Harriet Tubman, the leader of the Underground Railroad that brought slaves to freedom before the Emancipation Proclamation, will be the new face on the $20 bill, the Treasury Department announced Wednesday.
Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew also announced plans for new images on the reverse of the $10 bill and the $5 bill honoring other leaders of the civil rights and women’s suffrage movements. However, Alexander Hamilton will remain on the face of the $10 bill.
The new $10 bill will feature an image of the historic march for suffrage that ended on the steps of the Treasury Department and honor the leaders of the women’s suffrage movement—Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Alice Paul. The front of the new $10 note will maintain Hamilton’s portrait.
Lew also announced plans for the reverse of the new $5 to honor events at the Lincoln Memorial that helped to shape our history and our democracy and prominent individuals involved in those events, including singer Marian Anderson, Eleanor Roosevelt and Martin Luther King Jr.
The reverse of the new $20 will feature images of the White House and President Andrew Jackson, the current face of the $20 bill.
Lew said he had received an overwhelming number of comments since the Treasury first announced plans to redo the $10 and $20 bills. Many people had expressed outrage that Hamilton might be displaced from the $10 bill, particularly after the debut of the hit Broadway musical, “Hamilton,” brought fresh attention to the nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury. This week, the show won a Pulitzer Prize.
“When I announced last June that a newly redesigned $10 note would feature a woman, I hoped to encourage a national conversation about women in our democracy,” Lew wrote in a
