Harriet Tubman is to replace President Andrew Jackson’s face on the $20 bill, therefore becoming the first African-American person ever to be printed on a USA currency.
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U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi tweeted: “With Harriet Tubman & Suffragettes on $, we give our young girls an everyday reminder of their power to transform our history”.
U.S. Treasury spokesman Rob Runyan could not say when the redesigned bill would be issued.
Jackson’s image will now be on the back of the $20 bill.
“This gesture sends a powerful message, because of the tendency in American history, the background of excluding women and marginalizing them as national symbols”, said Riche Richardson, associate professor in the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University. Now she and Tubman’s family hope these new changes will continue moving America forward.
Bennefield said, “It’s been a long time, and I just don’t know that changing they money would be a way to honor her (Tubman)”.
The plan originally was to revamp the $10 note in 2020, possibly having a woman share it with Hamilton, while the $20 bill, one of the world’s most circulated banknotes, would wait another decade for redesign. Initially it was Alexander Hamilton on the $10 bill who was supposed to be removed.
The new $10 note will depict a historic 1913 protest for women’s suffrage at the Treasury and several women, black and white, involved in that campaign.
Lew didn’t go that far Wednesday.
There’s no date set for the release of the $20 bill, but it’s definitely slated to come after the new $10 bill.
US currency has undergone upgrades over the years to stay ahead of counterfeiters. “Today, I am excited to announce that for the first time in more than a century, the front of our currency will feature the portrait of a woman – Harriet Tubman on the United States dollars 20 note”, Lew said. During the Civil War she recruited slaves to the Union Army, organized a spy network and is credited with leading a charge that disrupted Southern supply lines.
The group Women on 20s campaigned for more than a year to get a woman on the front of the $20 bill, and Tubman was the public’s number one choice for that in a 2015 vote held by the group.
Amrita Myers, a historian at Indiana University, said honoring Tubman was appropriate.
The currency redesign will include other women, as well.
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On coins, Sacagawea, a Native American who assisted the Lewis and Clark Expedition, is featured on the gold dollar, and suffragist Susan B Anthony is on the silver dollar.
