The United States currency is soon to get a controversial overhaul. Ever since the U.S. Treasury announced a redesign of the $10 bill in June, American citizens have weighed in with their opinions on who should earn a spot in print.
Modern Money, the Treasury’s campaign to keep the public updated on the currency change, features 274 alternative female candidates, such as Maya Angelou, Emily Dickinson and Jane Addams for the bills that citizens suggested through various social media platforms.
In an open letter from Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, he states that the $5, $10 and $20 notes are now up for redesigns, and the government aims to get this crop of bills into America’s wallets by 2030. They will unveil final designs in 2020 in honor of the centennial of the 19th Amendment, which was essential to women’s suffrage. Lew had the legality to select nominees to feature on the bills. After crowdsourcing across the nation for public opinion, Lew has come up with outlines of each new bill design.
On the $5 note, President Abraham Lincoln will remain on the front, and the back will honor events that have taken place at the Lincoln Memorial as well as Marian Anderson, Eleanor Roosevelt and Martin Luther King Jr.
While American currency representing different races and genders is a progressive and important step in history, the problem is that no woman is receiving a bill to herself. No woman is receiving the same treatment that Presidents Lincoln and Jackson as well as treasurer Alexander Hamilton have received.
The $10 will still feature the First Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton on its front, and on the back an image of the Treasury building and a vignette of the 1913 suffrage march with Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Stanton and Alice Paul.
Perhaps the most controversial change is that the $20 note will bump President Andrew Jackson from the front of the bill to the back with a picture of the White House. Harriet Tubman will take his place as the first woman in more than a century and the first African-American ever to appear as the face of American currency.
The fact that Tubman will be sharing a bill with a slave owner is insulting. According to The Hermitage, Jackson owned approximately 150 slaves at the time of his death in 1845. Jackson also signed the Indian Removal Act, which forcefully relocated Native Americans from their homeland.
Tubman, born a slave around 1820, made 19 trips into the south to save over 300 lives through smuggling on the Underground Railroad. She deserves better than to share a bill with the very type of person who enslaved her.
National currency is important. It represents the country’s rich and layered history through only a few select images, and is internationally known as a symbol of the U.S. To refuse Tubman, or any of the chosen women for that matter, the right to her own bill projects the idea that women still don’t deserve the right or are not strong enough to represent America. Equal opportunities in representation should be afforded to all demographics.