Since 1928, President Andrew Jackson, a war hero who owned slaves and signed the Indian Removal Act, has graced the twenty dollar bill.  However, the United States Department of the Treasury has announced that Harriet Tubman, who escaped slavery and helped over 60 people escape from slavery through the Underground Railroad, will be the center figure on a new design of the bill.  Jackson will still remain, but he will reside on the back.

Other changes to the currency include the addition of women’s suffrage leaders on the back of the ten dollar bill.  These include Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Alice Paul.  The five dollar bill will still feature President Lincoln and the Lincoln Memorial, but it will also depict major events that have taken place at the memorial, such as Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech, Marian Anderson’s performance, and Eleanor Roosevelt’s address to the NAACP.

The drastic change comes in part because of the efforts of a group called Women on 20s, which began after Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew proposed a change to the currency and asked for citizen’s opinions on which historical women should have a place on the currency.  Harriet Tubman won, but the Treasury Department still wanted to include more civil rights and women’s suffrage leaders.  While at first, the image of Alexander Hamilton on the ten dollar bill was going to be replaced, fans of the widely- known and Pulitzer Prize winning musical Hamilton reacted and convinced Secretary Lew to keep Hamilton on the bill.

However, the final designs for the bills will not be released until 2020, and the Treasury Department does not expect them to be in wide circulation until the later half of the decade.  Still, the inclusion of so many influential leaders in American history reflects the wide diversity and freedom that our country was founded upon.