CHARLOTTE, NC — The U.S. Postal Service will host a Gwen Ifill stamp dedication on March 17, from 10:30 a.m. to noon, at Friendship Missionary Baptist Church, located at 3400 Beatties Ford Road.

The stamp dedication ceremony is sponsored jointly by the North Carolina Ebony Society of Philatelic Events & Reflections (ESPER) and The Friendship Seniors in the Spotlight Stamp Club. The event free and open to the public.

The stamps and philatelic items will be available for purchase and the Postal Service will be providing free stamp cancellations for Gwen Ifill pictorial postmark at the dedication ceremony.

The Gwen Ifill Forever Stamp was issued on Jan. 30, and is the 43rd stamp in the Black Heritage series. News of the stamp is being shared with the hashtags #GwenIfillForever and #BlackHeritageStamps.

Gwen Ifill Biography
Gwen Ifill was one of the most esteemed journalists in American history and among the first African Americans to hold prominent positions in both broadcast and print journalism.

After graduating from college in 1977, Ifill worked at The Boston Herald American, The Baltimore Evening Sun, The Washington Post and The New York Times. In 1994, she took a broadcast job at NBC, where she covered politics in the DC bureau. Five years later, she joined PBS; she became the senior political correspondent for “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” and moderator and managing editor of “Washington Week” — the first woman and first African American to moderate a major television news-analysis show.

In 2013, she became co-anchor of the “PBS NewsHour,”part of the first all-female team to anchor a national nightly news program. Ifill died in 2016.

Among Ifill’s honors were the Radio Television Digital News Foundation’s Leonard Zeidenberg First Amendment Award (2006), Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center’s Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism (2009) and induction into the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame (2012). In 2015, she was awarded the Fourth Estate Award by the National Press Club. She received numerous honorary degrees and served on the boards of the News Literacy Project and the Committee to Protect Journalists, which renamed its Press Freedom Award in her honor.

The 2016 John Chancellor Award was posthumously awarded to Ifill by the Columbia Journalism School. In 2017, the Washington Press Club Foundation and the “PBS NewsHour” created a journalism fellowship named for Ifill. Her alma mater, Simmons University, opened the Gwen Ifill College of Media, Arts, and Humanities in 2018.

Customers may purchase stamps and other philatelic products through The Postal Store at usps.com/shop, by calling 800-STAMP24 (800-782-6724), by mail through USA Philatelic or at Post Office locations nationwide. The Gwen Ifill stamp will be issued in panes of 20.

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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