Harriet Tubman Twenty Dollar Bill to be Resurrected

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

Harriet Tubman was a black woman who had been born into slavery but managed to escape her human bondage.  But being free herself was not enough for Harriet, not while others still lived their lives in chains.   She turned around and went back into the slave states thirteen times to lead relatives and other enslaved peoples to freedom.   Then later, during the Civil War, Tubman worked as an armed scout and a spy for the northern armies.  She was a true American patriot in every sense of the word.

The Obama administration announced in 2016 that it was moving forward with plans to put the face of Harriet Tubman on the twenty dollar bill.  She was to become the first woman as well as the first black person featured on American currency.  The New York Times managed to acquire an image of the proposed new twenty dollar bill and publicized it nationally.

Then Donald Trump was elected and all of that quickly changed.

Trump, a man who had long been accused of racially-biased business dealings - and a man who built his political base through spurious claims that Barack Obama had not been born in the United States,  quickly stopped the move to change the twenty dollar bill.  He claimed the bill was being proposed solely out of a sense of political correctness, a concept that he opposed.  Trump also made a big show out of declaring Andrew Jackson, the white man who currently decorates the twenty, to have been a personal hero of his - and he even had a portrait of Jackson hung on the wall in the Oval Office.  There would be no women, and especially no black women, on US currency while Donald Trump was in charge!

But now Joe Biden has been elected, and things are fixing to change again.  Andrew Jackson's portrait has been taken out of the Oval Office - and Harriet Tubman is once again preparing to take a place of honor on our nation's currency.  

Harriet Tubman survived life in the chains of slavery, numerous trips into the South to rescue other slaves, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the early years of Jim Crow America - and now she has even survived Donald Trump!   She's more than earned her place on the twenty dollar bill!

Thank you, President Biden, for helping to bring us out of the racist backwater of the Trump years!