More than metal.
More than money.
More than nostalgia.
A coin is a declaration — of who a nation chooses to honor, what it chooses to remember, and what it is willing to erase.
Coins circulate values as surely as they circulate money.
That is why what happened at the U.S. Mint should unsettle anyone who cares about truth, history, and the health of our civic life.
At a recent ceremony unveiling coins meant to commemorate America’s 250th anniversary, the federal government rejected designs that would have acknowledged abolition, women’s suffrage, and the civil rights movement. These designs were not improvised or ideological. They were developed through a lawful, bipartisan process by the Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee, a body created by Congress to ensure that U.S. currency reflects the full American experience.
Those recommendations were ignored.
As reported by The New York Times on Dec. 14, 2025, proposed designs featuring Frederick Douglass, a suffragist carrying a “Votes for Women” banner, and six-year-old Ruby Bridges walking into a desegregated school were set aside in favor of a narrower, sanitized narrative — Pilgrims, founding fathers, familiar profiles. History without friction. Progress without struggle.
The Erasure Hidden in Plain Sight
So dismissive was the process that none of the advisory committee’s members attended the unveiling. That absence matters. When experts appointed to safeguard public trust collectively stay away, it reflects how profoundly the process itself had been disrespected — reduced to a formality rather than honored as the law intended.
This moment cannot be understood apart from the so-called anti-woke movement now shaping federal decisions. That movement does not reject ideology; it replaces honest history with denial. It insists that acknowledging injustice is more dangerous than ignoring it, that telling the full American story is divisive, and that comfort should take precedence over truth.
Under this logic, struggle becomes an inconvenience. Resistance becomes suspect. And the people who forced America to live up to its ideals are treated as optional to the national narrative.
This Is Bigger Than the U.S. Mint
This pattern does not stop with coins.
In early December 2025, the National Park Service publicly released its 2026 schedule of fee-free admission days. For the first time in years, Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth were omitted — despite both being federally recognized holidays and long-standing days of free access for families and communities. At the same time, Flag Day was added as a free-admission day. That date happens to coincide with the birthday of the sitting president, who is simultaneously advancing efforts to place his own likeness on U.S. currency. No law changed. No explanation was offered. But the message was unmistakable.
That is priority.
It reveals a governing posture defined by arrogance and narcissism — the belief that personal glorification belongs on national symbols while collective struggle does not. It is the same impulse that dismisses expert committees, rewrites history, and treats democratic norms as optional rather than binding.
That is not a coincidence.
Let us be clear: telling the whole truth is not wokeness.
This is not harmless symbolism; it is the misuse of power with lasting civic consequences.
Coins circulate values as surely as they circulate money. They teach people — quietly, persistently — who mattered enough to be remembered and who did not. To erase abolitionists, suffragists, and civil rights heroes from our currency is to teach a false lesson: that freedom was inevitable, that equality came easily, and that resistance was unnecessary.
That is a dangerous lesson to teach or reinforce — for anyone.
It advances a broader fiction — that America was and is broadly equitable, that disparities are exaggerated, and that unfinished work is merely a matter of opinion. This is modern racism in institutional form. Not always loud. Not always crude. But effective precisely because it hides behind procedure, omission, and respectability.
And when language itself comes under pressure — when words like democracy and journalism are treated as suspect in some funding and policy spaces, and when the language of diversity, equity, and inclusion is routinely reframed as a threat rather than a civic commitment — the pattern becomes unmistakable. Control the vocabulary, and you constrain the imagination. Narrow the story long enough, and people forget what was ever possible.
Let us be clear: telling the whole truth is not wokeness, whatever that word is supposed to mean.
Telling the whole truth is the foundation of a functioning democracy, no matter how deliberately that word is being stripped of meaning and treated as suspect in certain circles. A democracy worthy of the name requires memory, honesty, and the courage to confront complexity.
This is not a burden the Black press carries alone—but it is one the Black press has long carried faithfully.
The Black press exists because truth has never been evenly distributed. Because official narratives have often excluded Black lives, Black resistance, and Black achievement. And because someone has always had to insist that America be judged not only by its promises, but by its practices.
Today, that insistence is shared by educators of all races, museums committed to accuracy, historians and archivists, lawmakers who respect democratic norms, corporations and philanthropies that understand inclusion as strength, and citizens who refuse to confuse comfort with truth.
That coalition matters — and it must act.
Silence, too, is a choice.
Support the Black press and independent journalism. Demand congressional oversight when lawful processes are ignored. Stand with educators and cultural institutions that refuse to sanitize history. Engage civically, including voting, because these decisions are made by people placed in power by elections, and more decisions are coming as the 2026 midterms approach.
Silence, too, is a choice.
What’s in a coin?
Memory.
Values.
Power.
And if we allow our history to be reminted without resistance — stripped of struggle and polished for comfort — we will have taught people that truth is negotiable, that power need not listen, and that democracy itself can be diminished quietly, while some insist the word is the problem rather than the deliberate erosion of its practice.
History is not woke.
It is real.
And telling it whole is not radical.
It is the bare minimum a nation owes its people — and its future.
Dr. Frances Murphy Draper is CEO and publisher of The AFRO-American Newspapers.