First Black Featured in U.S. Currency: Biden administration effort to put Harriet Tubman on $20 bill

Nearly 200 years after his death, Andrew Jackson is stepping away from the United States' cultural consciousness.

Jackson will no longer appear on the $20 bill, capping a decades-long decline in the seventh president’s popularity. Jackson is now mostly remembered as a historical villain—a slave owner whose major legislative accomplishment was the act that led to the Trail of Tears, in which thousands of Cherokees were forced from their land. But his election in 1828 also ushered in an era of popular democracy in the U.S., though it didn't include women or people of color.

Harriet Tubman will take Jackson’s place on the bill. Tubman is most well-known for leading thousands of slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad. She also worked as a spy for the Union Army during the Civil War, and was the first American woman to lead a military expedition. The contrast between her and Jackson couldn’t be any more different.

Her appearance on the $20 bill, announced last Wednesday by U.S. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, will mark the first prominent placement of a woman or an African American on U.S. currency. It coincides with the hundredth anniversary of women’s suffrage, and greater public awareness of both the importance of Civil Rights pioneers and the continued racial and gender inequality in the United States.

“Removing Jackson and putting Harriet Tubman on shows that our society is coming to a greater cognizance and a greater recognition that the role of slavery and Indian removal have played in American history,” says Daniel Feller, a professor of history and the director of the Papers of Andrew Jackson at the University of Tennessee. “The more we recognize those two facts in American history, the better off we are.”

“Removing Jackson and putting Harriet Tubman on shows that our society is coming to a greater cognizance and a greater recognition that the role of slavery and Indian removal have played in American history,” says Daniel Feller, a professor of history and the director of the Papers of Andrew Jackson at the University of Tennessee. “The more we recognize those two facts in American history, the better off we are.”