It’s time for Harriet Tubman
When I was a kid, my parents would frequently tell me that, “Money burns a hole in your pocket.”
As soon as I’d accumulate more than a few pennies, I was off to the neighborhood corner store to retrieve a handful of penny candy.
I was guilty as charged.
But since U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced that the nation’s $20 bills will be, sometime in the future, adorned with the image of a former slave who helped lead hundreds of slaves to their freedom, there’s talk that many Americans will let those bills “burn holes their pockets,” or worse, they’ll set them on fire in their hands.
It’s just that way in America, where any change, (or, maybe every change) can become a heated political controversy.
Harriet Tubman epitomizes the freedoms that were sewn into the very fabric of this country.
By the time she died in 1913, she was not only known for setting slaves free along the Underground Railroad, she’d been a supporter of women’s right to vote.
Her image will eventually replace the likeness of a slaveholder president, Andrew Jackson, whose administration forcibly relocated 125,000 Native Americans from their lands in southeastern United States, which led to what is now known as the “Trail of Tears,” because of its brutality.
Harriet Tubman helped give people their freedom. Andrew Jackson gave many people their misery.
Yet, there are many people who scowl at the notion that a woman, who just happens to be an African American, should become a symbol our country’s legal tender.
It doesn’t matter that Jackson’s face has already appeared on the $5, $10, $10,000 and now $20 bills.
In other words, he’s already had his chance. Perhaps it’s time for a change.
Oh, there are some folks who’ve hatched all kinds of silly reasons to resist Tubman’s presence on the 20.
“They could make her smile a little can’t they,” somebody wrote on an internet blog. “Why would (they) use an image of a grumpy person. I would be too discouraged to buy anything with this bill,” they concluded.
She’s “grumpy?” You’d be grumpy too, if your entire existence had been something to be bought and sold.
When you finish this, go look under your mattress and pull-out that $10,000 bill you’ve set aside for a rainy day.
Take a look at that mug.
Salmon P. Chase, the onetime Secretary of the Treasury and Chief Justice of the United States, doesn’t only look “grumpy,” his angry sneer kind of indicates he may have been having a low fiber day when they painted his image.
Then there’s Donald Trump.
Trump, and his current supporter/ex-failed presidential candidate – Ben Carson – both claim the $2 bill would be an appropriate place to put Tubman’s image.
Imagine the outcry. Thomas Jefferson is on the $2 bill.
That won’t happen.
Trump gushes that Andrew Jackson, “had a history of tremendous success for the country,” probably because he did to the Cherokee people, what he’d like to do to Mexicans.
Later Carson wrote an op-ed in which he called the remodeled bills, “nothing short of a national disgrace.”
A what?
To Carson, the picture of somebody that appears on something that appreciates in value (most of the time) after you give it to somebody else, is worthy of being a “national disgrace.”
I’m floored.
Then there’s one of the folks on Fox News, Brian Kilmeade, who expressed his belief that by replacing Jackson’s image with that of Harriet Tubman’s is, “an unbelievable sign of disrespect,” to Jackson.
Why?
To Kilmeade, Jackson had “done so much in the founding of our country.”
First, Jackson definitely wasn’t a Founding Father. He was only nine years old when the Declaration of Independence was signed.
To add to America’s Great Circular Argument (Which came first, the freedomor the slaves?) – of the five founding fathers who do appear on our 12 paper bills currently in circulation – all but one (Alexander Hamilton) was a slaveholder.
So why not a former slave on the $20 bill, to add a little balance?
Edward A. Owens is a three time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net