Read an Excerpt
FOREWORD By Kali Holloway
One of America’s most fervently held—and desperately clung to—myths
is that our racial hierarchy is neither engineered nor rigorously
enforced, but the natural and inevitable result of every group getting
exactly what they deserve. At the core of this fictive theory is the
belief that the innately civilized, law-abiding, industrious, and
intelligent nature of whiteness justifies its position atop the racial
order, just as the inherent pathology, criminality, ignorance, and
self-defeating ways of blackness perpetually constrain it to the bottom.
Of the myriad self-absolving and racist lies propagated by white
supremacist culture, the notion that black folks have only themselves to
blame for their oppression is perhaps the most insidious. It’s a
denialist view wholly divorced from both the consequences of American
policy and the realities of our past, and its hegemony requires
defensive maintenance of a national memory built on lies of historical
omission.
This whitewashing happens not just symbolically, in textbooks,
monuments, memorials, and markers, but materially, in policies that
directly impact the life, death, and political power of black Americans.
Affronted by black emancipation and enfranchisement after losing the
Civil War, defeated Confederates developed the Lost Cause mythos, white
supremacist propaganda with multiple aims. Relying heavily on public
symbols, it sought to project a Southern antebellum innocence onto the
past, while telegraphing absolute white power onto the future. To that
end, Lost Cause mythologists portrayed Confederate leaders—men whose
most notable contribution to history was armed defense of white folks’
right to buy, sell, and enslave black people—as heroes. Anonymous
Confederate combatants, cast in bronze and stone, stood sentry atop
lofty pedestals that implicitly demanded public veneration. The
Confederacy’s dishonorable fight for black enslavement was tacitly
rendered an honorable but lost cause. In town centers, along avenues,
and in myriad other public spaces, these statues stood as constant
signifiers of racial terror. On courthouse lawns and statehouse grounds,
they were strategically erected to serve as reminders to black folks
that those institutions had no regard for them.
Black folks, then as now, implicitly and empirically understood how
white supremacist symbols are inextricably linked to white terror
violence, imbuing the environment with harassment and intimidation,
race-stamping public spaces as immutably white, and emboldening
anti-black vigilantism. Civil rights activist, educator, and Charleston,
South Carolina, native Mamie Garvin Fields grew up in the shadow of a
statue that went up in 1887 depicting politician John C. Calhoun, a
vocal and virulent racist who once called black enslavement a “positive
good.”
“Our white city fathers wanted to keep what [Calhoun] stood for
alive,” Fields stated in her memoirs nearly a century later. “Blacks
took that statue personally. As you passed by, here was Calhoun looking
you in the face and telling you, ‘Nigger, you may not be a slave, but I
am back to see you stay in your place.’”
Black folks protested white supremacist symbols littering the
landscape, a brave risk under the often lethal threat of Jim Crow, which
those same monuments monumentalized and made tangible. When the United
Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) in 1931 erected a “loyal slave
monument”—a type of Confederate marker promoting the insane idea that
black people were happiest being enslaved by white folks—near the West
Virginia site of John Brown’s rebellion at Harpers Ferry, the NAACP
demanded a tablet be placed nearby to honor Brown, noting a counter was
needed to the “nationally publicized tablet giving the Confederate point
of view” and the rising movement of “copperheadism,” or Confederate
sympathy and slavery apologism. W. E. B. Du Bois, who wrote that the
dedication event for the UDC’s monument had been a “pro-slavery
celebration,” drafted the proposed wording for the Brown memorial, which
called the abolitionist’s rebellion “a blow that woke a guilty nation.”
It was never erected, but the NAACP made its resistance known.
Mamie Garvin Fields described how she and other black children would
“carry something with us, if we knew we would be passing that way, in
order to deface” the Calhoun statue in Charleston, to “scratch up the
coat, break the watch chain, try to knock off the nose—because he looked
like he was telling you that there was a place for ‘niggers’ and
‘niggers must stay there.’” Newspaper accounts catalog yet more protests
using defacement, as in 1888 when a statue of the figure of Justice
positioned at Calhoun’s feet was found with “a tin kettle in her hand
and a cigar in her mouth”; in 1892, when someone painted the face of the
Justice statue “lily” white; or in 1894, when a young black boy named
Andrew Haig shot at the figure of Justice with a tiny pistol. A park
keeper was ultimately hired to stop “the nuisances and depredations now
committed by goats, boys and night prowlers,” but apparently failed in
that mission. In 1895, the Calhoun statue was removed. A local newspaper
article recounts how, as the statue was being lowered off its pedestal
by a rope, a group of black boys watching nearby “skillfully pasted Mr.
Calhoun in the eye with a lump of mud.” The original Calhoun’s plinth
stood forty-five feet in the air. In 1896, a replacement Calhoun was
erected on a pedestal some 115 feet off the ground. Officially, the
first Calhoun statue was removed because of design flaws, but Fields
contends that black “children and adults beat up John C. Calhoun so
badly that the whites had to come back and put him way up high, so we
couldn't get to him.” The figure was finally removed for good on June
25, 2020.
Black protests against white supremacist symbols continued during the
Civil Rights era, becoming even more overt. In 1966, after an all-white
jury acquitted the white man who admitted to murdering Sammy Younge
Jr., a black student activist attending Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute,
thousands of protesters congregated at the town’s central Confederate
marker, spray-painting its pedestal with Younge’s name and the phrase
“Black Power.” Less than two years later, just after the April 1968
assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., black students at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill expressed their grief and
rage by dousing a campus Confederate statue known as “Silent Sam” in red paint.
After a young black man named James Cates was murdered by a white
motorcycle gang in 1970, black students rallied at the foot of the
monument. In a call-back to those demonstrations, UNC-Chapel Hill
student Maya Little would pour a mixture of her own blood and red ink on
the statue in April 2018, in an action that presaged its toppling by
protesters four months later, boldly and accurately stating that “the
statue and all statues like it are already drenched in black blood.”
In these and far too many examples to describe here, black folks have
protested the iconography of white power from its earliest appearance,
as part of a broader movement toward the dismantling of white supremacy,
writ large. W. E. B. Du Bois, Mamie Garvin Fields, the early NAACP—all
were involved in seeking rights for black folks in various spheres, in
calling out white supremacist socio-politics of their day. But in tandem
with those efforts to secure black folks’ civil rights, they also noted
the way those symbols attempted to write black folks out of American
history, and how the net effect of symbols that conveyed anti-blackness
and white terror added fuel to the prevalence of both.
This was never mere conjecture. In fact, a 2021 study by researchers
at the University of Virginia further confirms it, concluding there is a
direct correlation between Confederate monuments and white racial
terror, and that “the number of lynching victims in a county is a
positive and significant predictor of the number of Confederate
memorializations in that county.” Those markers, most of which still
stand, continue to do the work of white supremacy. But there are hints
of progress in acknowledging the damage they do, the hostile ambience
they create, and the structural inequities their existence perpetuates.
In late 2021, a Tennessee appeals court granted a new trial to a black
man who had been convicted by an all-white jury who deliberated in a
room full of Confederate memorabilia—including a portrait of Confederate
president Jefferson Davis, a framed Confederate flag, and a placard
displaying the insignia of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The
appellate court’s jurists agreed with the argument that white
supremacist symbology had an “inherently prejudicial” impact on jurors.
Just as the architects of the Lost Cause had hoped they would.
In Twenty Dollars and Change, scholar Clarence Lusane makes
the same argument about the power of symbols and their impact on public
consciousness, but in its inverse, suggesting that the “inherently
prejudicial” effect of the images we choose can and should be used to
augment larger struggles for real change. Using the debate around the
U.S. Treasury’s promise to replace Andrew Jackson with Harriet Tubman on
the front of a twenty-dollar bill as a springboard, Lusane argues that
“rolling out a Tubman twenty not only disrupts and diminishes the
legacies of white supremacy that persist in official narratives, but
that doing so is a necessary step toward diminishing and abolishing
racist distortions of our political economy, health and medical
institutions, and justice system.”
“This is why the book is named Twenty Dollars and Change,”
writes Lusane: “it is an effort to address the connection between
official narratives and power, and the urgent need to transform both.”
What does it mean to have Tubman on the twenty, as well as poet Maya
Angelou on the quarter, as white supremacist legislators and white
parents work in tandem to ban Angelou’s books and legally prohibit
teaching about slavery using the mislabeled racist boogeyman of
“critical race theory”? How do we reckon with the incongruity of putting
Tubman and Angelou on money even as racial capitalism is directly
responsible for black women, who have the highest labor force
participation rate among women, being paid 36 percent less than white
men and 20 percent less than white women, being three times as likely to
live in poverty as white women, and suffering the greatest job losses
and economic suffering among all American women amidst the coronavirus
pandemic?
More broadly, Lusane elucidates how structural racism and the
convulsive and circular political violence of white backlash—embedded in
contemporary Republican politics, anti-black voting suppression, and
resistance to legislation that would repair the Supreme Court’s
decimation of the Voting Rights Act; anti-protest laws, some allowing
vicious attacks against demonstrators, passed at a fast clip after the
anti-racist uprisings following the police murder of George Floyd; and
statutes against “wokeness” that target public schools, libraries, and
places of work—undermine the strides of black progress. “It is the
quotidian violence of America’s racial caste system,” writes Lusane,
“that poses the most critical threat to communities of color and
democracy itself. Ultimately, it is that system, and the narratives that
validate it, that must be overthrown.” It is in the service of that
goal that Lusane also carefully, and contemplatively, contextualizes
Tubman’s work and legacy as foundational to a tradition of resistance,
including the fierce battle against the regressive anti-black racism of
this moment. It is also in the service of that goal that he advocates we
make the conscious “inherently prejudicial” choice to see an
illiterate, handicapped, self-emancipated, insurgent black woman for the
thoroughly original American icon—and hero—she is.
This, Lusane notes, is exactly why figures such as Harriet Tubman and
Maya Angelou, for all the valid concerns over empty efforts at racial
inclusion, should be represented, centered, honored and celebrated. The
exclusion of black folks, and particularly black women, from America’s
public-facing images of itself—monuments, money, and more—has always
been a warped reflection of whiteness wholly incongruous with the actual
face of this country. Honest narratives about black women and other
folks who continue to fight for what this country purports to stand for,
saving America from its own worst and most insidious tendencies, should
be in our public spaces and on our shared objects. In tandem with the
work of change on the ground and elsewhere, they are the totems of
progress.
If representation didn’t matter, the right wouldn’t be fighting so hard to keep it all white.
Twenty Dollars and Change is a future-gazing guide to who we
must be to become who we claim to be. And, as Lusane notes, we will
only get there by changing, inside and out.
PREFACE
On March 13, 2017, I and my then seven-year-old son, Ellington, woke
at 5:00 a.m. for a bus trip to the much-anticipated grand opening of the
Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Visitor Center in Church Creek,
Maryland. Thanks to my good friend, WPFW radio host and producer Joni
Eisenberg, we were able to secure the last two tickets on a bus
chartered by senior black women who were going to the event. The
ladies—most of whom were in their seventies or older—were dignified and
rowdy the whole ride there. It was a great experience for my son and me.
On our way, we had lots of discussions about history, race, and what
Harriet Tubman meant to African Americans and the nation as a whole.
Although my son did engage in a few discussions and enjoyed being fawned
over by the ladies, for much of the ninety-minute ride he quietly read
his Power Rangers book.
Operated by the U.S. National Park Service, the Center presents a
collection of historic artifacts, artwork, and other materials about
Harriet Tubman, the Underground Railroad, slavery, and anti-slavery in
Maryland. The main exhibit features lots of hands-on history about
Tubman’s life. For the opening, a large tent was set up and talks were
presented on a range of subjects. For young people, there were history
lessons and role-playing, entailing costumes and wigs that could be worn
as the youth learned about the antebellum period and how enslaved
people organized revolts and escapes to freedom.
Ellington enjoyed it all immensely. The inspiring moment to me came when we were on our way back and Ellington put away his Power Rangers book and read—and eventually fell asleep reading—his new book, What Was the Underground Railroad, by Yona Zeldis McDonough.
The timing of our trip was fortuitous. Months earlier, in April 2016,
the Obama administration’s Treasury Department had announced plans to
redesign U.S. five-, ten-, and twenty-dollar bills. The purpose of the
initiative was to better reflect the racial and gender diversity of the
American people. The part of the announcement that drew the most
response—both celebration and anger—was the declaration that Harriet
Tubman would appear on the front of the redesigned twenty, pushing
Andrew Jackson’s image, long on the bill’s front, to the back. Debate
about Tubman, Jackson, and the future of the U.S. twenty was jolted to
another level on November 8, 2016, when Donald Trump, the most overtly
bigoted and misogynist presidential candidate in living memory, was
announced winner of the election. Occurring less than two months after
Trump’s inauguration, our trip to the Center provided a needed injection
of hope. Everything about Tubman’s life resisted the pervasive racism,
sexism, and classism of her time. She never backed down in the face of
threats and peril that most of us will never have to experience. I
especially wanted my son to know and embrace the black female leadership
and agency that her life story embodies. The trip occurred as I was in
the process of researching this present work, and inspired me to dive
deeper into Tubman’s life and legacy.
This book is an effort to link the struggles of the past with the
challenges of the present. Whether or not one agrees about placing
Tubman on the front of the twenty-dollar bill, the debate provides yet
another opportunity to advance the nation’s reckoning with white
supremacy, patriarchy, and institutional injustice. Raising public
consciousness about these issues is even more urgent today than when the
announcement was first made in April 2016. Since then we have faced the
emergence of a killer pandemic, an authoritarian presidency, and an
attempt to overthrow the 2020 election with mob violence. At the same
time, we have also seen the emergence of a powerful racial justice
movement, organized largely by black women, challenging white supremacy
and patriarchy in all their forms, particularly in the ways police
target communities of color. More than ever, we need to clarify and
elucidate the two competing political visions before us: one rooted in
exclusion and domination, the other in diversity and liberation. The
lessons and lifework of Harriet Tubman provide inspiring proof we can
still achieve the latter.
