What:

A special 45-min. Black History Month ceremony to feature an unveiling of a 26” x 38” enlargement of the new Gwen Ifill Forever Stamp, the 43rd issuance in the Postal Service’s Black Heritage stamp series. 

When:

 10 a.m. on Friday, February 28, 2020

Where:

Springfield Avenue Station Post Office
290 Springfield Avenue
Newark, New Jersey 07103

Who:

Michael Deignan – District Manager, USPS Northern NJ District
Silvia Glover – Acing Postmaster, Newark NJ
David H. Lippman – Sr. PIO Dept. of Communications, City of Newark NJ   
Della Moses Walker – Director, New Jersey Chapter of E.S.P.E.R.
                                                   (African American Stamp Society)
Dennis Martin Jr.  - Customer Service Manager, USPS Newark NJ

Background:

Among the first African Americans to hold prominent positions in both broadcast and print journalism, Gwen Ifill was a trailblazer in the profession.

After graduating from college in 1977, Ifill’s first job as a journalist was at The Boston Herald American. She later worked at The Baltimore Evening Sun, The Washington Post and The New York Times, where she was a White House correspondent and covered Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in 1992.

In 1994, Ifill moved to NBC, where she covered politics in the Washington bureau. Five years later, she joined PBS as senior political correspondent for “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” and moderator and managing editor of “Washington Week,” becoming the first woman and first African American to moderate a major television news-analysis show. During her career, Ifill covered seven presidential campaigns and, in 2004, she became the first African American female journalist to moderate a vice-presidential debate. She also moderated the 2008 vice-presidential debate. In 2013, Ifill became part of the first all-female team to anchor a daily national broadcast news show, “PBS NewsHour.” Ifill died in 2016.

Among Ifill’s honors were the Radio Television Digital News Foundation’s Leonard Zeidenberg First Amendment Award (2006), Harvard’s 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 “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 the fall of 2018.

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