Why I Say No to the Harriett Tubman $20

By Makheru Bradley

Hypocrisy and Symbolism

I thought it was a hypocritical idea when the Obama Administration announced in 2016 that the iconic liberator of enslaved Afrikans, Harriet Tubman, will replace the seventh President of the United States, Andrew Jackson, as the portrait on the $20 bill. President Trump, who considered Jackson to be his favorite president, stopped the plan in its tracks. Last week the Biden Administration announced, "The Treasury Department is taking steps to resume efforts to put Harriet Tubman on the front of the new $20 notes. It's important that our notes, our money, reflect the history and diversity of our country, and Harriet Tubman's image gracing the new $20 note would certainly reflect that."

It’s still a hypocritical idea, but it’s consistent with the history of the exploitation of Afrikan people in the United States. The proposal is also consistent with the idea that the Afrikan American body politic is often rewarded with symbols while other constituents get actual rewards.

Harriet Tubman stole the capital assets of slave owners

The Biden Administration proposal would be utter desecration of the good name of our Esteemed Ancestor Harriet Tubman (named Araminta Ross at birth) who was born into slavery in Maryland, between 1819 and 1822. When she was 25 Tubman escaped alone to Philadelphia. Risking her personal freedom and her life, Tubman liberated the capital assets (hundreds of enslaved Afrikans) of America’s antebellum oligarchs by leading escaped slaves to “freedom” via the Underground Railroad. She stole their property which represented money. The people she freed called her “Moses” and “The General.” Enslavers offered up to $12,000 for her capture.

Dr. Brittney Cooper in an article titled, “Putting Harriet Tubman on the $20 Bill Is Not a Sign of Progress. It's a Sign of Disrespect,” had this to say about the contradictions inherent in the Biden proposal: "I know in a country that worships at the altar of capitalism–an economic system made possible by the free Black labor procured through the Trans-Atlantic slave trade–a Black woman’s face on our currency seems like the highest honor we could bestow. But what a stunning failure of imagination. Putting Tubman on legal tender, when slaves in the U.S. were treated as fungible commodities is a supreme form of disrespect. The imagery of her face changing hands as people exchange cash for goods and services evokes for me discomfiting scenes of enslaved persons being handed over as payment for white debt or for anything white slaveholders wanted. America certainly owes a debt to Black people, but this is not the way to repay it."

There are no limits to the hypocrisy of the American power structure

The proposed Harriet Tubman $20 is absolute hypocrisy considering the fact the US government refused to give Tubman a pension for her service to the US military during the Civil War as a scout, spy, nurse, and a planner of the Combahee River Raid, which liberated an estimated 700-800 enslaved Afrikans.

Regarding that Civil War raid, author Paul Donnelly said: "It’s no exaggeration to say that the Combahee raid was unique in American history. All Union operations in slave territory, especially as the Emancipation Proclamation became well known, yielded the self-liberated by the hundreds. But the Combahee raid was planned and executed primarily as a liberation raid. … That’s how Tubman conceived of it. That, too, is unique — because for the first and only time in the Civil War, or for that matter any American conflict before this century, a (formerly enslaved Afrikan) woman played a decisive role in planning and carrying out a military operation."

All of Harriet Tubman’s appeals for pension were denied. She was given a pension of $8 a month in 1890, 25 years after the war ended, but only because she was the widow of veteran Nelson Davis. In 1899 the federal government increased the pension to $2o a month until her death in 1913. The point here is that Harriet Tubman was never paid a pension for her own US military service. President Biden should start by correcting that wrong to Harriet Tubman, in some capacity.

Piling on the hypocrisy: A liberator on one side, an enslaver on the other

When the Obama Administration announced the proposed changes in 2016, their press release stated, “The reverse of the new $20 will feature images of the White House and President Andrew Jackson.” The New York Times reported that it had obtained a preliminary design of the proposed $20, showing Harriet Tubman on the front and a statue of Jackson on the other side.

Incredibly, the Administration of the first Black president proposed a design that has our Esteemed Ancestor on the front, and the genocidal enslaver Andrew Jackson on the back. Dr. Cooper describes Andrew Jackson as “the notoriously racist President, known both for owning hundreds of slaves and for his brutal and genocidal policy of (Indigenous Peoples) removal (the Trail of Tears).”

Not only that, it was Jackson who appointed Roger Taney to the SCOTUS. Taney ruled in the 1857 Dred Scott Decision that Black people have no rights white people are bound to respect.

The Obama Administration could not see or just plain ignored this obvious contradiction. And the Biden Administration will follow suit?

The entire struggle of Afrikan people in the US has been against the hypocrisy of what this country claimed versus what it practiced. The great Frederick Douglass said, “The limits of tyrants are proscribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” It’s time for our endurance of American power structure hypocrisy to expire.

For more from the author, follow his blog Makheru Speaks.