Over the past year, I’ve added stamps portraying Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, and Karl Marx to the many, many knickknacks on three small shelves in my basement office.

The stamps – which collectively are today’s penultimate #stampoftheday offering—have joined a diverse array of objects that include (in no particular order) a wooden birdhouse my mother put into a family Yankee swap, the remnants of the small travel chess and backgammon set that my father carried through Europe in 1944 and 1945, the plastic hardhat Jody gave me at the party celebrating the publication “MegaProjects”, and a small plastic person I bought at a flea market in France during a family bicycle trip when we added a character named Francois Poulet to our menagerie of characters.

I think I know why I chose to add these three stamps to this display – which also includes Gumby, a small sliding baseball player that Jody once put on a birthday cake, a Barack Obama bobble-head doll, and the pins that my mother got when my brother and then I became Eagle Scouts.

The Marx stamp is there not only to remind me of the importance of class and business interests in understanding stamps (and many other things) but also because I thought it was odd to find him on a stamp that was clearly connected to Germany and, probably, because it reminds me that my father fought against Nazi Germany. The stamp was issued in 1947 by the government of Rheinland-Pfalz, an entity created by the French military administration in Allied-occupied Germany that in 1949 became a state in the new Federal Republic of Germany. The stamp series itself honored a delightfully eclectic set of people, places , structures and activities associated with the region including Marx, Beethoven, Gutenberg and Charlemagne as well as a bridge, two cathedrals, two castles, and a picture of a girl carrying grapes.

The 3-cent stamp portraying Anthony, which was issued in 1936, is on the shelf because it’s a powerful reminder of how this #stampoftheday odyssey has underscored the dominant public role played by white men through much of our history. That’s been highlighted time and time again by the fact that so few women were portrayed on stamps until at least the 1960s, and, unlike Anthony, the women who were portrayed tended to be significant but more benign figures, like Red Cross founder Clara Barton or Girl Scout founder Juliette Gordon Low.

Notably, the stamp made Anthony just the fifth woman to be portrayed on a US postage stamp since 1851, when the first postage stamps were issued. Moreover, Anthony was arguably the first women to appear on a stamp primarily because of what she did. The women who preceded her were Queen Isabella of Spain (whose patronage made Christopher Columbus’ voyage to America possible); Martha Washington, Pocahontas, and James Whistler’s mother (whose image from a painting was replicated on a 1934 stamp honoring the “Mothers of America.”)

Anthony, on the other hand, was uncompromising firebrand, whose last public speech, made in 1906 a month before she died, ended with her asserting (even though she had been fighting for the right to vote for decades) “failure is impossible.” Such fighting words have seemed especially resonant in the past year.

When I started this stamp odyssey, I had no idea how much the stamps would help me explore and better understand this country’s shameful racial history. Nor did I have any idea of how frequently and how meaningfully the stamps illustrating that history would take me back to Frederick Douglass.

The first, and most powerful time this happened was on Juneteenth (Friday, June 19th) when I wrote about a stamp, issued in 1940, showing the Lincoln Emancipation Statue in Washington, DC. Dedicated in 1876, it depicts Lincoln holding the Emancipation Proclamation, with a newly freed slave with broken shackles, kneeling, but preparing to stand, in front of him. In that post, I quoted extensively from, the speech that Douglass gave the day the statue was dedicated.

It’s an extraordinary speech because Douglass did not gloss over the flaws of Lincoln (who is shown here on the stamp issued on April 14, 1866, a year after he was killed). But he also didn’t downplay Lincoln’s important accomplishments. As Douglass noted: “Despite the mist and haze that surrounded [Lincoln]; despite the tumult, the hurry, and confusion of the hour, we were able to take a comprehensive view of Abraham Lincoln, and to make reasonable allowance for the circumstances of his position. We saw him, measured him, and estimated him [and]…we came to the conclusion that the hour and the man of our redemption had somehow met in the person of Abraham Lincoln.”

Douglass, it turns out, also offered wise guidance on how we might publicly incorporate such understanding into the current debates about what to do with historic monuments that involve people with troubling back stories. In a little-known letter published a few days after the statue was dedicated, he noted, the while the statue was “admirable…it does not…tell the whole truth and perhaps no one monument could be made to tell the whole truth of any subject which it might be designed to illustrate.”

“The negro though rising, is still on his knees and nude,” he explained. “What I want to see before I die is a monument representing the negro, not couchant on his knees like a four-foot animal but erect on his feet like a man.”

“There is,” he added, “room…for both.”

Karl, Susan, and Frederick are on my shelf to remind me not only to think about – and tell—”the whole truth” and, in doing so, to make room for multiple perspectives that provide that truth. Lincoln may join them as a reminder of the amazing ways that people can change and even grow into greatness.

These are the lessons I want to remember when I stop writing these daily missives.

Stay well, be safe, fight for justice, and work for peace.