Harriet Tubman rises up as new face of $20 bill

Abolitionist and women’s rights crusader Harriet Tubman will replace the former president on the front of the $20 bill, becoming the first African American to appear on U.S. currency, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced Wednesday.

[...] the U.S. did not throw away its shot to keep founding father Alexander Hamilton, the nation’s first secretary of the Treasury, on the $10 bill.

Lew said Hamilton, who was originally considered for replacement with a female figure, will remain on the front of the redesigned $10 bill after months of backlash led by rabid fans of the Pulitzer Prize-winning hip-hop musical “Hamilton.”

The back of the new $10 note will feature female activists who fought for women’s rights and suffrage like Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the back of a newly designed $5 bill will depict the civil rights movement in moments from the Lincoln Memorial that included Eleanor Roosevelt, African American opera singer Marian Anderson, and Martin Luther King Jr.

Emily Nahmanson, the founder of Hamiltunes SF, an event at which participants sing along to songs from the musical, said the musical has somehow transferred fans’ affections from the play onto the founding father himself.

Proponents also applauded the federal government’s decision to replace Jackson, a slave trader who opposed paper money and led the deadly removal of several Native American Indian tribes from their homelands in the southern United States, with a freed slave who dedicated her life to helping others find freedom.

Tubman, best known for her efforts leading dozens of others to freedom along a secret path of safe houses known as the Underground Railroad, is the second woman to appear on the front of U.S. paper money.

Lew said Tubman, who also served as a Union Army spy during the Civil War and spoke out for women’s right to vote, is someone who “reflects both American values and American democracy, but also the power of an individual to make a difference in our democracy.”

The Treasury considered public opinion in its redesign and received nominations naming more than 200 notable women whom Americans said they would like to see on currency.

The list included women from a broad range of backgrounds, such as jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald, first female casualty of the Iraq war Lori Piestewa and photographer Margaret Bourke-White.

The new bills are still being designed, though Lew said the Treasury hopes to unveil them by 2020 — in time for the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which granted American women the right to vote.

The $10 bill was the only note up for redesign in 2020, a regular process meant to prevent counterfeiting, but an online campaign started by Women on 20s pushing to put a woman’s face on the new $20 bill in 2020 to mark the anniversary of women’s suffrage moved up the Treasury’s timeline.

Howard said there is still more work to be done to U.S. currency in order to make the nation’s money more reflective of its populace and values, such as including images of American Indian history.