US Dollar bills: history in the making – by Kelechi Deca
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Harriet Tubman
US Dollar bills: history in the making – by Kelechi Deca
It took the United States a hundred years to have a woman as Governor of its central bank ( The Federal Reserve Board) , and it is taking them another hundred years to make adjustments to have the face of women on its Dollar bills.
Most interesting is the $20 bill where the face of a former slave owner is giving way for the face of a former slave.Yesterday, the US Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew 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.
Harriet Tubman…..
Araminta Ross, known as “Minty,” was born into slavery on the Eastern Shore of Maryland around 1822. When she was about 26, and married to John Tubman, she escaped to Philadelphia and took her mother’s given name, Harriet. She later returned to rescue family members, and was asked by slaves not related to her to help them escape as well. She took great risks traveling at night from the South to the free North via a network of secret routes and safe houses on the Underground Railroad. When the Civil War began, Tubman became a spy for the Union.
Also on the list of those who made it to the $10 bill is another great black woman Sojourner Truth.
Sojourner Truth………
Born Isabella Baumfree — a Dutch-speaking slave born in 1797 in rural New York — changed her name to Sojourner Truth after she walked off an upstate farm in 1826 with her infant daughter. She became a Christian preacher and grew increasingly political in pressing for abolition, women’s suffrage and prison reform. She delivered her most famous address, “Ain’t I a Woman,’’ in 1851 in Ohio, where she said: “I could work as much and eat as much as a man — when I could get it — and bear the lash as well. And ain’t I a woman?’’
How long will it take them to have a woman president?
