A New York designer took matters into his own hands after Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin delayed replacing Andrew Jackson with Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill. (Dano Wall)

A New York designer took matters into his own hands after Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin delayed replacing Andrew Jackson with Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill. (Dano Wall)

Depsite Trump, Harriet Tubman is appearing on $20 bills

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he was delaying the new Harriet Tubman $20 bill until 2028.

  • DeNeen L. Brown The Washington Post
  • Friday, May 24, 2019 6:35am
  • Nation-World

By DeNeen L. Brown / The Washington Post

Minutes after Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Wednesday that he was delaying the new Harriet Tubman $20 bill until 2028, a New York designer tweeted: “We’ll see about that.”

Dano Wall, 33, has created a 3-D stamp that can be used to superimpose a portrait of Tubman over Andrew Jackson’s on $20 bills. Wall said he has sold out of the stamps and is hurrying to produce more.

“My goal is to get 5,000 stamps out there,” said Wall. “If there are 5,000 people consistently stamping currency, we could get a significant percent of circulating $20 bills [with the Tubman] stamp, at which point it would be impossible to ignore.”

Wall began manufacturing the stamps in 2017, soon after President Donald Trump took office, and Mnuchin refused to commit to the Obama administration’s plan to put Tubman on the $20 bill.

Jackson, the nation’s seventh commander in chief, was a slave owner. Tubman, who escaped slavery on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, helped lead hundreds of people to freedom along the Underground Railroad.

Wall has been stamping as many $20s as he can and encouraging others to do the same.

“Putting Harriet Tubman on the front of the $20 bill would have constituted a monumental symbolic change, disrupting the pattern of white men who appear on our bills,” he said, “and, by putting her on the most popular note currently in circulation, indicates exactly what kind of a life we choose to celebrate; what values we, as a country, most hope to emulate. Harriet Tubman’s unparalleled grit, intelligence, and bravery over the course of her long life certainly make her worthy of such an honor. “

Last month Trump described the redesign of the $20 bill with Tubman’s image as “pure political correctness” and suggested she could be added to the $2 bill instead. Trump admires Jackson, the first populist to occupy the White House.

“Andrew Jackson had a great history,” Trump said, “and I think it’s very rough when you take somebody off the bill.”

But Jackson was also the president responsible for the 1830 Indian Removal Act, which forced more than 60,000 Native Americans from their lands and onto the Trail of Tears.

In her book, “Unhinged,” former White House staffer Omarosa Manigault Newman wrote that when Trump was shown an image of Harriet Tubman, his response was: “You want me to put that face on the twenty-dollar bill?”

But Wall said the more he learned about Tubman, the more impressed he was with her accomplishments and the more determined he was to get the bills with Tubman’s face into circulation.

“Before this project,” Wall told The Post, “I knew she was a famous American, someone I looked up to in the vague sense without realizing everything she did in the Army. I since learned she was a spy for the Union. She was buried with military honors. She freed over 1,000 people. The more you learn about her, the more you are in awe of what she was able to accomplish.”

Wall said he created the stamps with a 3-D printer and laser cutters. “I got some engravable rubber and that is how I made the stamp face,” Wall said.

He used the image of the young Harriet Tubman, which was jointly acquired in 2017 by the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

“It was sort of by coincidence that I began designing this stamp shortly after that photo of her was discovered,” Wall said. “I think it’s a really beautiful image and is significant in that it is the earliest known photograph of her. It also happened that her face lined up very nicely with Andrew Jackson’s features when superimposed on the bill, so I decided to go with that rather than use any of the older portraits of her that I’d seen in other proposed designs.”

Initially, Wall funded about 100 of the stamps on his own.

In 2018, he applied for and received a grant from the Awesome Foundation, which defines itself online as a “global community advancing the interest of awesome in the universe, $1,000 at a time.”

Last October, Wall began selling the stamps on ETSY. Since then, he’s sold more than 600.

Wall said he’s been careful not to violate a U.S. law of defacing currency. “The basic gist of it is you can’t render a bill illegible,” Wall said. “You can’t cover any text or numbers or anything on it to serve as an advertisement… . Anything outside of that – if the bill is still fit for circulation is fine. You can write on it and mark in any way.”

According to the U.S. Bureau of Engraving, “defacement of currency” is prohibited under a federal law.

“Under this provision,” according to the bureau, “currency defacement is generally defined as follows: Whoever mutilates, cuts, disfigures, perforates, unites or cements together, or does any other thing to any bank bill, draft, note, or other evidence of debt issued by any national banking association, Federal Reserve Bank, or Federal Reserve System, with intent to render such item(s) unfit to be reissued, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.”

Wall said that since 2017, he has been using the Tubman-stamped currency in vending machines and at stores in New York.

“The vast majority of people don’t notice it was stamped,” Wall said.

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