DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA — Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew has decided to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill, making her the first woman on U.S. paper currency in 100 years, a Treasury official said Wednesday.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in advance of Lew’s official announcement, said that the 19th century abolitionist and a leader of the Underground Railroad, would replace the portrait of Andrew Jackson, the nation’s seventh president.
Lew’s announcement is expected to provide details on other changes being made to the $20, $10 and $5 bills.
The decision to place Tubman’s portrait on the $20 likely means that Lew has decided to keep Alexander Hamilton on the $10 bill, a victory for those who had opposed his initial plan to remove Hamilton.
An online group, Women on 20s, said it was encouraged that Lew was responding to its campaign to replace Jackson with a woman. But it said it would not claim victory unless Lew also committed to issuing the new $20 bill at the same time that the redesigned $10 bill is scheduled to be issued in 2020.
The $10 bill is the next note scheduled to be redesigned to introduce updated protections against counterfeiting. That redesign was scheduled to be unveiled in 2020, which marks the 100th anniversary of women getting the right to vote. Lew had often cited that connection as a reason to put a woman on the $10 bill.
However, the effort ran into strong objections from supporters of Hamilton, who is enjoying renewed interest with the hit Broadway musical “Hamilton.”
The expectation is that Lew will propose replacing the Treasury building, now on the back of the $10 bill, with a mural-style depiction of the suffrage moment.
Written by: MARTIN CRUTSINGER, AP Economics Writer
Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @STGnews
Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
I’m sure AL Sharpton and his band of NAACP supporters will find something to complain about
IF, and that’s a huge IF, this current administration is allowed to remove Andrew Jackson from the $20 bill, he should not be replaced by Harriet Tubman or Rosa Parks and ONLY be replaced by an esteemed Native American Indian or American black woman:
The U.S. did the right thing when they checked ALL of the boxes with Sacagawea: a NATIVE AMERICAN, a Brave WOMAN, and a former SLAVE when we chose her for the dollar coin. Move her to the $20 IF the current administration and its lackeys win in removing Jackson — the dollar coin is and has been a horrible idea that only merchants, vending machines, etc. like because people use them as quarters.
OR, leave Sacagawea on the dollar coin and chose Sarah Winnemucca, a Paiute woman for the $20 bill. In 1872 her tribe was relocated to a reservation in Eastern Oregon ominously named after the nearby river Malheur, the French word for “misfortune”. For the next four years, Sarah served as an interpreter for the U.S. government’s Indian agent there. Two years later, the growing tensions between Native Americans and the U.S. government came to head in the Bannock War, during which Sarah’s father and other members of her tribe were taken hostage by Bannock forces. Offering her services to U.S. Army General Oliver Howard, Sarah traveled over some 200 miles of rough terrain into Bannock territory, ultimately returning with the freed hostages and important military intelligence for Howard. In the aftermath of the conflict, however, both the Bannock and Paiute were punished with exile to the Yakama reservation, further north in Washington Territory. Bad turned to worse there, with persistent mistreatment at the hands of the governments Indian agents and waves of disease that began to decimate the reservation. From there, she continued on to Washington, D.C. in 1879 to further champion the Indian cause by giving lectures. She authored the first book written in English by a Native American woman which remains a valuable historical record of both Native American life and the detrimental impact of white settlement upon it. By the end of Sarah’s tour, she had gathered thousands of signatures calling for an allotment of land for her tribe from Congress, which granted it by passing a bill in 1884. As had been the case years earlier, however, nothing came of it.
There are more/other American Indian Women, I’m sure, who deserve this respect.
Or, if this is purely a racist cause, let’s seriously consider Dr. Mae Jemison for recognition on our currency as an esteemed American. Dr. Mae Jemison was a mission specialist for NASA and the first African-American woman to enter space. She was born in Decatur Alabama in 1955, and studied chemical engineering and Afro-American studies at Stanford University. She then attended Cornell University’s medical school and used her degree working in a Cambodian refugee camp. She then served as a medical specialist in the Peace Corps in West Africa. After NASA selected her to undergo mission specialist training, she ventured into space aboard the Shuttle Endeavor in 1992. During her career as an astronaut, she logged 190 hours, 30 minutes, and 23 seconds in space. Dr. Jemison is a successful WOMAN, not some made-up revisionist black persona.
I say leave Andrew Jackson on the $20 and use the $2 dollar bill to appease the ever-changing PC agenda.
I lost interest in your comments just short of halfway through. ….shorten up your comments this isn’t a newspaper