USPS Misquotes Maya Angelou’s Forever Stamp !?!
Yesterday The U.S. Postal Service announced their new “forever” stamp honoring visionary Maya Angelou, but the USPS Misquotes Maya Angelou’s Forever Stamp.
We not sure if you heard about this travesty, but there is no word that they are going to reprint Maya Angelou’s Forever Stamp with a different quote that is actually hers.
See, Maya Angelou’s quote on the stamp is “A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.”
Here is the problem, the quote is NOT Maya Angelou’s which was taken from Angelou’s famed 1969 autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, but the line was actually penned by Joan Walsh Anglund. The quote on the “forever” stamp comes from Joan Walsh’s 1967 book of poems A Cup of Sun.
Maya was using another authors quote and now the U.S. Postal Service is looking foolish, but they say that their NOT going to change anything.
[rpi]
Once Anglund confirmed the line was hers, and not Angelou’s, a spokesman for the USPS issued a statement explaining the snafu.
Mark Saunders wrote in an email to the Washington Post prior to the stamp’s public unveiling:
“Had we known about this issue beforehand, we would have used one of [Angelou’s] many other works. .?.?. The sentence held great meaning for her and she is publicly identified with its popularity.”
Some 1,700 Angelou supporters — including First Lady Michelle Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, singer Roberta Flack and Angelou’s “daughter-sister-friend” Oprah Winfrey — attended the Postal Service unveiling in Washington, D.C., Tuesday, where no mention was made of the quote’s origin.
Winfrey, 61, paid tribute to Angelou at the event, held nearly one year after her death in May 2014 at age 86.
The TV titan told attendees of her first impression of her friend’s posthumous honor:
“I literally LOLd.”
“I knew that is exactly what Maya would have done. Oh yeah, she’d get a big kick out of this moment today.
Despite the USPS misquote, Maya’s close friend Oprah announced that she bought 100 sets of stamps:
