US paper money is getting a historic makeover.
Harriet Tubman, an African-American abolitionist born into slavery, is to be the new face on the US$20 bill.
The leader of the Underground Railroad is replacing the portrait of Andrew Jackson, the US’ seventh president and a slave owner, who is being be pushed to the back of the bill.
Photo: AFP / Women On 20`s
Alexander Hamilton, the first US secretary of the Treasury, who is enjoying a revival thanks to a hit Broadway play, is to keep his spot on the US$10 note after earlier talk of his removal.
The changes are part of a currency redesign announced on Wednesday by US Secretary of the Treasury Jacob Lew, with the new US$20 marking two historic milestones: Tubman is to become the first African-American on US paper money and the first woman to be depicted on US currency in 100 years.
“This gesture sends a powerful message, because of the tendency in American history, the background of excluding women and marginalizing them as national symbols,” said Riche Richardson, associate professor in the African Studies and Research Center at Cornell University, New York. “So even the symbolic significance of this cannot be overstated.”
Lew also settled a backlash that had erupted after he had announced an initial plan to remove Hamilton from the US$10 bill in order to honor a woman on the bill. Instead, the US Treasury Building on the back of the bill is to be changed to commemorate a 1913 march that ended on the steps of the building. It is also to feature suffragette leaders Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Alice Paul.
The back of the US$20, which now shows the White House, is to be redesigned to include the White House and Jackson, whose statute stands across the street in Lafayette Park.
The US$5 bill is also undergo change: The illustration of the Lincoln Memorial on the back is to be redesigned to honor “events at the Lincoln Memorial that helped to shape our history and our democracy.”
The new image on the US$5 bill is to include civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, who gave his famous “I have a dream” speech on the steps of the memorial in 1963, and African-American opera singer Marian Anderson and former US first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Anderson gave a concert at the memorial in 1939 after she had been blocked from singing at the then-segregated Constitution Hall. The Lincoln Memorial concert was arranged by Roosevelt.
An online group, Women on 20s, said it was encouraged that Lew was responding to its campaign to replace Jackson with a woman, but it said it would not be satisfied unless Lew committed to issuing the new US$20 bill at the same time that the redesigned US$10 bill is scheduled to be issued in 2020.
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