For at least two reasons, it seems appropriate that my father’s collection lacks the stamp I want to highlight as the #stampoftheday on Juneteenth, which marks the fact that the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed all slaves in the Confederacy was announced in Galveston, Texas, the last holdout of the rebel forces. With that announcement, slavery was now officially banned in all of the former Confederate states.

There’s no stamp marking that occasion. But in 1940, the Post Office issued a 3-cent stamp marking the 75th anniversary of the 13th Amendment, which declared that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude” would be allowed in the United States. Issued only months after the first Post Office had issued the first stamp to portray a black man (Booker T. Washington), today’s stamp portrays the Emancipation Memorial (also known as the Freedman’s Memorial Monument), a statue by Thomas Bell that stands in Lincoln Park, a large park in Washington’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.

The statue, which was funded in large measure by donations from people who had been enslaved, depicts Lincoln holding the Emancipation Proclamation, with a newly freed slave with broken shackles, kneeling before him, supposedly preparing to stand and embrace his freedom. The former slave is Archer Alexander, the last man captured under the Fugitive Slave Act. Many have taken issue with the fact that statue depicts Archer kneeling below Lincoln, including Frederick Douglass who said “a more manly attitude would have been indicative of freedom.”

Speaking at the statue’s dedication in April 1876, on the 11th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination (and less than a year before the shameful deal that would end Reconstruction and usher in the Jim Crow era), Douglass offered a stark, honest and thought provoking appraisal of Lincoln. Lincoln, he noted, “was preeminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men [who] was ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of this country.” Notably, at the start of the war, Lincoln did not object to the fact that slavery was legal in many states. It was its expansion that he opposed.

But Douglass also observed that Lincoln came around and freed slaves for a variety of reasons, not all of the noble. And he went on to make powerful observations about effective political leadership. Had Lincoln “put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union, he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the American people and rendered resistance to rebellion impossible,” Douglass said, which meant that “viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent. But measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.”

And that, Douglass noted was what mattered in the end because, “despite the mist and haze that surrounded [Lincoln]; despite the tumult, the hurry, and confusion of the hour, we [i.e. Blacks] 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. It mattered little to us what language he might employ on special occasions; it mattered little to us, when we fully knew him, whether he was swift or slow in his movements; it was enough for us that Abraham Lincoln was at the head of a great movement, and was in living and earnest sympathy with that movement, which, in the nature of things, must go on until slavery should be utterly and forever abolished in the United States.”

So the fact that we’re so far from the promise of the 13th Amendment and the Emancipation Proclamation and the fact that the statue honoring those accomplishments has, in the kneeling figure, an inappropriate image, make it seem fitting that my father’s collection lacks this stamp. Instead, all I have is a page in an album that I think he bought on a whim at some point in the 1970s, showing where that stamp should should be.

But the stamp’s story – specifically Douglass’ frank remarks – make me think that despite our flaws, progress and positive change were, are, and always will be possible, even after times when we have moved backwards. As Douglass said of Lincoln’s assassination, “no purpose of the rebellion was to be served by it. It was the simple gratification of a hell-black spirit of revenge. But it has done good after all. It has filled the country with a deeper abhorrence of slavery and a deeper love for the great liberator.” Hopefully, we’ll use these current dark times to again “fill the country with a deeper abhorrence” of the injustices that have to finally be addressed.

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