WORLD
Change for a $20: Tubman Ousts Jackson
Baku, April 21 AZERTAC
Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew on Wednesday announced the most sweeping and historically symbolic makeover of American currency in a century, proposing to replace the slaveholding Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill with Harriet Tubman, the former slave and abolitionist, and to add women and civil rights leaders to the $5 and $10 notes.
According to NY Times, Mr. Lew may have reneged on a commitment he made last year to make a woman the face of the $10 bill, opting instead to keep Alexander Hamilton, to the delight of a fan base swollen with enthusiasm over a Broadway rap musical based on the life of the first Treasury secretary.
Mr. Lew’s design proposals are the culmination of 10 months of often-heated public commentary that began almost immediately after he invited Americans last June to help him decide which woman from history to honor on the $10 bill. That feel-good initiative proved to be hardly as simple as he first imagined.
Yet other women mobilized by the Girls’ Lounge, a networking organization for female corporate leaders, demanded that a woman go on the $10 note, as Mr. Lew first proposed, because they did not want to wait years for a new $20 bill. Within the administration, Rosie Rios, who as treasurer of the United States oversees the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, was also pushing for a woman on the $10 bill.