First, the U.S. Mint nixed “Taxation Without Representation” as the slogan for the D.C. quarter. Now, the Mint has narrowed the choices for the design of the coin’s reverse to three figures from the city’s history: Benjamin Banneker, Duke Ellington and Frederick Douglass.

Each has his merits, of course, but this is a weak field. The problem is not any lack of achievement on the part of the candidates. No, it’s the tenuousness of their connections to the District, which are important but way too brief (Banneker); an accident of birth that had little meaning in his ultimate accomplishments (Ellington); and almost irrelevant to his greatness (Douglass).

Just as almost every state in the union decided that no one person captured the essence of its history and identity, the District should have chosen an inanimate symbol to put on the coin, which so many people fought so hard to get added to the Mint’s state quarters program. (The feds had zero interest in including Washington in the program. The District was added only at the last minute, and then was lumped, insultingly, into the same category as American Samoa, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands. I kid you not.)

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