Twenty Dollars and Change: Harriet Tubman and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice and Democracy

America is in the throes of a historic reckoning with racism, and official narratives are up for revision as we struggle to bring our democracy forward.

Re-evaluating who should be honored as a national hero is a key front in the fight for racial justice. Whose lives and contributions should be officially celebrated in our monuments, statues, street names, and the portraits on the money we exchange with one another every day?

For some, it's Andrew Jackson--a slaveholder who led military campaigns against Native Americans to expand US territory--who deserves to appear on the front of our most commonly used paper currency, the twenty-dollar bill. For others, it's Harriet Tubman--the abolitionist and Civil War veteran who repeatedly risked her life to free others from slavery--who better deserves the spot as an example of what America is and can be.

The debate over the future of the twenty-dollar bill exemplifies the country's struggle to come to terms with historic realities of white supremacy and abolitionism, and the ways in which those legacies are still active and influential today. Jackson represents a flawed political vision rooted in racial and economic domination, while Harriet Tubman's life story represents the struggle for liberation and justice for all--demands that protest movements have advanced with renewed urgency since the murder of George Floyd and the social inequities highlighted by the Covid-19 pandemic.

In Twenty Dollars and Change, African American scholar Clarence Lusane takes stock of the millions of Americans who have mobilized for and against honoring Tubman by enshrining her image on money, and places that debate within the ongoing struggle to realize a democracy in which her emancipatory, inclusive vision prevails.