I guess on the bright side Jackson is off the $20... (edit apparently he will be on the back in some fashion)
Harriet Tubman Just Abolished Andrew Jackson From The $20 Bill
BY
BRYCE COVERT
APR 20, 2016 12:46 PM
CREDIT: AP PHOTO/CAROLYN THOMPSON
Treasury Secretary Jack Lew will announce on Wednesday that Harriet Tubman, the prominent abolitionist, will replace former President and slaveowner Andrew Jackson on the front of the $20 bill,
according to a report from Politico.
The switch will likely not happen for some time, however.
According to CNN, the soonest a new $20 bill would be issued is 2030, and future Treasury secretaries could reverse the decision in the meantime.
The more immediate changes will be to the $10 bill, as it is the next in line to be redesigned. Lew had originally planned to remove the current face on the front of the bill, founding father Alexander Hamilton, and put a woman on the front instead. But after the smash hit Broadway play about Hamilton’s life, as well as lobbying from the play’s creator Lin-Manuel Miranda himself, Lew has changed those plans. Hamilton will stay, according to these news outlets, but a mural of the suffragettes who secured women’s right to vote, including Susan B. Anthony, will be added to the back.
There are no women on U.S. paper money. The
only time there was a woman on the front of a bill was during a brief period of time in the late 1800s when Martha Washington was on a $1 silver certificate, and Native American Pocahontas was on the back of a $20 bill in the 1860s. Some women have been on coins, such as Sacagawea and Susan B. Anthony on dollar coins and Helen Keller on the commemorative Alabama quarter.
In early 2015, the Women on 20s campaign
launched to rally around putting a woman on paper currency. Campaign members asked people to vote on which woman should be picked. Expecting 100,000 votes, they actually received more than 600,000. While the timing of that campaign is only coincidental with Lew’s decision to change the design of the $10 bill, it built momentum around the demand that a woman be put on the country’s currency.
The founders of that campaign are not happy with the idea of putting women on the back of the $10, however. They
sent an open letter to Lew calling the move “nothing but a cameo role on the back of a minor bill” and arguing “It will take a microscope to see who those individuals are, and we’ll be left with another decade or more of woefully inadequate representation of women and their worth.” They also added, “Nobody looks at the back of the bill, and that’s not likely to change… relegating women to the back of the bill is akin to sending them to the back of the bus.”
Lew is also expected to announce changes to the $5 bill to depict Civil Rights movement leaders on the back while leaving President Abraham Lincoln on the front.
UPDATE APR 20, 2016 4:25 PM
Treasury Secretary Jack Lew
made the changes official by announcing that the new $20 will feature Harriet Tubman on the front with images of Andrew Jackson and the White House on the back; the new $10 will have an image of a march for suffrage on the steps of the Treasury Department with the leaders Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Alice Paul; and the new $5 will include images of events on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial such as Marian Anderson singing the national anthem and Martin Luther King Jr. Lew also said the Bureau of Engraving and Printing will work closely with the Federal Reserve to accelerate completion of the new $20 and $5 bills "as quickly as possible."
Harriet Tubman Just Abolished Andrew Jackson From The $20 Bill