“You need a theme,” says Warachal E. Faison, board president of the Ebony Society of Philatelic Events and Reflections, a group dedicated to the collection of stamps relating to the African diaspora.
It’s fine to start acquiring whatever stamps strike your fancy, but to be a serious philatelist requires a more focused approach and the research required to understand stamps in a historical context.
Faison’s themes include Black history, women and health care and science (she works as a senior medical director at Pfizer).
Among her collection’s highlights: an illustrated Swedish stamp of Toni Morrison, released after her 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, and a sheet of 10-cent stamps featuring Booker T. Washington, the first African-American person put on a U.S. stamp, in 1940.
Faison’s older brother, Walter, who serves on the board with her, collects Martin Luther King Jr. stamps from around the world.....
