Harriet Tubman has Endured Another Decade in Chains

by Pa Rock

American Patriot

It was ten years ago this very day that US Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew announced that the portrait of abolitionist and freedom fighter Harriet Tubman would begin appearing on US twenty-dollar bills beginning in 2020.  That plan, however, was quickly scuttled the following year after the surprise ascendancy of the Trump administration to the presidency.  Trump's new Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, announced in 2019 that a new design for the twenty-dollar bill would not occur until 2028.

Mnuchin's pronouncement came after Trump, the new President and ardent supporter of Andrew Jackson, a slaveholder who had defied the nation's Supreme Court and moved thousands of Native Americans off their lands so they could be claimed and farmed by immigrants from Europe, labeled the move to replace Jackson with Tubman on the currency as "pure political correctness."  Trump went on to say that he felt Andrew Jackson should remain on the twenty and that Harriet Tubman would be better suited to grace some other currency denomination, such as perhaps the two-dollar bill.

There was a move during the Biden administration to get the Harriet Tubman twenty-dollar bill back on track, but it did not come to fruition.  Now, freshly designed currency is due to be released in 2030, and it will created with enhanced safeguards to prevent counterfeiting.   It is currently unclear whose face will be on the new twenty-dollar bill, but some prominent members of Congress, led by  New Hampshire Senator Jean Shaheen, are pushing to ensure that the new face on the twenty is that of Harriet Tubman and not that of slaveholder, Andrew Jackson.

Will an a abolitionist and freedom fighter adorn the new currency, or will it still bear the likeness of a slaveholder known for stealing the lands of Native Americans?   That will ultimately depend on the political make-up of Congress and who is sitting in the Oval Office - all of which will be determined by which Americans make the effort to get off their lazy asses and vote in 2026 and 2028.

It's time to break Harriet Tubman's chains of enslavement and finally give her the respect an honor that she earned more than a century-and-a-half ago.   Slavery in the United States ended in the 1860's, and now racism needs to be brought into the light and eradicated as well!