Harriet Tubman 20 Dollar Bill Mockup 1600X800
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You can count Christy Clark-Pujara among those who are excited to see that the Biden administration has revived efforts to put Harriet Tubman, the legendary Black abolitionist best known for conducting 70 slaves northward on the Underground Railroad, on the twenty dollar bill (replacing former president Andrew Jackson).

You can also count her among those who are concerned about aspects of the message it sends.

Christy Clark-Pujara

“I think she should be on it,” says Clark-Pujara, a professor of American history who specializes in early African American history. “We put people we admire on our currency, and we put founders on our bills. But it’s also complicated.”

Clark-Pujara’s concerns begin with the fact that by placing Tubman’s likeness on capital, we’re overlooking the fact that as a slave and a Black woman in the 1800s, she too was considered capital. To Clark-Pujara, that’s a troubling confluence.

“This is a woman who spent her life destroying slavery,” Clark-Pujara says. “It’s a reminder about the relationship between history, capitalism and capital in this country. If we put her on the bill uncritically, that’s a grave disservice to her legacy.”

Like many historical figures, Tubman has a legacy that is not fully appreciated or understood. Most know about her involvement as the conductor of the Underground Railroad. Far fewer also know that she was a nurse, a spy and a cook—despite the fact that she never learned to read. Or that she was the only woman to lead a military operation during the Civil War, a raid that freed 700 slaves from Combahee Ferry in South Carolina. Or that she dedicated her life not just to fighting slavery, but poverty as well.

That’s the conversation Clark-Pujara would like us to have around featuring Tubman on the bill. While that discussion can and will happen in the graduate seminar she teaches on slavery and capitalism, she would also like to see it happen more broadly through public history avenues, such as lectures at libraries, movies, and museum exhibits, as well as through broader lesson plans in public elementary and high schools. 

Harriet Tubman in 1895

“We have to think about it as a first step. We need to have a public discourse about American capitalism and slavery. People were mortgaged. The bodies of Black people were part of the financial system.” 

When Clark-Pujara tells people she’s a professor of African American history who is an expert in northern slavery, she says, people are often taken aback. Most believe that slavery was something that underpinned the cotton industry in the American South, without realizing, for instance, that 20 percent of New York residents were enslaved in the middle of the  eighteenth century, or that  J.P. Morgan, the powerful railroad magnate and financier, transported enslaved people from the Chesapeake (Old South) to the new southern states, like Texas.

There has been a tendency to flatten or mythologize Black figures in American history. Pujara rapidly ticks off some examples.

“We think of Rosa Parks as a tired old lady who didn’t get off the bus. She was actually a younger woman who worked as a rape investigator for the NAACP,” she says. “We remember Martin Luther King, Jr. as a man who delivered a message of kumbaya and hand-holding. At the time, the vast majority of Americans thought he was a hoodlum.”

Clark-Pujara considers herself an “eternal optimist” when it comes to enlightening others on the truths about American history.  For the last five years, she’s been one of the teachers participating in Justified Anger, a nine-week public course on African American history created by the Madison-based Nehemiah Center for Urban Leadership Development. It’s usually been taught on Monday evenings in local churches but is virtual this year. Last year, the course was routinely attracting as many as 200 people per session, most of whom were white.

“People are hungry for this,” says Clark-Pujara. “They want to know about the stories and perspectives they’re missing.”