By Julianne Malveaux
(Trice Edney Wire) – As an economist, I have spent much of my life thinking about what money does. It measures value. It facilitates exchange. It stores wealth. But money also tells a story. Every portrait placed on a bill announces whom this nation has chosen to honor—and whose history it expects us to carry in our pockets.
Ten years ago, the Treasury Department announced that Harriet Tubman would replace Andrew Jackson on the front of the $20 bill. That plan has been delayed again and again. Now, while Tubman continues to wait, supporters of Donald Trump are promoting a new $250 bill bearing his likeness, even though Congress has not authorized the denomination and current law prohibits living people from appearing on American currency.
The contrast could hardly be more offensive.
Harriet Tubman was born enslaved and escaped to freedom, then repeatedly risked her life to return south and lead others out of bondage. She served the Union as a nurse, scout and spy. In 1863, she helped lead the Combahee River Raid, which liberated hundreds of enslaved people. Later, she advocated for women’s suffrage. She gave her life to the proposition that freedom was worth fighting for, even when the fight brought her neither wealth nor comfort.
Donald Trump, meanwhile, is a billionaire president who has repeatedly blurred the line between public power and private enrichment. He has put his name on buildings, products and public institutions. Now his image is being proposed for a denomination created to commemorate the nation’s 250th anniversary.
This is more than vanity. It is the currency of oligarchy.
Oligarchy is what happens when wealth buys political power, political power protects and multiplies wealth, and public institutions are bent toward the glorification of people who already possess both. In a democracy, money is a public instrument. In an oligarchy, even public money becomes another surface on which the ruler may write his own name.
The Tubman $20 would tell a different story.
A $20 bill is not a rare commemorative object locked in a collector’s case. It is ordinary money. It passes across grocery counters and restaurant tables. It is slipped into church collection plates and handed to grandchildren. It pays for haircuts, prescriptions, school supplies and rides home. It is folded into a child’s birthday card by an auntie who wants the child to have “a little something.”
Imagine Harriet Tubman making those journeys.
Imagine a child opening that birthday card and asking who the woman on the bill is. Imagine generations of Americans encountering Tubman not only during Black History Month, but every day—at the ATM, the corner store and the kitchen table.
That is why representation on currency matters. It is history placed into circulation.
Andrew Jackson, whose portrait remains on the $20 bill, was an enslaver whose policies drove Native people from their lands. Tubman, who liberated enslaved people and served this nation, was supposed to take his place on the front. Earlier plans even retained Jackson on the reverse. Yet even that modest adjustment to our national memory has proved too much for those determined to preserve the old racial hierarchy.
Tubman was not merely an inspirational figure. She challenged an economic system. Enslavement was not only racial terrorism; it was coerced labor that created enormous wealth for white people while treating Black people as property. Each time Tubman led another person to freedom, she stole labor away from enslavers and disrupted the economics of bondage.
That makes her especially appropriate for American currency.
She also understood that freedom without economic power is fragile. After the Civil War, despite her service to the Union, she struggled for years to receive adequate compensation and a pension. The nation benefited from her courage more readily than it paid its debt to her.
That pattern is painfully familiar. Black people build, serve, sacrifice and create. The country applauds us symbolically while withholding material justice. Tubman is praised in speeches while being kept off the money. Meanwhile, a president who converts attention, office and access into personal advantage may receive a denomination manufactured for his image.
The issue is not merely whether one likes Donald Trump. It is a question of ownership. Does American currency belong to the American people? Does it reflect a shared history, including the people who expanded the boundaries of freedom? Or is it another possession of a president who treats public institutions as extensions of his personal brand?
Harriet Tubman belongs on the $20 bill because she represents the best of this nation—not the nation as it was, but the nation generations have struggled to make it become. She chose liberation over submission, collective freedom over personal safety and service over self-enrichment.
Donald Trump does not need another monument to himself. The man who lives in the house that enslaved people built has already had far too much access to the nation’s power, attention and money.
The last thing we need is his face on it.
