Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew announced Wednesday that African-American abolitionist Harriet Tubman will be featured on the front of the $20 bill. This is EPIC, in fact I tend to think it’s beyond epic. “I used to say, I could feel the bones rattling from the earth of how she’s feeling, because of how things happen to us as black people”. She was enslaved and found her way to freedom and decided that it wasn’t enough to really free herself. By placing Tubman’s face on paper bills where we see men such as George Washington and Abraham Lincoln places her in a stratosphere reserved for the greats of the young nation’s history.
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Sofia, 11, of Cambridge, Massachusetts wrote President Barack Obama a letter back in 2014 after completing a school project on historic American heroes and noticing there are now no women heroes honored on our standard USA currency.
Eighty-one percent of Democrats polled Thursday by SurveyMonkey support putting Tubman – who helped hundreds of slaves find freedom via the “underground railroad” – on the $20, reported Politico, while 50 percent of independents and only 34 percent of Republicans agree.
“She represents the best of America and believed in the promise of America”, said Karen Hill, president and chief executive officer of the Harriet Tubman Home Inc., an Auburn museum.
As for Jackson, history has been less kind.
It has been confirmed that Harriet Tubman will replace Andrew Jackson on the front of the 20 dollar bill.
For Tennesseans in Congress, however, there’s nothing to debate: Jackson belongs on the $20 bill. It would have simply replaced Alexander Hamilton with, of all people, Susan B. Anthony – the women’s rights leader who today is known primarily for appearing on not one but two failed iterations of the $1 coin, first from 1979-1981 and then again in 1999. “Maybe we do the $2 bill, or we do another bill” for Tubman, he said. “Andrew Jackson had a great history, and I think it is very rough when you take somebody off the bill”, said Trump. And the number of smaller bills like the $20 note is slated to increase.
Throughout history, Tubman forged ahead as an African American woman and a crusader in the anti slavery movement-most notably as a conductor for The Underground Railroad.
A image of what a new $20 dollar bill featuring Harriet Tubman has been circulating online.
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GOP Rep. John J. Duncan of Knoxville suggested his own solution to the Jackson vs. Tubman quandary.
