Placing Harriet Tubman On $20 Bill To Speed Up: Biden Officials

WASHINGTON, DC — After a four-year delay by the Trump administration, efforts to put Dorchester County, Maryland, native and abolitionist Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill have resurfaced as President Joe Biden's appointees head federal agencies.

The move to replace President Andrew Jackson on the front of $20 bills with onetime slave Tubman was on hold while Donald Trump was in office. Making Tubman the face of the currency was supposed to happen in 2020.

On Monday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said the Treasury Department is taking steps to put Tubman's image on the new $20 notes.

"The Treasury Department is taking steps to resume efforts to put Harriet Tubman on the front of the new $20 notes," Psaki said Monday.

"It's important that our notes, our money ... reflect the history and diversity of our country. And Harriet Tubman's image gracing the new $20 note would certainly reflect that," Psaki said. "So we’re exploring ways to speed up that effort."

Supporters of the historic change want to remove the image of a president who forced native Cherokees onto the deadly Trail of Tears and traded slaves, and replace it with that of a woman who helped hundreds gain freedom via the Underground Railroad.

The Obama administration had announced plans to put Tubman on the $20 bill, but that was put on hold once Trump took office. Tubman served as a Union scout during the Civil War and championed women's voting rights.

NAACP President Derrick Johnson spoke about the symbolism of having Tubman on the $20 bill. “When we have a more representative set of symbols that really connotes all of America and the significance that we all played, it allows people to see the beauty in the diversity that we are as a country, and do away with this white supremacist mentality that has caused so much harm over time.”

Redesigning the bill takes time and involves enhanced security measures in the makeup of the currency. Producing the new $20 notes with the latest anti-counterfeiting technology and other security measures will require a new high-speed printing facility, which is scheduled for 2025, CNBC reported.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) originally sponsored a bill in 2015 directing the Department of the Treasury to put Tubman on the face of the $10 bill, replacing Alexander Hamilton. But the switch to the $20 occurred after historians and fans of the musical "Hamilton" objected to altering the $10 bill.

A bill was then submitted that would replace Jackson with Tubman on the $20.

Tubman was one of the finalists in a campaign to put the face of a woman on the $20 bill by the group Women On 20s.

In June 2019, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan urged the Trump administration to put Tubman on the $20 bill immediately instead of waiting a decade.

Hogan sent a letter to then U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin last year urging him to reconsider its decision to delay the release of the Tubman $20 bill.

"Dorchester County, Maryland, is incredibly proud to be a steward of Harriet Tubman's lasting legacy, but her influence reaches far beyond the borders of our great state," Hogan wrote in 2019. "I hope that your department will reconsider its decision and instead join our efforts to promptly memorialize Tubman's life and many achievements."

Any change in the currency was postponed until at least 2026, Mnuchin said in late May 2019, and the revamped $20 bill would not likely be in circulation until 2028.

Trump had called the move to feature Tubman "pure political correctness" and said she could be honored on the $2 bill.

Tubman overcame abuse, war, chronic illness and extreme injustice to make her mark on American history as a suffragette, an abolitionist and a Civil War veteran, Hogan's office said in a statement. The Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park and Visitors Center in Church Creek, which Hogan marked the grand opening of in 2017, receives hundreds of thousands of visitors each year from all 50 states and over 60 countries.

SEE ALSO:

• Harriett Tubman $20 Bill Delayed While Trump Is President
• Abolitionist Harriet Tubman Wins Popular Vote to Be Face of $20 Bill

Jackson is remembered for his brutal treatment of Native Americans. Jackson pushed for the Indian Removal Act, which displaced tens of thousands of Cherokees from their native lands in the Southeast to regions west of the Mississippi River. The move killed thousands as they were uprooted from their ancestral homes.

The late Maryland Congressman Elijah Cummings co-sponsored a bipartisan bill in 2017 in an effort to place Tubman's image on the $20 bill.

He said previously that "Harriet Tubman was called the Moses of her people, because after she escaped slavery, she courageously made 19 trips to the South to free more than 300 enslaved African Americans."

Tubman was born a slave about 1822 in Dorchester County, Maryland, who used the Underground Railroad to escape to freedom in the North in 1849, then helped others gain their freedom. She also actively spied against the Confederacy during the Civil War.

The four finalists to break the paper currency barrier were Tubman; Rosa Parks, civil rights activist; human rights advocate and former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt; and Cherokee nation chief Wilma Mankiller.