My first response to Harriet Tubman being on the $20 bill was, ok, sure. Black. Woman. Check and check the diversity boxes.  Then I realized all I knew about her was her name.  And all we have, and will have, on the $20 bill is a nineteenth–century photo of an unsmiling old lady.

But, then I started to read about her. She was, of course, a slave. One time, a white man was pissed off at another slave and threw a two-pound weight at him. Missed him. Hit her.  Fractured her skull.  She was back in the fields two days later, still bleeding from her head.  She suffered epileptic-like seizers the rest of her life.

She made a daring escape from slavery. “Daring.” Like, there was any other kind of escape from slavery?  And, after that, she returned to slave-holding parts of Maryland, at enormous personal risk, to help other slaves escape to freedom on the Underground Railroad.  She carried a revolver and meant to use it.

There’s an about-to-be-famous woodcut image of her during the Civil War. In her forties.  Wearing what must have been a brightly colored head scarf and brandishing a rifle.  This image would have been explosive in 1963.  Or now.  But, in 1863 . . . .

This should be the image for the new twenty. Uniting both 14^th Amendment and 2^nd Amendment supporters in common cause.

In 1865, on a train in the North, the conductor asked her to move to a less desirable seat. A hundred years before Rosa Parks, she refused.  The conductor and two white passengers then wrestled her out of her seat and broke her arm in the process.

She helped lead Union troops in an armed assault on plantations along the Combahee River in South Carolina. An estimated seven hundred slaves broke and ran for freedom when they heard the steam whistles from the Union boats.  Broke and ran while their erstwhile masters vainly fired hand guns in the air and cracked bull whips.  And when the about-to-be-free slaves reached the Union boats they saw among the soldiers a black woman with a rifle. Badass.