DUSHANBE, April 21, 2016, Asia-Plus — A woman will appear on redesigned 20-dollar bill.
Harriet Tubman will become the first African-American and woman on the $20 bill, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced on Wednesday, according to
The New York Times
.
Tubman will replace Andrew Jackson, the nation”s seventh president, on the currency.
Tubman, who was born into slavery in the early part of the 19th century, escaped and then used the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad to transport other slaves to freedom. After the Civil War, Tubman, who died in 1913, became active in the campaign for women”s suffrage.
Mail Online
reports the treasury last year announced plans to replace Alexander Hamilton, the nation”s first secretary of the treasury, on the $10 bill with a woman.
But they have now decided to keep Hamilton after both Hamilton supporters and women”s groups championed for the $20 bill to be changed to incorporate a woman instead.
The New York Times
says the broader remaking of the nation’s paper currency, which President Obama welcomed on Wednesday, may well have captured a historical moment for a multicultural, multiethnic and multiracial nation moving contentiously through the early years of a new century.
While Hamilton would remain on the $10, and Abraham Lincoln on the $5, images of women would be added to the back of both.
The picture of the Treasury building on the back of the $10 bill would be replaced with a depiction of a 1913 march in support of women’s right to vote that ended at the building, along with portraits of five suffrage leaders: Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Alice Paul and Susan B. Anthony, who in more recent years was on an unpopular $1 coin until minting ceased.
The final redesigns will be unveiled in 2020, the centennial of the 19th Amendment establishing women’s suffrage, and will not go into wide circulation until later in the decade, starting with the new $10 note.
