Harriet Tubman Twenties

I have been stamping Harriet Tubman's face on my twenty dollar bills for a couple of years now.  Most vendors don't blink an eye.  A great number of them, especially servers in restaurants and small businesses, are excited to see them.  In Las Vegas, I waited for twenty minutes while the Cashier examined the bill and my handout explaining it. The women bartenders and servers waited with me and let out a small cheer when the properly faced twenty dollar bill was cleared. Once in awhile, there will be a refusal to accept it, even when assured the stamp violates no counterfeit laws. So, I put my purchases back on their shelves.  It is long past time for Harriet Tubman to be the face of our twenty dollar bills.  In 2016, the Obama Administration hired an artist to do the engraving, and things were lined up for the change.  Then came Steve Mnuchin, who as the twice impeached former president's Secretary of the Treasury, halted the presses, so to speak.  The enlarged visages of America's white men have been on our paper money for more than a hundred years. Enough.  Andrew Jackson was not a hero.  He was just a President, and an angry one at that.  As recent events have proven, American Presidents can be the opposite of heroic.  He authored the Indian Removal Act, resulting in the Trail of Tears, the taking of ancestral lands and thousands of deaths.  His farm "The Hermitage" required the unpaid labor of over 100 enslaved people.​

Originally designed by New York City artist Dano Wall, the Harriet Tubman Stamp has become the new "face" for artistic activism. The final design for the new $20 bill was originally set to be revealed in 2020, marking the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment that gave women the right to vote.  But after Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told a congressional panel in May of 2019 that the government would be pushing back the plan to replace Jackson with Tubman on the bill to 2028, Wall has set a goal to stamp as many $20 bills in circulation as possible..  The original image for this stamp comes from a carte-de-visite portrait of Harriet Tubman taken by Benjamin Powelson in Auburn, NY in 1868.  Harriet Tubman was born a slave named Araminta Ross (“Minty”)  around 1820-1823 in Maryland. Of Ashanti blood, descendant of tribal chiefs, she possessed an unconquerable spirit and immense physical strength, surpassing that of most men. To avoid being “sold south” in her youth, she followed the north star of freedom, but soon was back teaching other negroes the road she had trod.  Rewards amounting to $40,000 were offered in Virginia and Maryland for her arrest. While in this work as an “underground railroad” agent in the north she led the group that rescued Charles Nalle, a fugitive slave, in Troy. Though beaten upon the head by policemen’s billies, she thrashed two of them and aided the rescue with her mighty muscles. She became known as the ‘Moses of her people.’  Appointed as a nurse to Colonel Shaw’s famous negro regiment in 1863, she soon appeared in a new capacity as a scout for the union troops.  She also helped free more than 700 African-Americans during an 1863 raid in South Carolina, which earned her another nickname: General Tubman.  In 1894, she founded the Harriet Tubman Davis Home for indigent aged negroes, at Auburn, NY, where she herself died at the supposed age of 98.  
​Note: Pursuant to 1.1.18 U.S.C. § 333, stamped currency is fit for circulation so long as its denomination remains legible