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A Capitol employee placed a protest sign when the project's tentative halt was announced in 2019
Photo: YURI GRIPAS / REUTERS
The new US administration resumes plans for the first bill with a portrait of an African American woman.
The Treasury Department wants to bring Harriet Tubman "on the $ 20 bill," announced President Joe Biden's spokeswoman on Monday.
It is important "that our banknotes, our money, show the history and diversity of our country," she said.
Biden's predecessor Donald Trump had stopped the project.
The plan for the new banknote came about under Trump's predecessor Barack Obama.
Trump had criticized the project as "pure political correctness" during the election campaign and suspended it in 2019.
He admired the President Andrew Jackson, who was in office from 1829 to 1837 and has been depicted on the $ 20 bill since 1928, he said at the time to justify it.
Former slave is supposed to replace slave owner
Under Obama, the Treasury Department conducted a poll for the redesign of the banknote.
Millions of Americans participated.
Tubman, selected for the bill, lived from 1822 to 1913. She had escaped slavery and then campaigned for its abolition.
As an activist with the Underground Railroad organization, she succeeded in smuggling numerous Afro-Americans from the slave-holding states of the south into the north of the USA and thus into freedom.
Jackson, on the other hand, was a slave owner himself.
As a general, he led the attack on the so-called Negro Fort in Florida, a settlement of former slaves.
As president, Jackson was then responsible for the forced relocation of Native Americans from their homeland in the southeastern United States to territories west of the Mississippi River.
Thousands died of hunger and disease.
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ire / AFP
