Tubman earned her right to be on $20 bill

Let’s do this. Put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill.

It’s time for the face of our currency to catch up with the great changes this country has undergone since the end of the Jim Crow era. Putting the no-nonsense image of Tubman, a black woman who served her people as a conductor of the Underground Railroad — and served her country as a Union Army spy during the Civil War — would be a powerful reflection of that change.

With the exception of Abraham Lincoln, the white men on the face of all our nation’s paper currency, from $1 to $100, had a hand in slavery. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and Benjamin Franklin owned slaves. Alexander Hamilton bought and sold them. Grant helped win the Civil War and Jefferson signed a law that banned slave importation, but those acts hardly diminish the fact that they treated blacks as chatel.

Some people might excuse slaveholding as being acceptable in those times. But Tubman’s moral compass took her in another direction during a period when the enslavement of blacks was both legal and widely condoned.

Owning slaves didn’t require courage of our currency icons. Sneaking onto slave plantations did. Tubman repeatedly risked her life to free blacks after her 1849 escape from a plantation.

Abolitionist John Brown said Tubman was among the “bravest persons on this continent.” Fredrick Douglass called her “Moses.” Slavery supporters put a price on her head, paid in U.S. dollars. How ironic to move her from wanted poster to $20 bill.

For her service, Tubman got little respect, only a small widow’s pension after the death of her second husband, a Civil War soldier. When Tubamn died in 1913, she had few dollars to her name. If Treasury Secretary Jack Lew puts Tubman’s image on the $20 bill, America’s Moses will replace a slave owner. This is more than symbolism. America’s capitalism, once undergirded by the labor of slaves, still depends on their descendants. Even as black employment and wealth lag behind whites, Black Enterprise magazine reports that black buying power will be $1.1 trillion this year. Tubman could not have imagined such a thing, but her efforts made it possible.

Her service as a nurse, cook and Union Army scout shows she wanted to build a new America.

Her efforts helped bring two mighty waves of change. The first was Reconstruction after the Civil War when former slaves served in Congress and the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments were adopted. The next, a 2nd Reconstruction, has seen the number of blacks in Congress swell to 48 and ushered in the first black president.

Putting Tubman’s face on the $20 bill would be a fitting tribute to her achievements.