Image of African American Woman on $20 Bills

The U.S. Department of the Treasury announced on Wednesday that the image of Harriet Tubman will be printed on the center of the country's twenty-dollar bills. Harriet Tubman (born 1820 - died 1913) was an African American woman who saved the lives of hundreds of enslaved Black people during the American Civil War. Currently, the image on the twenty-dollar bills features Andrew Jackson, the seventh President of the United States, who was a prominent slave owner. According to The New York Times, images of other female leaders and the American human rights movement will also be depicted on the new twenty-dollar bill. The new design will be unveiled in 2020, coinciding with the centennial of the women's suffrage movement in the U.S. (which led to the 19th Amendment to the Constitution in 1920). In another decision, the U.S. Treasury announced that the image of Alexander Hamilton, one of the Founding Fathers, will remain on the ten-dollar bills. This new bill will enter circulation in the next decade. The Treasury's initial plan to change the images on the ten and twenty-dollar bills was announced in early summer last year. Initially, a woman's image was to be placed at the center of the ten-dollar bill. However, Alexander Hamilton, who recently won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama for a musical about him, remained on these bills. Since last summer, supporters of Hamilton and advocates for women's rights have been negotiating with the Treasury to dedicate the center of the twenty-dollar bill to women and the centennial of their movement in the country. Harriet Tubman, who was born in 1820 in Maryland as a slave on a farm, traveled through the Eastern and Southern states of America after marrying a freed slave and helped many enslaved people escape to the free Northern states. She even served as a female commander in the war between the abolitionists of the Northern states and the pro-slavery supporters in the Southern states and was one of the leaders of the women's equality movement in America. She passed away in 1913.