The newly designed $20 will no doubt look very much different than this. But it will include a woman important to the struggle against racism, according to the Treasury. And that makes fearless Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman a top contender for the spot.
An unnamed senior federal official told CNN Saturday that Treasury Secretary Jack Lew will announce this week sometime that Alexander Hamilton will remain on a newly designed $10 bill but a woman will replace Andrew Jackson on the $20. Just don’t expect to see bills with whomever that replacement is pouring out of the nation’s ATMs anytime soon. Newly designed $5 and $10 bills will show up first. Because of the lengthy design and anti-counterfeiting measures, if Hillary Clinton becomes president and serves two terms, she’ll be long out of office by the time a woman appears on the $20—in 2030 at the earliest, according to Treasury officials:
Lew announced last summer that he was considering redesigning the $10 bill to include the portrait of a woman. The decision to make the historic change at the expense of Hamilton drew angry rebukes from fans of the former Treasury Secretary. The pro-Hamilton movement gained steam after the smash success of the hip-hop Broadway musical about his life this year.
Those pressures led Lew to determine that Hamilton should remain on the front of the bill. Instead, a mural-style depiction of the women's suffrage movement -- including images of leaders such as Susan B. Anthony -- will be featured on the back of the bill.
Back in March 2014, Jillian Keenan at Slate proposed getting the genocidal Jackson off the $20 and replaced with a woman. Matt Iglesias at Vox picked up the theme in July that year. And in May, the non-profit group Women on $20s appeared, asking supporters to sign a petition to dump Jackson and to say who they thought the replacement should be. Over time, the candidates were winnowed down to 15: Alice Paul, Clara Barton, Frances Perkins, Susan B. Anthony, Rachel Carson, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Betty Friedan, Shirley Chisholm, Sojourner Truth, Rosa Parks, Barbara Jordan, Margaret Sanger, Patsy Mink, Harriet Tubman and Eleanor Roosevelt.
Eventually, the group got 600,000 signatures on a petition, a plurality of whom picked Harriet Tubman as the best of those many good choices. This made me particularly happy because Tubman was my first choice, too. The United States should make a big deal out of the leaders of resistance in its history—its disrupters—who are too often vilified in their own time and ignored afterward despite their essential contributions to a better America.
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