Anyone pining for the ‘good old days’ can just check their wallet
Apr 21, 2016, 5:20 AM | Updated: 9:18 am
There will not be a woman on the currency after all. There will be eight!
The Treasury Secretary has finally ended the speculation. The first woman since 1896 to get a starring role on US paper currency will be on the $20 dollar bill.
Harriet Tubman was born a slave in Maryland in about 1822, escaped to Canada as a young woman thanks to the Underground Railroad, and then helped smuggle others to freedom until the Civil War broke out when she organized a network of spies for the Union.
Andrew Jackson will still cling to the back of the bill despite being a slave owner and driving out Native Americans along the Trail of Tears – some people wanted him banished from the bill entirely.
Alexander Hamilton remains the star of the $10 but no fewer than five women will be upstaging him on the back: Suffragettes Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Alice Paul – who in 1913 led a women’s march on the US Treasury where a mob attacked them.
Finally Lincoln stays on the front of the $5 dollar bill but the back will feature Martin Luther King and two women: opera star Marian Anderson and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who, in the 1930s, arranged for Anderson to sing at the Lincoln Memorial when the theaters wouldn’t have her.
So come 2020, when you find yourself pining for the “good old days” in America, you can just check your wallet and snap yourself out of it.
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