Harriet Tubman and the $20 Bill: A Nation’s Memory, A Nation’s Shame

By Stacy M. Brown Senior Global Correspondent

There are moments when the American sun seems unable to burn through the fog of its own deliberate amnesia. We are told to move forward, to celebrate progress, to take pride in a country that, we are assured, is always striving toward justice. But how does a nation move forward if it cannot bear to look honestly at the ground beneath its feet—or the ghosts standing upon it?

Once, not so long ago, the United States promised to place Harriet Tubman’s face on the $20 bill. It was more than a design change; it was to be an act of national recognition, an admission that greatness in America has never belonged solely to those who wrote its laws or commanded its armies, but to those who broke its chains. Tubman was such a person—fierce, indomitable, a conductor on the Underground Railroad who risked her life again and again for a freedom she was never meant to taste. To see her image in every wallet and every bank would be to admit that this country, at its best, belongs to its bravest dissenters.

But the promise has been withdrawn. The current administration has quietly halted the Tubman bill, with the Secretary of the Treasury offering only bureaucratic evasions as explanation. The symbolism is unmistakable: in the centennial year of Black History Month, even this modest act of acknowledgment is deemed too much.

Yet Tubman’s erasure is only one act in a vast, orchestrated pageant of forgetting. Federal policies now sweep across the land, rolling back diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives that once dared to name the reality of American racism. Black history exhibits—those fragile sanctuaries of inconvenient truth—have been stripped from museums, their stories labeled “divisive” or “political.” Statues honoring Black leaders are removed under the cover of neutrality, while monuments to the Confederacy are dusted off and raised again. Funding for Black colleges is slashed, and public art that once proclaimed Black dignity is ordered down.

The attack is not merely symbolic, nor is it limited to the realm of memory. In February 2025, President Trump dismissed General Charles Q. “CQ” Brown, the first Black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as if to remind the nation that no amount of merit, no record of service, will shield a Black man from the caprice of power. The message is clear and chilling: there is no place at the table for those whose very existence unsettles the story America tells itself.

Even the nation’s temples of history are not spared. The Smithsonian, under the leadership of Lonnie Bunch, finds itself accused by the administration of “extreme political activism” for the simple act of telling the truth. To present the fullness of America—the glory and the grief, the founding ideals and the founding crimes—is now framed as an act of rebellion. The halls where children might have learned the names and faces omitted from their textbooks are patrolled, censored, and stripped of their uncomfortable lessons.

Yet the people who live beneath these policies, who have inherited both the wounds and the wisdom of survival, do not forget. As Congressman Bennie Thompson says, “Black Americans have worked hard and sacrificed for generations. One man can’t silence our voice or erase our legacy.” Congresswoman Joyce Beatty, still fighting for Tubman’s rightful place on the $20 bill, knows that to replace a slave owner with an abolitionist is not an erasure—it is a restoration.

But restoration requires courage, and this country, again and again, flinches from its own reflection. The story of America is the story of what it refuses to remember. “To remove or dilute this history—especially at a site where the nation’s first president enslaved Black women, men, and children—is not a bureaucratic oversight. It is an act of ideological violence.” These words are not merely protest; they are prophecy.

Harriet Tubman walks among us still, silent but unyielding. She is the conscience America cannot silence, the lantern-bearer on a road this nation is still too afraid to travel.