Harriet Tubman to join Andrew Jackson on $20 bill

The reactions to Wednesday’s announcement that Harriet Tubman is going to be the new face of the $20 bill have been wide ranging: praise, contempt, as well as sobering reminders that America’s economy was founded on the backs of people like Tubman through slavery.

Is the Treasury Department’s move retribution after centuries of very male and very white currency in America? And yet, is this the most apt way to honor a woman who fought to be free from circulating as someone else’s currency?

This is precisely because it’s a purely symbolic question rather than a pragmatic one — it touches some of the deepest nerves in American politics. Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren calls it “dividing the country” while Donald Trump has denounced the move as “pure political correctness.“

People who were initially enthusiastic about the change when word leaked Wednesday morning were perhaps disillusioned to learn later that day that Jackson hasn’t been exiled from the bill entirely. Meanwhile, fans of both the musical Hamilton and the strong-state tradition in American politics are simply heightened to learn that America’s first treasury secretary has gotten a reprieve relative to the initial plan to replace him with a woman.

Donald Trump said Thursday that he thinks putting Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill and moving Andrew Jackson to the back of the bill is “pure political correctness.”

“Andrew Jackson had a great history,” Trump told Matt Lauer on NBC’s Today. “I think it’s very rough when you take somebody off the bill. Andrew Jackson had a history of tremendous success for the country.”

Some would call that sweet justice, but the decision to include a woman on our paper currency is long overdue, especially when compared to other countries.

We spent the past week compiling data on the world’s 180 recognized currencies, with several questions in mind: How many countries’ currencies feature at least one woman? What percentage of the world’s money pictures a woman? And which women are the most well-represented?

On Wednesday it was announced that Harriet Tubman, American hero and abolitionist, would be replacing Andrew Jackson on the front of the $20 bill. It’s a historic (perhaps controversial) decision, that will go into effect in 2030. But as Stephen Colbert pointed out on last night’s episode of The Late Show, it’s also a sign of how little progress has been made.

“Apparently, in the ‘what to put on our money priority list,’ woman and African American both came after Cyclops pyramid,” he joked.

The news that Harriet Tubman will be replacing Andrew Jackson on the front of the $20 bill is significant for all sorts of reasons. Slave owner Jackson is being pushed to the back of the bill by a former slave; Tubman, who led more than 300 slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad, is displacing a president who drove 16,000 Cherokees (and thousands more from other native tribes) out of their homelands on the Trail of Tears.

But even if Tubman weren’t displacing Jackson, the $20 would be the perfect bill to honor her, because the sum of $20 played a significant role in her life on two separate occasions.

Harriet Tubman is officially set to be the first woman in history on a US dollar bill — and most people don’t know the half of what she did.

In a 2015 episode of Comedy Central’s Drunk History, Crissle — a comedian and co-host of The Read podcast — downs drinks and launches into a brilliant, booze-soaked tribute to Tubman, educating host Derek Waters and viewers on the activist’s crucial contributions to the Civil War.

On Wednesday, the Treasury Department announced that a portrait of Harriet Tubman will grace future $20 bills starting in 2030. It’s a fitting, and long overdue tribute to a genuine hero of American history who helped end the gravest evil this nation ever perpetrated.

But the department also announced that the man currently on the bill — perhaps America’s worst president and the only one guilty of perpetrating a mass act of ethnic cleansing — will still be on there: Andrew Jackson. This is unacceptable. Jackson was a disaster of a human being on every possible level, and should not be commemorated positively by any branch of American government. And as a slave owner, putting him on the other side of Tubman’s bill is particularly disgraceful.

The Treasury Department will put Harriet Tubman’s face on the $20 bill, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced Wednesday. But contrary to previous reports that Tubman would replace Jackson entirely, Lew told reporters that Jackson will still appear on the back of the $20 bill.

It was expected that a woman would replace Jackson on the front of the $20 bill, but it wasn’t known which woman. Tubman’s name had been floated as a likely candidate, however.

But tying Tubman to American money is complicated, as Fusion contributor Jay Smooth noted in a 2015 video.

Last May, when Women on 20s, a nonprofit organization that was petitioning to put women on American money, announced that Tubman was the polled favorite, Jay Smooth argued that America’s legacy of enslaving human beings for profit made Tubman an imperfect choice for the $20 bill. “What we’re basically talking about right now,” he said in the above video, “is honoring the work Harriet Tubman did to free us from slavery by putting her face on the reason we were in slavery.”