Where's Harriet Tubman?

As March is Women’s History Month, I started thinking about one of our great American heroes, Harriet Tubman, and wondering whatever happened to plans to put her on our twenty dollar bill.

Proposed under the Obama administration, the new bill was scheduled to be released next year, a hundred years after women won the right to vote. But as a Forbes magazine author recently put it, “Harriett Tubman won’t be in your wallet anytime soon.”

Here’s why.

Harriet Tubman would replace Andrew Jackson, our seventh president, who, by the way, was a big-time slave owner. He also drove a nation of Cherokees on the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma. Thousands died.

Guess who is a big fan of Andrew Jackson? Donald Trump, and he doesn’t want to let his hero go. “Andrew Jackson had a great history, and I think it’s very rough when you take someone off the bill,” Trump said.

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, in charge of all currency updates, knows what the president wants. Quoted in Forbes, Munchin said, “It’s not something that I’m focused on at the moment.”

So we wait, and we wonder if the Maryland slave who became a Moses to her people will ever find her place on our currency.

Frustrated by the Treasury Department’s inaction, Democratic Congressman Elijah Cummings, and Republican John Katko have reintroduced legislation to require the Treasury Department to stop sitting on its hands and start printing the Tubman bill.

Also tired of waiting, artist Dano Wall has come up with his own solution. He’s made a 3-D stamp of Harriet Tubman, which he uses to replace the image of Jackson’s face on $20 bills. He’s also made stamps for his friends.

Wall doesn’t expect he and his friends will get around to stamping all 9.5 billion twenty dollar bills in circulation. But he does hope to get people talking.

Meanwhile, it’s a good time for us, as Americans, to get to know Harriet Tubman better. Growing up on a tidewater plantation on Maryland’s eastern shore, she worked in the field and as a house slave. She was often rented out to nearby households, where she cleaned, cooked, and cared for infants. But repeated beatings from her mistress left her ill, and she was sent back to her mother, who nursed her to health. Thereafter, she worked outdoors with the men, farming and lumbering in the woods.

A young woman no taller than five feet, Harriet grew strong and able at her work, learning the lay of the land and the survival skills she would later need in her escape and return trips to rescue others. A setback occurred, however, when she was struck in the head by a weight thrown at another slave, causing severe injury. For the rest of her life she was prone to headaches and bouts of epilepsy.

In my next column, I’ll tell you more about Harriet Tubman. Did you know she came to Boston, speaking and raising money? That she later worked as a nurse and a Union spy in the Civil War?

You can also find more about Harriet Tubman on your own, online, and in several excellent biographies. The one I’m reading is Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero by Kate Clifford Larson.

March is an excellent time to “find” Harriet Tubman.