White House to Accelerate Effort to Put Harriet Tubman’s Picture on $20
On the day before President Biden signed four new executive orders designed to promote racial equality, his administration also took steps to put a woman who did exactly that on the $20 bill. Her name is Harriet Tubman, and she will be the first Black person to ever appear on the face of any American currency.
In her January 25 press briefing, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters that Biden’s new Treasury Department is looking for ways to accelerate the process of putting Tubman on the front of the ATM staple, an idea that ground to a halt under Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. Tubman, an ex-slave known as “Moses,” was an iconic conductor on the Underground Railroad. Her image would replace that of slave-owning President Andrew Jackson.
Psaki said, "It's important that our notes -- our money -- reflect the history and diversity of our country, and Harriet Tubman's image gracing the new $20 note would certainly reflect that." She said the administration is “exploring ways to speed up the process” of redesigning the bill that would feature Tubman on the front and possibly a statue of Andrew Jackson on the back, if the Obama-era design proposal is retained.
The idea to have Tubman replace President Jackson began in 2016 when President Obama’s Treasury Secretary, Jacob Law, began the process of redesigning the bill with a “sweeping and symbolic redrawing” of the currency. But the new bill was not completed during the Obama era. And now, after five years of inertia, that Mnuchin claimed were “technical,” not political, the idea is alive again.
Originally, the changeover was scheduled to take place in 2020 to coincide with the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage, a cause promoted by Tubman.
Tubman was born a slave in Maryland in 1822. She escaped in 1849 but returned to rescue others. Even after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, which allowed bounty hunters to capture slaves who had made it to the North, she continued her efforts and took her escaped travelers to Canada.
The switch on the bill from the picture of a racist to that of an abolitionist set off a flurry of opposition when it was first announced in 2016. The debate centered not only on Jackson’s deeds and misdeeds, but on the propriety of judging history according to contemporary values.
Mnuchin’s delay became the subject of an investigation that the Treasury Department’s Inspector General conducted at the request of Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY). Schumer sought to learn the reason for the delay that Mnuchin announced during a Congressional hearing in May 2019 when he said the redesign would not go into effect until 2026. He also would not commit to Tubman being featured on the note. The investigation subsequently found no wrongdoing by Mnuchin.
As Obama’s Treasury department began the redesign process, opponents fought back. Some argued that Jackson, who was known as “Old Hickory,” was the first common man to become president after six aristocrats. He is credited by historians for blocking the recharter of the Second Bank of the United States and preventing South Carolina from seceding from the Union following a tariff dispute in 1832. As a heroic general during the War of 1812, he racked up a series of victories against the British.
On the opposing side, Jackson is accused of owning slaves, removing five tribes of Native Americans from their homelands, and forcing the creation of the Trail of Tears, a 1,000-mile march that would cause the death of 4,000 Cherokees.
During his campaign for president in 2016, Donald Trump called Jackson a “fellow populist” and said the effort to honor Tubman was “pure political correctness.” When he became President, he hung a picture of Jackson in the Oval Office.
The new Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, the first woman to hold that position, was confirmed by the Senate on January 25. She has not spoken about the new Tubman bill, but the Biden administration has.
And so has the NAACP. Derrick Johnson, chief executive and president, told The Washington Post, “Harriet Tubman lived at a time when Congress, the Supreme Court and our nation was abhorrently paralyzed over whether it was legal to allow one person to own another. In a true act of liberty and independence, Tubman freed herself from slavery, only to return south 19 more times, risking her own life and freedom, to save her family and hundreds of others from a life spent in slavery.
“The legacy of Harriet Tubman and other Black Americans who built the nation we know today must be recognized and celebrated in our schools, culture and currency. The NAACP applauds the Biden administration’s announcement to change the design of the $20 bill to commemorate the full story of the significant figures in our history.”
The Treasury Department has not provided a timeline for the new design to take effect. They explained that the redesign and process of putting new currency into circulation would be a lengthy process. It would have to include protecting against counterfeiting and making sure all new bills would be ATM-compatible.
