Last week, when it was announced that a likeness of the former slave known as the Moses of her people will replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill, the most popular search on Google was, briefly, “Who is Harriet Tubman?”
That suggests people care who’s on our paper money — or at least some do. Another top search asked, “Who is on the $20?”
Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew asked for public comment a year ago on the biggest revamp in U.S. currency since 1929 and was flooded with responses. He appears to have listened. While Lew first proposed putting a woman on the front of the $10 bill, replacing Alexander Hamilton, he decided to keep Hamilton, who once held his same job, and move Jackson to the back of the $20 bill by the late 2020s. The first bill to change will be the $10 one, when images of five American women, including former Florence resident Sojourner Truth, will be depicted on the reverse. An image of a 1913 march for women’s rights, rather than the stolid treasury building, will share that side of the bill with Truth, Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, Alice Paul and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
It’s too bad that the nation must wait for more than another decade for Tubman to take her place of honor. We hope some people are still using paper money by then, but with the advance of the cashless society, who’s to know.
Tubman, who was born Araminta Ross, escaped from slavery in Maryland in 1849 and made it to Philadelphia. She made the first of her 19 trips back south to free her sister and two children. Then it was her brother and two men. The third time, she went back for her husband, only to discover that he’d remarried. Undaunted, she continued her journeys, risking capture, to free 300 African-Americans from bondage, including her 70-year-old parents.
Frederick Douglass once said of Tubman that he knew of no one “who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people.”
In 1856, with her Underground Railroad work at its peak, a $40,000 reward was promised for Tubman’s capture. Given inflation, that sum would be worth more than $1.1 million today. That’s a fortune — and proof of the economic damage she and Northern abolitionists were inflicting on slave states. She continued her trips after the start of the Civil War in 1861, working for the Union as a nurse, cook and scout by reporting back on terrain that might become a battlefield. In 1863, a proclamation by President Abraham Lincoln, and later the northern victory, put her railroad out of business.
Tubman’s is a face from our distant past, but last week’s decision easily found fault lines in modern politics. Candidate Donald Trump called her selection “pure political correctness,” a phrase he tosses out like a snack to his resentful supporters. Rather than show respect for Tubman’s place in American history, as candidate John Kasich did, Trump’s dismissal served to ignite an ugly outpouring on social media about the “war on whites” and “white genocide.”
Genocide is a terrible thing and potent allegation. Some use it to describe Andrew Jackson’s campaign in the 1830s to force the Cherokee people from their ancestral homes in the south to Oklahoma, in the brutal forced migration known as the Trail of Tears.
A Pew Research Center survey found that 59 percent of all Americans believe that diversity makes the United States a better place. It was 46 percent among Republicans, a category that included 34 percent who said it makes no difference and 13 percent who said diversity makes the U.S. a “worse place.”Whether Trump wins or loses, racial animosity will remain a part of American life and that’s one reason we need Tubman’s stern face looking out from the front of the $20 bill.
Her appearance there, as th