Calvin Massey

Calvin "Cal" Massey did almost everything before he designed a coin.

He was born in Philadelphia on February 10, 1926, and grew up in the small towns of Morton and Darby just outside the city. He played jazz piano well enough that his trio backed Aretha Franklin on Philadelphia stages, and he sketched John Coltrane during rehearsals led by his brother, the bandleader Bill Massey. He trained as an artist at the Hussian School of Art, and in the late 1940s and 1950s he drew comic books — early stories for titles like Astonishing and Journey Into Mystery, working in the same Marvel-predecessor pages as a young Stan Lee, years before Spider-Man existed.

Across nearly seventy years he made hundreds of paintings, illustrations and sculptures. The thread running through almost all of it was the same: powerful, dignified portraits of Black people — what one tribute called "powerful and regal images" of African Americans. He kept working into his nineties, and died on June 10, 2019, at 93.

Massey is best known to collectors for a single design, but it sits on top of a long career in relief.

For years he worked with the Franklin Mint, the private medal house, where he designed more than 200 commemorative medals — including the very first medal the company ever issued, honoring General Arthur MacArthur Jr. Relief — the art of raising a figure off a flat metal surface so it catches light — was his medium long before the U.S. Mint called.

When the organizers of the 1996 Atlanta Centennial Olympic Games commissioned art for the Games, Massey was one of the artists chosen, and his high-jump design became the obverse — the "heads" side — of a U.S. Mint commemorative silver dollar. It shows an athlete clearing the bar in the Fosbury Flop, the back-first technique Dick Fosbury made famous at the 1968 Olympics. The athlete is a young Black woman. By several accounts it was the only Olympic commemorative image that year to depict a Black person — a quiet, deliberate choice from an artist whose whole body of work argued for exactly that kind of presence.

The same instinct drove his most public commission. Massey designed the Patriots of African Descent Monument at Valley Forge, installed in 1993 — described as the only memorial on federal park land honoring the African-descended soldiers who fought in the founding of the United States.

The coin is worth knowing on its own terms.

It was struck in 1996 as one of sixteen coins in the United States' sprawling program for the Atlanta Centennial Olympic Games — a run that spanned 1995 and 1996 in clad, silver and gold. The High Jump dollar is 90% silver (10% copper), weighs 26.73 grams, and measures about 1.5 inches across. Massey designed the obverse; the Mint's Thomas D. Rogers designed the reverse, which carries the Atlanta Games logo.

For collectors, the interesting part is scarcity. The Mint authorized up to a million coins and came nowhere close. The 1996-P proof finished at roughly 124,502 struck; the 1996-D uncirculated at just 15,697 — one of the smallest silver-dollar mintages in the whole Atlanta program, and the reason that "D" coin trades at a real premium today. (Mint mark is the small letter — P for Philadelphia, D for Denver — that says which Mint struck the coin.)