THE ABOLITION OF COINS

 

What appears on circulating coinage is not just a visual choice. It is a statement about whose stories are considered foundational enough to be woven into the ordinary rituals of national life. It signals which histories we believe belong not only to museums or commemorations, but also to the nation's shared civic identity.

As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary in 2026, those design choices carry extraordinary weight.

Anniversaries are never neutral. They are acts of storytelling. They reveal not only what a nation honors, but what it chooses to leave out. At moments like this, remembrance becomes a test of conscience. It asks whether we are willing to tell the full story of who we are, or only the parts that make us comfortable.

A nation that claims to uphold its principles must decide where those ideals are made visible. That history of struggle and expansion of freedom was supposed to be reflected in the United States Mint's 2026 Semiquincentennial Quarters Program, the original circulating-coin series planned to mark the nation's 250th anniversary.

I know this to be true, not from the sidelines, but as someone brought into the process while it was still underway. In late May 2024, I was invited to work with the United States Mint as designs for the Frederick Douglass Abolitionism Quarter were being developed.

I met with Mint officials, reviewed evolving portfolios, and participated in formal discussions about how my great-great-great-grandfather, Frederick Douglass, would be represented. I also addressed the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee virtually during its public review, offering input before a final design was selected. This was not an abstract policy debate unfolding at a distance. It was a real, deliberative process, one in which I was intimately involved.

The coin concepts under consideration were not random. They were intentional. Among them were a quarter honoring abolition through Frederick Douglass, a coin recognizing the women who fought for the vote, and a quarter commemorating Ruby Bridges, the six-year-old child who desegregated an all-white school in New Orleans, exposing the lie that freedom, once declared, had been fully delivered.

These were not decorative choices. They were moral ones.

Had the recognition moved forward, the Frederick Douglass Abolitionism Quarter would have marked the first time an African American appeared on United States currency in general circulation, not as a commemorative issue, but as part of the nation's everyday economic life.

As a Douglass descendant, I know how significant that moment would have been, not only for our family, but for Black Americans who have long waited for the nation's civic symbols to reflect the reality that we have always been part of its story.

As I worked with the United States Mint on the Frederick Douglass Abolitionism Quarter, I returned again and again to a simple yet historically grounded truth. Frederick Douglass was not only an abolitionist. He was a founding father of the Second American Republic that emerged from the Civil War.

The nation that came into being through the Reconstruction Amendments, the country that abolished slavery, redefined citizenship, and attempted, however imperfectly, to make equality enforceable under law, was shaped profoundly by my great ancestor's moral vision. He did not merely critique the founding; he helped redefine the nation through a broader, more honest understanding of freedom.

As his descendant, this distinction is not abstract to me. It shaped how I approached the design discussions themselves. Some of the concepts depicted him mid-oration, hands raised, speaking from behind a podium. That imagery reinforced a familiar frame of protest and persuasion—powerful, but incomplete. It was not how he needed to be presented here.

We ultimately landed on a dignified profile portrait, one that deliberately echoed the visual language long reserved for presidents and founding fathers. The message was deliberate. Not Frederick Douglass speaking truth to power, but Frederick Douglass recognized as a statesman of conscience whose ideas helped shape the nation's moral and constitutional architecture.

 
Douglass Abolitionism Quarter Designs. The Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee selected AQ-O-01.

The casting aside of the original semiquincentennial coin program belongs squarely in that same lineage. It is not merely a retreat from diversity, but an assertion of power over memory, a deliberate narrowing of who is permitted to define the nation and whose struggles are deemed expendable.

What makes this erasure especially jarring is what it reveals about white supremacy and the machinery of exclusion. The figures removed from the coin program, Frederick Douglass, the suffragists, and Ruby Bridges, are not marginal characters in the American story. They are among the people who made the country better, who pressed and agitated for it to live up to its own ideals when those ideals were denied in practice.

To remove them from the nation's 250th anniversary is not an act of historical neutrality. It is a choice about whose contributions count, and whose struggles are deemed too unsettling to commemorate.

To read the complete article, see:
The Abolition of Coins (https://blackvoicenews.com/2025/12/27/douglass-coin-design-debate/)

To read the earlier E-Sylum articles, see:
U.S. MINT SEMIQUINCENTENNIAL COIN LAUNCH (https://www.coinbooks.org/v28/esylum_v28n50a23.html)
UNCHOSEN SEMIQUINCENTENNIAL COIN DESIGNS (https://www.coinbooks.org/v28/esylum_v28n50a24.html)

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