Harriet Tubman’s life was a declaration of American possibility—abolitionist, liberator, a woman who risked everything to fight for freedom in a nation built on the enslavement of her people.
For years, a new $20 bill featuring Tubman’s face was held up as a milestone in the nation’s reckoning with its past, a public acknowledgment of those who endured and resisted the country’s original sin. That milestone will not arrive.
The Trump administration, as confirmed by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, has quietly abandoned the Tubman redesign, dissolving a decade of advocacy and signaling a deliberate retreat from the promise of honest historical recognition.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), who in 2015, introduced legislation to put Tubman on the $20, expressed disappointment in Bessent’s announcement.
“Commemorating Harriet Tubman would have been the perfect way to honor the women who helped build this country and bravely stood up for freedom and equality throughout our nation’s remarkable 250-year history,” Shaheen said in a statement. “Though Secretary Bessent may be more interested in illegally plastering Donald Trump’s image on a $250 bill, putting a woman on a U.S. bill remains long overdue, and I will keep focusing on finding a path to honor Harriet Tubman’s patriotism and sacrifice.”
The decision to shelve the Tubman bill is part of a sweeping, coordinated campaign to muzzle Black voices and distort public memory. Since taking office in 2025, Trump has unleashed a torrent of policies aimed at excising Black achievement and struggle from the American story.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in federal agencies have been dismantled. Any mention of systemic racism has been scrubbed from government training materials and official communications. Black historical figures have vanished from federal websites, and exhibits addressing slavery, racial violence, and the fight for civil rights have been ordered removed or rewritten. Statues of Confederate generals have returned to public plazas, while murals and monuments to Black leaders are taken down.
The administration has not stopped at memory and symbolism. In a move that rocked the military establishment, Trump fired Air Force General Charles Q. “CQ” Brown—the first Black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the highest-ranking military officer in the nation—in February 2025. The ouster, widely condemned by civil rights advocates, was seen as retaliation for Brown’s visibility and a chilling message about who is permitted to lead at the highest levels of government.
The attack on Black history has reached the nation’s most respected institutions. The National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History have become targets of presidential ire. The administration has accused these museums of “extreme political activism” for presenting the country’s founding paradox: a nation proclaiming liberty while perpetuating slavery. Pressure has mounted on Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch—the first African American to hold the institution’s top post—to abandon nuanced, truthful storytelling in favor of a “basic consensus view” that sanitizes the past.
“I’m the 14th secretary so there are 13 other people that have had this role – that’s it, in 180 years,” Bunch told NBC News. “So, you feel that weight, but candidly you also feel the weight as an African American, to say you want to make sure that people celebrate you being the first [and] you want to make sure you’re not the last.”
Meanwhile, members of Congress have lashed out at the president.
“Black Americans have worked hard and sacrificed for generations,” declared Mississippi Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson. “One man can’t silence our voice or erase our legacy.”
Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), who has led the years-long push to put Tubman on the $20 bill, has continued to demand action in Congress.
“Replacing a slave owner with an abolitionist is a powerful way to honor our history and the heroes who fought for freedom,” she said.
However, the current administration’s policies, from the halls of the Treasury to the nation’s museums, have represented an unambiguous attempt to enforce silence and reassert white comfort as the norm.
“Black history is American history,” exclaimed Pennsylvania Democratic State Rep. Chris Rabb, in a response to the removal of displays at the President’s House historic site in Philadelphia that was ordered by the Trump administration. “The histories of all oppressed peoples are American history. Attempts to bury these truths only reveal the fragility, and the dangerous ambitions, of those who fear them.”
