Last month president Trump‘s Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin put the kibosh on a redesign of the 20-dollar bill that would have included a historic change, a black person on United States currency. And not just black person, but Harriet Tubman!
In his announcement, Mnuchin stated any design change would be delayed by up to six years and would not feature the former slave-turned-political activist who helped slaves escape to freedom through the Underground Railroad.
The New York Times got their hands on a prototype of what the Harriet Tubman $20 bill would have looked like.
From the NY Times,
The development of the note did not stop there. A current employee of the bureau, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter, personally viewed a metal engraving plate and a digital image of a Tubman $20 bill while it was being reviewed by engravers and Secret Service officials as recently as May 2018. This person said that the design appeared to be far along in the process.
The Obama administration approved the Harriet Tubman $20 bill, and the prototype was created in 2016.
Any design change to $20 bill, which currently sports the mug of the seventh U.S. President, Andrew Jackson, wouldn’t be available to the pubilc for years. Enough time for minds to change.
