NEW MOMENTUM TO PUT HARRIET TUBMAN ON $20 BILL

A BEP facsimile design sans security features

The Biden administration will revive the push to make Harriet Tubman the face of a new $20 bill, an effort that was shelved during former President Donald Trump's term.

"We're exploring ways to speed up that effort," White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters Monday after being asked if the new administration would pick up the Obama-era initiative.

An updated $20 note featuring Tubman, the former slave who became an icon of the abolitionist movement, was originally set to be unveiled around the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote.

But Trump's Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, announced during a 2019 congressional hearing that the redesign would be delayed until 2028. Mnuchin said at the time that the primary reason for redesigning a currency is to combat counterfeiting efforts.

Psaki said Monday that the Treasury Department is "taking steps to resume efforts" to put Tubman's image on the front of the new $20 bills.

It's important for the bills to "reflect the history and diversity of our country," Psaki said, "and Harriet Tubman's image gracing the new $20 note would certainly reflect that."

Producing the new $20 notes with robust anti-counterfeiting technology and other security measures in place will require a new high-speed printing facility, which is currently scheduled for 2025.

Concepts for an updated $50 note are in development.

To read the complete article, see:
Biden's Treasury revives push to put Harriet Tubman on $20 bill after Trump shelved it (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/25/harriet-tubman-20-bill-biden-revives-push-after-trump-shelved-it.html)

The redesign of the bill would place a woman on the front of U.S. paper currency for the first time in more than a century and replace the nation's seventh president, Andrew Jackson, a slave owner who stared down an early threat of secession imperiling the union. In the new design, Jackson would move to the back of the note.

The Treasury Department's watchdog agreed in 2019 to review the agency's plan after Democrats said the Trump Treasury Department had intentionally slow-walked the proposal.

As a candidate in 2016, Mr. Trump had rejected the idea of putting Tubman on the bill. During his term he expressed admiration for Jackson, kept a portrait of him in the Oval Office and visited Jackson's tomb at the Hermitage in Nashville early in his presidency.

Former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in 2019 that plans to unveil the Tubman bill would be postponed until at least 2026.

Tubman was born a slave around 1822 on Maryland's Eastern Shore and became a leading abolitionist and suffragette. She escaped slavery in 1849 but spent the next decade repeatedly returning to Maryland to help free her friends and family through the Underground Railroad, a network of people and places that helped slaves safely escape to the north.

To read the complete article (subscription required), see:
Treasury Resuming Efforts to Put Harriet Tubman on $20 Bill (https://www.wsj.com/articles/treasury-resuming-efforts-to-put-harriet-tubman-on-20-bill-11611602005)

Gary writes:

Putting Tubman on legal tender, when slaves in the U.S. were treated as fungible commodities is a supreme form of disrespect. The imagery of her face changing hands as people exchange cash for goods and services evokes for me discomfiting scenes of enslaved persons being handed over as payment for white debt or for anything white slaveholders wanted. America certainly owes a debt to Black people, but this is not the way to repay it.

... we should note, that Black people's faces have, in fact, been on our national currency before. During the Confederacy, as each secessionist state printed its own money, images of enslaved people picking cotton and doing other forms of menial labor appeared on the currency in several states.

Harriet Tubman's life was about fighting against the system that treated Black lives and Black bodies as property, currency and capital. She was a great emancipator, freeing herself and hundreds of others and helping to bring the Union forces to victory working as spy in South Carolina during the Civil War. Would she consider it an honor to have her likeness plastered on American currency? And if she agreed to the honor, what would she ask for in return?

To read the complete article, see:
Putting Harriet Tubman on the $20 Bill Is Not a Sign of Progress. It's a Sign of Disrespect (https://time.com/5933920/harriet-tubman-20-bill-joe-biden/)

To read earlier E-Sylum articles, see:
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE HARRIET TUBMAN PLAN? (https://www.coinbooks.org/v21/esylum_v21n16a33.html)
BEP PREPARED HARRIET TUBMAN FACSIMILE DESIGNS (https://www.coinbooks.org/v22/esylum_v22n24a32.html)

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