WELDON – Kicking off activities for the 2013 Lyceum Series of Special Events at Halifax Community College (HCC) will be a U.S. Postal Service Stamp Dedication on Tuesday, Feb. 5 at 11 a.m. in The Centre. The event is free and open to the public. This year, stamps in honor of Rosa Parks and the Emancipation Proclamation will be dedicated.
The U.S. Postal Service 2013 Rosa Parks (Forever®) stamp honors the life of this extraordinary American activist who became an iconic figure in the civil rights movement. In 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks courageously refused to give up her seat on a municipal bus to a white man, defying the discriminatory laws of the time.
The response to Parks's arrest was a boycott of the Montgomery bus system that lasted for more than a year and became an international cause célèbre. In 1956, in a related case, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that segregating Montgomery buses was unconstitutional.
The stamp honoring Rosa Parks is one of three stamps in the civil rights set celebrating freedom, courage and equality being issued in 2013. It is being issued as a Forever® stamp. Forever stamps are always equal in value to the current First-Class Mail one-ounce rate.
The U.S. Postal Service also commemorates the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. The proclamation, signed by President Abraham Lincoln on Jan. 1, 1863, declared that all slaves in the rebel states to be free. To commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, the Postal Service introduced a limited-edition Forever Stamp at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., which houses the historic document.
HCC President Dr. Ervin Griffin and Weldon Postmaster Andrea Green will be dedicating officials at the event. More details on these stamps can be found at https://www.usps.com/. For more information on the 2013 HCC Lyceum Series of Special Events, visit http://www.halifaxcc.edu/lyceum/.
The Postal Service receives no tax dollars for operating expenses and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations.
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A self-supporting government enterprise, the U.S. Postal Service is the only delivery service that reaches every address in the nation, 151 million residences, businesses and Post Office Boxes. The Postal Service receives no tax dollars for operating expenses, and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations. With 32,000 retail locations and the most frequently visited website in the federal government, usps.com, the Postal Service has annual revenue of more than $65 billion and delivers nearly 40 percent of the world’s mail. If it were a private sector company, the U.S. Postal Service would rank 35th in the 2011 Fortune 500. In 2011, the U.S. Postal Service was ranked number one in overall service performance, out of the top 20 wealthiest nations in the world, Oxford Strategic Consulting. Black Enterprise and Hispanic Business magazines ranked the Postal Service as a leader in workforce diversity. The Postal Service has been named the Most Trusted Government Agency for six years and the sixth Most Trusted Business in the nation by the Ponemon Institute.
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