The 4 Women Who Could Grace the $20 Bill

Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman, Eleanor Roosevelt, Wilma Mankiller
By Arden Dier,  Newser Staff
Posted Apr 8, 2015 11:15 AM CDT
The 4 Women Who Could Grace the $20 Bill
A photograph of Rosa Parks from the 1950s and a paper written by Parks about segregation are seen at the Library of Congress in Washington, Jan. 29, 2015.   (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

And then there were four: Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Wilma Mankiller have been named as the finalists for the Women on 20s campaign to replace Andrew Jackson with a female on the $20 bill. Over five weeks, more than 250,000 people voted in an online poll that shrunk the list of 15 possible candidates down to three, CNNMoney reports. A majority of voters named Roosevelt, Tubman, or Parks in their top three candidates, USA Today reports. The group says Mankiller, the first female chief of the Cherokee Nation, was added as a finalist due to "strong sentiment" that a Native American should replace Jackson, who authorized the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which moved Native American tribes to what is now Oklahoma (Mankiller's home state).

A second round of voting will wrap up in the next few weeks and determine which candidate Women on 20s will present to the Treasury as part of its campaign to issue new bills by 2020. "Every one of the 15 candidates came out a winner because people of all ages across the country took the time to get to know them," says campaign Executive Director Susan Ades Stone, per the Detroit Free Press. She adds that having a woman on the $20 bill would be "a little pocket monument" to the "great women who've contributed to the shaping of our nation." The Treasury announced last month that a new $10 bill with a "tactile feature" will go into circulation in 2020, CNNMoney reports. A rep wouldn't specify whether Alexander Hamilton or someone else would grace the revised currency. (More US currency stories.)

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