parks on Cover Volume 18 Quarter 1.
Rosa Parks: Celebrating Courage
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to surrender her seat on a municipal bus to a white man. Her simple, quiet act of defiance set off a chain of events that not only led to the Montgomery bus boycott — a major milestone in the civil rights movement — but also to the fulfillment of an artist’s long-held dream.
Years ago, an apprentice of famed illustrator Mark English looked with admiration as his mentor designed stamp after stamp for the U.S. Postal Service. Dreaming of one day following in such footsteps, he envisioned what it might be like to create even one stamp that could bear his artistic legacy for generations to come.
Now, that young apprentice — Thomas Blackshear II — is an award-winning illustrator who, with this month’s issuance of the Rosa Parks stamp (with the support of the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute of Self Development), is celebrating the 22nd postage stamp of his career. And to do so while honoring a woman who helped change the course of his life is a reality that far surpasses Blackshear’s early dreams.
Although the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott stamp in the To Form a More Perfect Union pane (2005) celebrated the outcome of Parks’s boldness, Rosa Parks — commemorating the 100th anniversary of her birth — is the first stamp to honor the activist directly.
“She’s a woman who we all admire for being courageous,” says art director Derry Noyes, who worked with Blackshear on the design. “Anybody would have seized this as one of the most important stamps the Postal Service has ever put out.”
Feeling the weight of portraying Parks for history, the pair began sorting through photographs, aiming to find one that would convey her inner strength and beauty — “to make this a really strong portrait of a really strong woman,” says Noyes.
But finding the right photo proved to be the most challenging part of the process, says Blackshear. Not only because so few photos of Parks exist, but also because “You want to make sure whatever image used is going to be instantly recognizable” once it’s reduced to stamp size.
After settling on an image of Parks taken in the police office following her indictment as one of the leaders of the resulting bus boycott, Blackshear began to sketch. Trying to capture the sense of who she was and what she was getting ready to face, he created a first drawing that showed a rather serious, pensive Parks set against the backdrop of a bus window.
But the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee felt that she looked a bit too stern or sad in this early iteration. So Blackshear reworked the drawing in such a way that “with just a very subtle change, he maintained that pensive look but gave her a hint of a smile,” says Noyes. The ever-so-slight upturn in the mouth was enough to sufficiently change her mood while also maintaining a sense of her quiet strength.
“We’ve made a visual icon,” adds Noyes of the final stamp art, a gouache painting on illustration board. Rosa Parks is herself an icon, she adds, but this stamp will serve as the definitive image honoring the courage of a woman who changed history — quite the design accomplishment for one former young apprentice.
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