Maya Angelou: first Black woman on US coin

Maya Angelou is making change - 31st January 2022

The US Mint is breaking with tradition and adding diversity to the images struck on federal currency. Maya Angelou's image will grace the new US quarter, making history as the first Black woman to be depicted on the coin.

Angelou, the world-renowned poet, memoirist and activist, was a prolific writer, propelled into the public eye by her 1969 autobiography 'I know why the caged bird sings'. This narration of her early life under segregation in the Deep South sparked a career of over 30 highly respected works.

Angelou passed away aged 89 in 2014, having amassed scores of honorary degrees and bearing the Presidential Medal of Freedom - the highest US civilian honour, awarded by President Obama in 2010. Two decades earlier, President Bill Clinton invited Angelou to read her poetry at his inauguration ceremony, making her the first black woman to do so.

Angelou's depiction on the quarter - stood with welcoming, outstretched arms, a bird soaring behind her lit by the bright rising sun - is "inspired by her poetry and symbolic of the way she lived," a US Treasury Department figure remarked. The obverse of the coin retains its traditional likeness of the first US president, George Washington.

The historic quarter is the first in a series planned to raise the profile of pioneering women's roles in US society. Future issues honour the country's first woman astronaut, Sally Ride; as well as Wilma Mankiller, the Cherokee Nation's first woman tribal chief and fervent campaigner for indigenous rights, and Hollywood's first Chinese American woman star, Anna May Wong.

This move to redress a historic lack of women on US currency comes a year after President Biden appointed Janet Yellen the first woman to the role of US Treasury Secretary. A veteran of the Federal Reserve and the Council of Economic Advisers, Yellen stated: "Each time we redesign our currency, we have the chance to say something about our country - what we value, and how we've progressed as a society."

Biden's White House has also restarted plans to feature abolitionist Harriet Tubman on the 20 dollar bill, which had stalled under President Trump.