On April 20, 2016, the U.S. Treasury announced plans to feature Harriet Tubman's portrait on the redesigned $20 bill.
On April 20, 2016, U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced that Harriet Tubman's portrait would be placed on the front of a redesigned $20 bill, replacing the primary placement of President Andrew Jackson, who would be moved to the back. This announcement followed a public engagement campaign, including the "Women on 20s" initiative, which had polled Americans on which historical woman should be honored on U.S. paper currency.
The decision marked a historic and unprecedented step: Tubman would become the first African American and the first woman in over a century to be featured on the front of a U.S. paper bill, and the first Black woman ever to receive such an honor on American currency at all. The choice symbolically linked her legacy as a formerly enslaved woman who led others to freedom with the very currency of the nation she helped shape.
Although initial plans anticipated release around 2020, the redesign faced delays across subsequent presidential administrations, with production and release timelines pushed further into the following decade. Nonetheless, the April 2016 announcement itself was widely celebrated as a milestone in American cultural and racial history, representing official government recognition of Tubman's centrality to the national narrative of freedom, resistance, and civil rights, decades after her death in 1913.