Harriet Tubman Cancelled - Again!

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

The Obama administration announced plans in 2016 to replace major slaveholder and  exterminator of Native Americans, Andrew Jackson, on our nation's twenty dollar bill with the image of Harriet Tubman.  Tubman was a former slave, abolitionist, and suffragist who famously led other enslaved people to freedom along the "underground railway."  The contrast between the two people - a white, male slaveholder and a black female abolitionist who fought for freedom - could not have been greater.

But then Donald Trump happened, and one of his early acts upon assuming the presidency was to hang a portrait on Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office and declare him to be one of Trump's personal heroes.  Soon after, the Trump administration also announced that plans to replace Jackson with Tubman on the $20 bill were being put on hold while new security measures were being addressed for the nation's twenties.  

During Joe Biden's administration an effort was made to get the project moving again, but production time required about ten years to get new security measures in place.

(Why does it take ten years to make a new $20 bill, but we could start cranking out new $250 bills before Trump leaves office in less than three years?) 

Trump returned to power before the change in the design of the twenties could be accomplished, and his new administration, some of whom were known for openly opposing the promotion of minorities and women to top levels in the US military, had no problem in again putting Harriet Tubman on the back burner.    Yesterday US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, South Carolina plutocrat who buys and restores museum quality mansions, announced that plans to put Harriet Tubman's image on the $20 bill have been officially scrapped.

Of course they have.  That's just one more Trump outrage that the next Democratic President will have to address.

Andrew Jackson served as President of the United States from March of 1829 to March of 1837.  During his lifetime he and his family owned 325 human beings.   Jackson actively bought and sold slaves for profit and as a part of his cotton plantation business operation.  At the time he was sworn in as President he owned about a hundred slaves, and by the time he died in 1845 he owned around 150 enslaved men, women, and children.  Instead of freeing his slaves at the time of his death, he left them to his heirs.

Jackson's forced removal of Native American populations from their ancestral homelands in order to open up more land for white settlement and expand the institution of slavery brought about the deaths of thousands of members on the native population and led to many of the hardships that Native Americans endure to this very day.

Yet Andrew Jackson is a personal hero of Donald Trump.  It doesn't take an Ivy League education to figure that one out!