We were promised a Black woman on the $20 bill …
The writer and poet Maya Angelou has become the first Black woman to have her likeness depicted on the quarter, the first in a series of coins commemorating pioneering American women that began shipping this week, the U.S. Mint announced Monday. …
The coin is the first in the American Women Quarters Program, a four-year effort in which the Mint will issue five quarters a year to honor women in fields including women’s suffrage, civil rights, abolition, government, humanities, science and the arts. This year’s other honorees are Sally Ride, the first American woman in space; Wilma Mankiller, a Native American activist; Nina Otero-Warren, a leader in New Mexico’s suffrage movement; and Anna May Wong, the first Chinese American film star in Hollywood.
(The New York Times, January 11, 2022)
No doubt this is a great way to honor Angelou. But it might be a stealth way to shortchange Blacks. After all, we were promised abolitionist and activist Harriet Tubman would become the first Black woman to have her likeness depicted on the $20 bill.
I hasten to note, however, that no less a person than the first Black president of the United States is the one who made that promise. But, for what shall redound as an historical oversight, Barack Obama waited until the end of his eight year presidency to do so. And so he had no time to fulfill that promise. I duly criticized him in “Tubman, Truth, and MLK on Currency is Fine. But What about Douglas? And Remember Geronimo?” April 25, 2016.
Of course, it came as no surprise that Donald Trump made a public show of heaping scorn on this original promise. He did so initially by saying the only bill Tubman belongs on is a phony $2 bill. But then he added lasting injury to this insult by prominently installing a portrait of unrepentant pro-slavery profiteer Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office.
Unlike his former boss, Joe Biden took up the baton of this unfulfilled promise at the beginning of his presidency. I duly commended him in “In Putting Tubman on $20 Bill, Biden Rebuking Trump, Upstaging Obama,” January 27, 2021.
But I am all too mindful that this is the same Biden who was down in Georgia yesterday spouting platitudes about voting rights bills he promised around the same time to enact. I am politically aware and thus cynical enough to know that, if he’s still hasn’t done anything about voting rights, he probably hasn’t even thought of doing anything about Tubman.
Now comes this Angelou on the quarter celebration … I’m sure Biden is banking that it will placate those upset by reports that Tubman on the $20 bill will has now become a promise deferred to as late as 2030. But still, like dust, [we] rise…
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Tubman… Biden Tubman…