WAITING FOR HER $20 BILL

Harriet Tubman led military raids during the Civil War as well as her better-known slave rescues

The Conversation
April 28, 2022

Harriet Tubman statue in Harlem, New York 

stockelements / Shutterstock.com

Harriet Tubman was barely 5 feet tall and didn’t have a dime to her name.

What she did have was a deep faith and powerful passion for justice that was fueled by a network of Black and white abolitionists determined to end slavery in America.

“I had reasoned this out in my mind,” Tubman once told an interviewer. “There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty, or death. If I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive.”

Though Tubman is most famous for her successes along the Underground Railroad, her activities as a Civil War spy are less well known.

As a biographer of Tubman, I think this is a shame. Her devotion to America and its promise of freedom endured despite suffering decades of enslavement and second class citizenship.

It is only in modern times that her life is receiving the renown it deserves, most notably her likeness appearing on a US$20 bill in 2030. The Harriet Tubman $20 bill will replace the current one featuring a portrait of U.S. President Andrew Jackson.
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In another recognition, Tubman was accepted in June 2021 to the United States Army Military Intelligence Corps Hall of Fame at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. She is one of 278 members, 17 of whom are women, honored for their special operations leadership and intelligence work.

Though traditional accolades escaped Tubman for most of her life, she did achieve an honor usually reserved for white officers on the Civil War battlefield.


After she led a successful raid of a Confederate outpost in South Carolina that saw 750 Black people rescued from slavery, a white commanding officer fetched a pitcher of water for Tubman as she remained seated at a table.
A different education

Believed to have been born in March 1822 in Dorchester County, Maryland, Tubman was named Araminta by her enslaved parents, Rit and Ben Ross.


“Minty” was the fifth of nine Ross children. She was frequently separated from her family by her white enslaver, Edward Brodess, who started leasing her to white neighbors when she was just 6 years old.

At their hands, she endured physical abuse, harsh labor, poor nutrition and intense loneliness.

As I learned during my research into Tubman’s life, her education did not happen in a traditional classroom, but instead was crafted from the dirt. She learned to read the natural world – forests and fields, rivers and marshes, the clouds and stars.


She learned to walk silently across fields and through the woods at night with no lights to guide her. She foraged for food and learned a botanist’s and chemist’s knowledge of edible and poisonous plants – and those most useful for ingredients in medical treatments.

She could not swim, and that forced her to learn the ways of rivers and streams – their depths, currents and traps.

She studied people, learned their habits, watched their movements – all without being noticed. Most important, she also figured out how to distinguish character. Her survival depended on her ability to remember every detail.


After a brain injury left her with recurring seizures, she was still able to work at jobs often reserved for men. She toiled on the shipping docks and learned the secret communication and transportation networks of Black mariners.

Known as Black Jacks, these men traveled throughout the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic seaboard. With them, she studied the night sky and the placement and movement of the constellations.

She used all those skills to navigate on the water and land.

“… and I prayed to God,” she told one friend, “to make me strong and able to fight, and that’s what I’ve always prayed for ever since.”

Tubman was clear on her mission. “I should fight for my liberty,” she told an admirer, “as long as my strength lasted.”

The Moses of the Underground Railroad

In the fall of 1849, when she was about to be sold away from her family and free husband John Tubman, she fled Maryland to freedom in Philadelphia.

Between 1850 and 1860, she returned to the Eastern Shore of Maryland about 13 times and successfully rescued nearly 70 friends and family members, all of whom were enslaved. It was an extraordinary feat given the perils of the 1850 Slave Fugitive Act, which enabled anyone to capture and return any Black man or woman, regardless of legal status, to slavery.

Those leadership qualities and survival skills earned her the nickname “Moses” because of her work on the Underground Railroad, the interracial network of abolitionists who enabled Black people to escape from slavery in the South to freedom in the North and Canada.


Harriet Tubman, far left, poses with her family, friends and neighbors near her barn in Auburn, N.Y., in the mid- to late 1880s. Bettmann/Getty Images

As a result, she attracted influential abolitionists and politicians who were struck by her courage and resolve – men like William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown and Frederick Douglass. Susan B. Anthony, one of the world’s leading activists for women’s equal rights, also knew of Tubman, as did abolitionist Lucretia Mott and women’s rights activist Amy Post.

“I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years,” Tubman once said. “and I can say what most conductors can’t say; I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.”
Battlefield soldier

When the Civil War started in the spring of 1861, Tubman put aside her fight against slavery to conduct combat as a soldier and spy for the United States Army. She offered her services to a powerful politician.

Known for his campaign to form the all-Black 54th and 55th regiments, Massachusetts Gov. John Andrew admired Tubman and thought she would be a great intelligence asset for the Union forces.

He arranged for her to go to Beaufort, South Carolina, to work with Army officers in charge of the recently captured Hilton Head District.

There, she provided nursing care to soldiers and hundreds of newly liberated people who crowded Union camps. Tubman’s skill curing soldiers stricken by a variety of diseases became legendary.

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But it was her military service of spying and scouting behind Confederate lines that earned her the highest praise.

She recruited eight men and together they skillfully infiltrated enemy territory. Tubman made contact with local enslaved people who secretly shared their knowledge of Confederate movements and plans.

Wary of white Union soldiers, many local African Americans trusted and respected Tubman.

According to George Garrison, a second lieutenant with the 55th Massachusetts Regiment, Tubman secured “more intelligence from them than anybody else.”

In early June 1863, she became the first woman in U.S. history to command an armed military raid when she guided Col. James Montgomery and his 2nd South Carolina Colored Volunteers Regiment along the Combahee River.


The ruins of a slave cabin still remain in South Carolina where Harriet Tubman led a raid of Union troops during the Civil War that freed 700 enslaved people.

Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images

While there, they routed Confederate outposts, destroyed stores of cotton, food and weapons – and liberated over 750 enslaved people.

The Union victory was widely celebrated. Newspapers from Boston to Wisconsin reported on the river assault by Montgomery and his Black regiment, noting Tubman’s important role as the “Black she Moses … who led the raid, and under whose inspiration it was originated and conducted.”

Ten days after the successful attack, radical abolitionist and soldier Francis Jackson Merriam witnessed Maj. Gen. David Hunter, commander of the Hilton Head district, “go and fetch a pitcher of water and stand waiting with it in his hand while a black woman drank, as if he had been one of his own servants.”

In that letter to Gov. Andrew, Merriam added, “that woman was Harriet Tubman.”
Lifelong struggle

Despite earning commendations as a valuable scout and soldier, Tubman still faced the racism and sexism of America after the Civil War.


Harriet Tubman is seen in this 1890 portrait.

MPI/Getty Images

When she sought payment for her service as a spy, the U.S. Congress denied her claim. It paid the eight Black male scouts, but not her.

Unlike the Union officers who knew her, the congressmen did not believe – they could not imagine – that she had served her country like the men under her command, because she was a woman.

Gen. Rufus Saxton wrote that he bore “witness to the value of her services… She was employed in the Hospitals and as a spy [and] made many a raid inside the enemy’s lines displaying remarkable courage, zeal and fidelity.”

Thirty years later, in 1899, Congress awarded her a pension for her service as a Civil War nurse, but not as a soldier spy.

When she died from pneumonia on March 10, 1913, she was believed to have been 91 years old and had been fighting for gender equality and the right to vote as a free Black woman for more than 50 years after her work during the Civil War.

Surrounded by friends and family, the deeply religious Tubman showed one last sign of leadership, telling them: “I go to prepare a place for you.”

Kate Clifford Larson, Visiting Scholar Women's Studies Research Center, Brandeis University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

'Thank god for Canada': Harriet Tubman on the US$20 bill is a triumph for the Great White North

© Provided by National Post Portrait of Harriet Tubman taken just after the end of the U.S. Civil War.

The new administration of U.S. President Joe Biden has fast-tracked efforts to feature famed abolitionist Harriet Tubman on the US$20 bill, a change that was first announced in 2016. Below, an updated version of a post first published in 2016 arguing the Canadian case for why there could be no greater figure on the world’s most circulated banknote.

If Canada could have hoped for anyone on a United States Treasury Note, it would have to be Harriet Tubman.

Here was a woman who lived in Canada, who risked her life to turn people into Canadians and stands as a testament that when it came to basic human freedom, the so-called “land of liberty” couldn’t hold a candle to a cold, agrarian British colony. “I wouldn’t trust Uncle Sam with my people no longer, I brought ’em all clear off to Canada,” Tubman told her biographer in 1869.

Tubman will be taking the place of seventh president Andrew Jackson, one of four men featured on U.S. money who owned slaves — and a president who ironically hated central banking.

“We’re ecstatic that we can call her one of our own,” said Rochelle Bush, historian for Tubman’s former church in St. Catharines, Ont. Between the 1851 passage of the Fugitive Slave Act and the opening shots of the Civil War 10 years later, Tubman was a well-known attendee at the Salem Chapel British Methodist Episcopal Church.

That is, when she wasn’t slipping back over the border to smuggle more people to Canada via the Underground Railroad. In total, Tubman freed roughly 300 former slaves by bringing them to Canadian soil, and hundreds of their descendants remain in the country to this day. Within Tubman’s own family tree, in fact, Bush estimates there are roughly 100 descendants living in Ontario and British Columbia.

As Bush noted, it’s a further testament to Canada that some of these Tubman descendants look black, while others look white. “Thank god for Canada; interracial marriage was accepted,” she said. In several former slave states, meanwhile, interracial marriage would not be legalized until 50 years after Tubman’s death.

Canada’s history is not free of chattel slavery. Notably, James McGill, the founder of McGill University, owned black household slaves. But as a component part of the British Empire, Canada was subject to London’s 1834 effective abolition of the practice , which occurred a full 31 years before slavery was completely abolished in the U.S.

Nevertheless, U.S. history has long been unusually coy about pointing out where the Underground Railroad actually ended. Often, textbooks will merely say that slaves were fleeing “north.” While early passengers on the Underground Railroad were initially able to stop their journey in the free Northern states, that ended in 1850 with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, a notoriously coercive measure that made it a crime for Northerners to shelter escaped slaves, even if they lived in a state where slavery had already been rendered illegal. From that point forward, the Underground Railroad had to be extended beyond U.S. borders into British territory

.

Tubman has already been adopted as a figure important to Canadian history. She was briefly in the running to feature on Canada’s $10 bill, and has been named by Parks Canada as a person of national historic significance. Saint Catharines is also home to the Harriet Tubman Public School, complete with a life-sized bronze statue of Tubman.

Kathleen Powell, manager of the St. Catharines Museum, similarly touted that “someone from St. Catharines” would be on a U.S. banknote (which, incidentally, currently costs CDN$25.40).

The honour will soon make Tubman among the most recognizable visages in the world, up there with Albert Einstein and the ubiquitous portrait of Mao Zedong. United States currency is used well beyond the country’s borders, and greenbacks remain the official or unofficial means of monetary exchange in several Central American countries and unstable corners of Africa. And among this vast array of international transactions, it’s the $20 that changes hands the most.

“There’s more $20 bills than human beings out there,” said Douglas Mudd, director of the Edward C. Rochette Money Museum in Colorado. The choice of Tubman is of sort of a no-brainer, said Mudd. In her 90 years, Tubman ran the gamut of United States history; a former slave, an abolitionist, a Civil War hero and an early suffragist. And, like any archetypal American hero, she always carried a gun. “In one person, she covers a number of different bases,” he said.

And, unlike a lot of the more political choices for U.S. money, support for Tubman is definitively nonpartisan. The conservative National Review, for one, praised the addition of a “gun-toting, Jesus-loving spy” in place of “overheated pompous populist” Andrew Jackson.

Appearing on a U.S. treasury note has a way of thrusting people into immortality. Alexander Hamilton was an influential Secretary of the Treasury, to be sure, but it was likely his face on the $10 bill that kept his legend strong centuries after his death. It was the prospect of taking Hamilton off the money, in fact, that inspired a revival in the Founding Father’s life story, including the hit Broadway musical Hamilton.

Canadians, of course, have a bad habit of smugly talking up their country in the presence of Americans, but Bush said it’s entirely fine now to “proclaim it to everybody” that the woman on the $20 bill appreciated Canada’s policy of not forcing those of African heritage to work for free.

Of course, in addition to former slaves, Canada also took in the people who had once owned them.

After the Civil War, in which Tubman served as a valuable Union spy and armed scout, British North America accepted many exiled Southerners from the defeated Confederacy, including Confederate president Jefferson Davis . “Canada was the gateway to freedom,” said Bush, “not only for freedom-seekers (the name for Underground Railroad refugees) but for Confederates as well.”

The Harriet Tubman mural that transcends time

Born enslaved roughly 200 years ago, Harriet Tubman became a legendary abolitionist in the US known for working on the Underground Railroad. Street artist Michael Rosato has immortalized the celebrated figure in art.

Michael Rosato's mural "Reflections on Pine" is centered around Tubman

Tubman Country. It's what inhabitants proudly call a stretch of land on the East Coast of the United States. Washington, DC, is just over two hours away by car, but traveling to visit the area invites a journey back in time.

The peaceful maritime region located in the state of Maryland once played a notorious role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In 1619, the first slave ship docked here carrying Africans who had been kidnapped in what is now Angola.

It is also here, on this segment of land surrounded by the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, that Harriet Tubman was born, very likely in mid-March 1822, though no one knows for sure.

Born into slavery, Tubman later escaped north to freedom. She then became an abolitionist and one of the most famous participants in the Underground Railroad, a secret safe house network that helped enslaved African Americans travel north to freedom.

She led at least several dozen enslaved individuals to freedom — all at great risk to her own life. She also fought for women's suffrage and Black rights.

Rosato's murals are gigantic, as seen in this photo showing him hanging the portrait panel of Tubman

Tubman's legacy

Artist Michael Rosato is waiting at the entrance to Cambridge, a town in Maryland of 12,000 people. The artist, in his mid-50s, is known for his giant works of street art that often depict figures of American history.

Today, he is standing in front of his mural "Reflections on Pine" (pictured at the top of this article).

The colorful 11-by-48-foot (3-by-14.5-meter) mural shows Tubman as an old woman with a headwrap and coat, standing in a cornfield. Above her is a military plane while next to her are portrayals of Black artists, scientists and politicians, other heroes of history, all of whom emanate from her portrait. What immediately catches the eye is that the perspective seems shifted: We are not looking at Harriet; she is defining us as the viewer.

Tubman was one of those special individuals whose human spirit was greater than anything else, Rosato says: "And to do that took a lot of courage and a lot of faith and just a lot of fortitude."

The artist says he put Tubman at the center of his painting because she played such an important role for many African Americans. "[She] is the inspiration for many African Americans in the community. You know, 'When she could do it, then I can do it,'" he says.

Rosato in his studio in Cambridge, Maryland

Capturing a vibrant Black community

Tubman's legacy contributed to an active Black civil rights movement in Cambridge.

The streets where the Black community lived were once a lively collection of stores, cafes and schools, but things changed after the riots and confrontations with police that occurred in the 1960s.

The mural recalls the vibrant times of the past. "When you look at that mural, there are a lot of things happening in it. That tells the story of a community," Rosato explains, adding that Tubman was the basis of that community.

Rosato's large-scale works in public spaces have generated discussion and received great acclaim. "I thought in designing this, you have to incorporate things that the community, both sides, white and Black, can identify with."
Reaching out, transcending time

Another mural by Rosato, "Take My Hand," shows Tubman by a river. She appears to be stepping over a wall and out of the painting as she extends her right hand to viewers, open and ready to take someone's hand in hers. A photo of a girl symbolically reaching out to the larger-than-life Tubman went viral on social media in 2019.

Rosato's mural "Take My Hand" shows a young Tubman reaching out to the viewer

At that time, a repressed anger was changing the United States, Rosato says. "The Black community was getting tired of the police shooting[s], they were getting tired of this pent-up acceptance of how they've been treated." All of a sudden, it wasn't just about the painting but also about the young child Tubman touches. For Rosato, this was poetic, and it was moving.

"Young girl, present day, touching the hand of a woman from 200 years ago," Rosato says. "That poetry is, I think, what spoke and what really got people, because [it] allowed them to be that little girl and to be this woman, offering a hand."

Only a few photos of Tubman exist. She is always looking seriously into the camera. This is also the case in the best-known black-and-white picture from 1895, taken when she was 73. While Rosato did use the historical image as a model, he chose to paint the slave emancipator in "Take my hand" at the age of 30. He wanted to show a young, rebellious Harriet and saw it as connected to the Black Lives Matter movement.

The mural not only depicts Tubman, but also shows the landscape where she had lived when she was enslaved — the place where she had to toil as the "property" of a white plantation owner and received whippings as a 6-year-old.

When you look at the mural, you're looking into the past, Rosato says. You can see the vegetation and the water. "And she is transcending time, in a way, because she is offering her hand to us the viewer in the present," he says.

At about 14 feet (4 meters) tall, and with hands measuring 3 feet, Tubman is monumental in size. "It's big — it's imposing, it's not life size, it's larger than life!" Rosato says. "So you are engaging with this larger-than-life woman who is reaching through this wall and part of her foot is painted trompe l'oeil, tricking the eye, to look like it's coming out and into your space."

Rosato's mural centers on African American abolitionist and reformer couple Frederick and Anna Douglass

Amending historic wrongs

Connecting the past and present also has to do with belated efforts to amend historic wrongs and reparations that many governments in the US, from the local to the state to the federal levels, have struggled to make.

Tubman not only helped enslaved people to freedom; she fought in the Civil War against the Southern slave-owning states, scouting out Confederate positions, and she also served as a nurse.

Despite her services, she was denied a pension. It was not until she was in old age, shortly before her death in 1913, that she finally received a monthly pension for her nursing work. She lived to be 91.

This article was originally written in German

Chicago school renamed to honor civil rights activist Tubman

Sat, February 19, 2022

CHICAGO (AP) — A Chicago elementary school has unveiled a new sign letting people know it is leaving behind the name of a racist and will instead honor a woman known for helping Black people escape slavery, Harriet Tubman.

The sign comes about a year after a group of parents successfully pushed for the school — long named after Swiss American biologist Louis Agassiz — to change its name to the Harriet Tubman Elementary School.

Officials at Chicago Public Schools are letting other schools in the city change their names after the Chicago Sun-Times reported in late 2020 that 30 of its schools were named after slaveholders and others were named after racists such as Agassiz.

The Board of Education could vote on an updated policy for school name changes next week, the Sun-Times reported.

CPS said in a statement that the new name is “more inclusive and representative” of the district's values.

"The CPS Office of Equity is committed to a comprehensive review process to consider new school names when a school is named after individuals who do not represent the values of our students, families, faculty and support staff,” CPS said.

Agassiz, was a biologist at Harvard in the 1800s and a proponent of scientific racism who sought to prove Blacks were inferior to other races. Two decades ago, a school committee in Cambridge, Massachusetts, voted to strip his name from a school there and rename it for Maria L. Baldwin, who years earlier was the first Black principal of the school.

The Harriet Tubman Elementary School on Chicago's North Side joins a long list of schools around the country to be named after the one-time slave who helped Black people to escape slavery in the South via the Underground Railroad in the 1800s.

TUBMAN $20 HOW'S THAT COMING?!

Harriet Tubman in the $20 Bill : Harriet Tubman

www.harriet-tubman.org/20-dollar-bill

Tubman also served as a spy and scout in the Civil War. On April 2016 the US Treasury announced that a new design of the $20 bill will have the portrait of Harriet Tubman on the front. The image of Andrew Jackson, who had been featured on the bill since 1928, will be removed from the bill because of his policy against Native Americans.

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Harriet Tubman $20 Bill Redesign to be Accelerated by ...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/25/us/politics/tubman-20-dollar-bill.html

2021-01-26 · Jan. 25, 2021 President Biden’s Treasury Department is studying ways to speed up the process of adding Harriet Tubman’s portrait to the front of the $20 bill after the Trump

SEE LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for TUBMAN 

Cynthia Erivo On the 'Powerful, Powerful' Role Music Played in Her Embodying the Spirit of Harriet Tubman
BY H. ALAN SCOTT ON 12/20/19 

ILLUSTRATION BY BRITT SPENCER

HARRIET - Official Trailer

Cynthia Erivo, the Tony, Emmy and Grammy-award winning artist, says the Oscar buzz around her most recent performance as Harriet Tubman in the film Harriet is "very overwhelming" and she "genuinely didn't expect it."

Already nominated for two Golden Globes for the role, Erivo breathes life into the often mysterious public image of the famous abolitionist and unofficial leader of the Underground Railroad.

Erivo says she hopes people learn more about the life lived before and after the period for which Harriet (born Araminta Ross, Erivo's Tubman takes her mother's name—Harriet—in the film after running to freedom) was famous. In order to tap into Tubman's soul, Erivo used a skill she knows a thing or two about: singing, a "powerful, powerful" tool to tap into the spirit of Tubman, and ultimately into the film's message of freedom.

"I think we need to use this film to inspire us to do good things and see the strength we have in ourselves," Erivo told Newsweek. "We as people have agency and the ability to bring about really good change."

Why do you think it's important for people to know Harriet Tubman's various names?

Getting to meet Araminta Ross, we get to humanize her and watch her grow. It took time to get from Araminta to Harriet.

What is often left out of Tubman's story is her military service and her work in the women's suffrage movement. Why are these parts of her story so important?

I don't think many people realize she worked in the army and the suffragette movement—much of that in the script we didn't have time to delve into. It's very exciting that a woman, particularly a woman of color, was one of the first women full stop to lead an armed raid and was a general in the army. There's a life story there that continued for a really long time.

Did the music in the film impact your performance?

Yes. It's a connection to the spirits. Negro spirituals were a way to send a message to one another. It's a powerful, powerful thing.

What sort of impact do you hope Tubman's story has on people?

To help or to make change should be a duty of ours. I hope it gives young men and women the courage and the confidence to see a woman who is the center of her narrative and to be strong and fast and mysterious and have this wonderful heart. It's an example that women can do anything.

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=HARRIET+TUBMAN

Yellen signals support for Harriet Tubman on $20 bill
Agence France-Presse
October 01, 2021

Harriet Tubman statue in Harlem, New York 

Putting Harriet Tubman, a Black woman who escaped slavery and became a leader of the pre-Civil War abolitionist movement, on the $20 bill would be an "honor" but designing banknotes takes time, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Thursday.

Shortly after taking office in January, President Joe Biden's administration announced that it would expedite plans to put Tubman on the bill that is among the most commonly used in the country.

The project, launched by former president Barack Obama but significantly delayed under former president Donald Trump, came back to the forefront after historic demonstrations denouncing racism and police violence against people of color last year.

"I couldn't possibly think of a better way to honor Harriet Tubman's legacy and her courage in fighting for the freedom of the enslaved people and women's right to vote then seeing her on a $20 bill," Yellen said in testimony to the House Financial Services Committee.

However, she warned that "issuing notes is a very lengthy process. It involves collaboration among a number of different agencies and it's necessary to design counterfeit features."

Tubman was born into slavery in 1822 but escaped. She returned multiple times to the slave-owning southern states to help dozens of others flee bondage, either to the northern United States or Canada, both before and during the 1861-1865 Civil War.

During the war she even helped with a raid on Confederate troops, and after the war, she became a champion of women's rights before her death in 1913.

Her life, and in particular her work helping enslaved people escape as a conductor on the "Underground Railroad," were featured in a 2019 Hollywood biopic.

Tubman's image was set to replace the portrait of Andrew Jackson, the US president behind the "Trail of Tears" that drove dispossessed Native American tribes from the southeast of the expanding country, and who was much admired by Trump.

His Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin announced in 2019 that the revamp of the $20 bill was being put off until 2028, citing "security issues" around counterfeiting.


Yellen appeared alongside Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell days after two regional Fed bank presidents suddenly retired after facing questions over their stock trading activity.

The central bank has faced criticism over the lack of diversity among its top officials, and in response to a question from a lawmaker, Powell promised to consider appointing people of color to replace them.

"I can absolutely guarantee you that we will work hard in both of these processes to find and give a fair shot to diverse candidates for these two jobs; it will be a big focus of both of these processes," Powell said.

Biden administration will revamp effort to put Harriet Tubman on $20 bill

Aarthi Swaminathan
·Reporter
Mon., January 25, 2021

The Biden administration is looking to revamp the effort to place Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill, replacing former president Andrew Jackson.

“I was here when we announced that, and it was very exciting and hasn’t moved forward yet,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, who also served in the Obama administration, told reporters during a briefing on Monday afternoon. “The Treasury Department is taking steps to resume efforts to put Harriet Tubman on the front of the new $20 notes. It’s important that our notes, our money... reflect the history and diversity of our country and Harriet Tubman’s image gracing the new $20 note will certainly reflect that.”

Psaki added that the administration is trying to find ways to “speed up that effort.”

The Obama administration had first proposed putting the iconic abolitionist on the paper currency in 2016. The goal was for the replacement of Jackson, the seventh U.S. president, to take place in 2020.

Tubman would be the first black woman and the first African American to appear on U.S. currency. Born around 1820, Tubman escaped slavery and later became a “conductor” for the Underground Railroad, where she led enslaved people to freedom before the Civil War.

Obama-era Treasury Secretary Jack Lew first announced the change in 2016 after a viral online campaign to feature a woman on the currency.

In 2020, Trump administration Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced that the new $20 bill would not be released until 2030, and the next administration’s secretary would make the decision on the change.—

Aarthi is a writer for Yahoo Finance. She can be reached at aarthi@yahoofinance.com. Follow her on Twitter @aarthiswami.

Officials have voted unanimously to rename 'Dixie' highway after Harriet Tubman

By Alisha Ebrahimji, CNN

© MPI/Archive Photos/Getty Images American abolitionist leader Harriet Tubman escaped slavery and led many other slaves to safety using the Underground Railroad.

A highway in Florida won't be keeping its name much longer after a county voted to change the name of a handful of "Dixie" highways to "Harriet Tubman Highway."

Miami-Dade County commissioners unanimously approved plans Wednesday to rename portions of The Dixie Highway, which runs 5,786 miles through 10 states from Michigan to Miami, according to CNN affiliate WPLG.

"The time is always right to do what is right," said Miami-Dade District 9 Commissioner Dennis Moss, quoting Martin Luther King, Jr.

Moss led the effort to rename the highway after Tubman, a famous African American abolitionist.

Depending on your perspective, the word Dixie takes on a different meaning for different people. Most commonly, it's associated with the old South and Confederate states. Dixie was considered the land south of the Mason-Dixon line, where slavery was was legal.

Injustice hiding in plain sight

Moss started looking into the name change after reading a letter from a man named Modesto Abety, former CEO of the Children's Trust in Miami-Dade County.

Abety's granddaugther asked him why "Dixie" was still on the name of the roadways considering its association with slavery, Moss told CNN.

"I moved forward with legislation and of course I did it because Dixie is associated with the southern Confederate states," he said.

Moss said the injustice has been hiding in plain sight for years, but he's grateful and proud his colleagues understand the importance of this name change and what the term Dixie has stood for in the past.

The decision to rename Dixie Highway after Tubman came as a suggestion from Abety's granddaughter.

"She was the antithesis of slavery," Moss said. "I thought that suggestion was a good suggestion."

It's important to Moss to set a precedent by not only removing the Dixie name from roadways that Miami-Dade County controls, but to urge the state of Florida to remove it from roadways in which it has jurisdiction.

A stepping stone on the path to change

While the name change was approved by Miami-Dade County commissioners, it's up to each state to act on other parts of the highway. State lawmakers will need to go through their own approval process for the parts each state owns.

The support hasn't been entirely unanimous, but to Moss' surprise, he said there's been little opposition.

It's unclear just how much the renaming process will cost the county, but Moss said he and his colleagues are prepared to do whatever it takes to see that they are changed once and for all.

"If this was an Adolf Hitler Highway, or if this was in our community, a Fidel Castro Highway, [the money] wouldn't even be a consideration as it relates to changing the signs," Moss said. "So let's not allow that to be an impediment and let's do what's right."

Why are US rightwingers so angry? 

Because they know social change is coming

Rebecca Solnit

The American right might win the occasional battle – but they will never win the war against progress

‘We are dismantling the trophies of the ugly old world of sanctified inequality and erecting monuments to heroes of justice and liberation.’ 

Photograph: Steve Helber/AP
Mon 20 Dec 2021 

While their fear and dismay is often regarded as rooted in delusion, rightwingers are correct that the world is metamorphosing into something new and, to them, abhorrent. They’re likewise correct that what version of history we tell matters. The history we tell today lays the groundwork for the future we make. The outrage over the 1619 Project and the new laws trying to censor public school teachers from telling the full story of American history are a doomed attempt to hold back facts and perspectives that are already widespread.

In 2018, halfway through the Trump presidency, Michelle Alexander wrote a powerful essay arguing that we are not the resistance. We, she declared, are the mighty river they are trying to dam. I see it flowing, and I see the tributaries that pour into it and swell its power, and I see that once firmly grounded statues and assumptions have become flotsam in its current. Similar shifts are happening far beyond the United States, but it is this turbulent nation of so much creation and destruction I know best and will speak of here.

When a regime falls, the new one sweeps away its monuments and erects its own. This is happening as the taking down of Confederate, Columbus and other statues commemorating oppressors across the country, the renaming of streets and buildings and other public places, the appearance of myriad statues and murals of Harriet Tubman and other liberators, the opening of the Legacy Museum documenting slavery and mass incarceration and housing a lynching memorial.

There was no great moment of overthrow, but nevertheless we are dismantling the trophies of the ugly old world of sanctified inequality and erecting monuments to heroes of justice and liberation, from the Olympic track medalists of 1968 making their Black power gesture at San Jose State University to the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park in Maryland. All those angry white men with the tiki torches chanting, in Charlottesville in 2017, “You will not replace us” as they sought to defend a statue of Gen Robert E Lee were wrong in their values and actions but perhaps not in their assessment.

White people are not being replaced, but in many ways a white supremacist history and society is. The statue of the general was removed earlier this year and will be melted down to be made into a new work of art under the direction of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center. They call the project “swords into plowshares”, a phrase suggesting that this marks the end of a war – perhaps the civil war in which the north never fully claimed its victory, the south never accepted its defeat.

What’s happening goes far beyond public monuments. The statues mark the rejection of old versions of who we are and what we value, but those versions and values matter most as they play out in everyday private and public life. We are only a few decades removed from a civilization in which corporal punishment of children by parents and teachers was an unquestioned norm; in which domestic violence and marital rape were seen as a husband’s prerogative and a wife surrendered financial and other agency; in which many forms of inequality and exclusion had hardly even been questioned, let alone amended; in which few questioned the rightness of a small minority – for white Christian men have always been a minority in the United States – holding almost all the power, politically, socially, economically, culturally; in which segregation and exclusion were pervasive and legal; in which Native Americans had been largely written out of history; in which environmental regulation and protection and awareness barely existed.

You have to remember how different the past was to recognize how much has changed. Frameworks such as indigenous land acknowledgments that were unheard of and maybe almost inconceivable a few decades ago are routine at public events.

The Civil Rights Act passed in 1964; in 1965, with Griswold v Connecticut, the supreme court overruled state laws criminalizing birth control and laid the groundwork for Roe v Wade six years later; only in 2015, Obergefell v Hodges established marriage equality for same-sex couples (while equality of rights between different-sex couples had also gradually been established as marriage became a less authoritarian institution). The right is trying to push the water back behind the dam. With deregulation and social service and tax cuts, they have succeeded in reestablishing an economy of extreme inequality, but not a society fully committed to that inequality.

They have succeeded in passing laws at the state level against voting rights and reproductive rights, but they have not succeeded in pushing the majority’s imaginations back to 1960 or 1920 or whenever their version of when America was great stalled out. They can win the battles, but I do not believe they will, in the end, win the war.

While the right has become far more extreme and has its tens of millions of true believers, it is morphing into a minority sect. This has prompted their desperate scramble to overturn free and fair elections and other democratic processes. White Christians, who were 80% of the population in 1976, are now 44%. Mixed-race and non-white people are rapidly becoming the majority. On issues such as climate, people of color are far more progressive; if we can make it through the huge backlash of the present moment, the possibilities are dazzling.

These are relatively concrete changes. Others are subtler and more recent, but no less important. Even in the last decade there has been an epochal shift in our expectations of how we should treat each other, and the casual cruelty and disdain targeting women, queer people, Bipoc, the disabled and those with divergent bodies that pervaded entertainment and daily life are now viewed as repugnant – and are met with consequences in some contexts.

A regular experience of this era (for those of us who were around for the last one) is to revisit a song, a film, a book and find that we have now become people who can see better the insults and exclusions that were so seamlessly woven into it. Some of the old art has not weathered well and will fall out of circulation, as some old culture always does; some will be interpreted in new ways; some neglected treasures will move from margin to center. We – a metamorphosing “we” – are sifting through an old and building a new canon.

Even more profound than this is a shift in worldview from the autonomous individual of hypercapitalism and social darwinism to a recognition of both the natural and social worlds as orchestras of interdependence, of survival as an essentially collaborative and cooperative business. Disciplines from neuropsychology to economics have shifted their sense of who we are, what works, and what matters. Climate change is first of all a crisis, but it’s also a reminder that the world is a collection of interlocking systems. The just-deceased bell hooks talked about a “love ethic” that included “a global vision wherein we see our lives and our fate as intimately connected to those of everyone else on the planet”.

Birth can be violent and dangerous, and sometimes one or the other of the two involved die. There is no guarantee about what is to come, and the shadow of climate chaos hangs over it all. We do not have time to build a better society before we address that crisis, but it is clear that the response to that crisis is building such a society. So much has already changed. The river Alexander described has swept away so much, has carried so many onward.

It has come so far; it still has dams to overtop and so far to go.

Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her most recent books are Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses

Cops on Campus are the Real Outside Agitators

BY JONAH RASKIN

 MAY 9, 2024

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Portland Police on the campus of Portland State University. Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair.

Nothing agitates a campus as dramatically as the arrival of the cops. Indeed, the cops have been the only real outside agitators on campuses across the country this Spring. They have brought upheaval and disorder by breaking up peaceful protests by disciplined students with a cause and ideals. And, of course, the administrators are responsible for calling in the cops. It’s the administrators who up the ante and invite confrontations and clashes. Blaming outsiders for rebellions and revolutions is one of the oldest and nastiest ruses in the world. And one of the newest, too. But it’s not working.

New Yorkers and others aren’t buying the Columbia administration’s story that outside agitators are to blame for the protests that have taken place on the campus. As though Columbia students are too blind or too stupid to see the terrors inflicted on the people of Gaza by the Israeli military with weapons supplied by the USA. At UCLA some masked men with clubs attacked pro-Palestinian demonstrators. The cops aren’t the only culprits now much as they weren’t in ‘68.

Columbia President Shafik must take us for idiots who haven’t learned the lessons of the past and can see what’s happening in front of our own eyes. I mean the abuses of state power in Gaza and to a lesser degree on college campuses from New York to California. I know loads about the cry that outside agitators are to blame for protest movements and rebellions. I’ve heard it before. I have been called one.

I graduated from Columbia College with a B.A. in 1963 and from Columbia University with an M.A. in 1964. By 1967 I was an assistant professor at the State University at Stony Brook. Along with more than 700 or so other protesters, including Abbie Hoffman and Tom Hayden – who coined the slogan “Create two, three, many Columbias” – I was arrested on the Columbia campus in ‘68 and went to jail briefly. I suppose in some respects I could have rightly been called an “outside agitator.” I had graduated from Columbia College five years before students occupied and liberated buildings where classes had been held, though I mostly relinquished the agitating on campus to the Black students who kicked off the 1968 rebellion soon after MLK was shot and killed. Now, that was an incitement to riot.

In ‘68 I didn’t think of myself as an outside agitator. I still reject that label. In the world today insurgents are both insiders and outsiders, localists and internationalists who reject political boundaries and borders. Imperialism respects no national boundaries and neither do anti-imperialists. The line that supposedly divides insiders from outsiders and domestic from imported agitators is far more blurry than it might seem to the casual eye. In ‘68 I felt that I had as much right to sit in as any of the undergraduates. I paid my dues. I had been miseducated and misinformed when I was a student.

I was arrested twice in ’68. The second time I went on trial in a courtroom after I declined to apologize to the Columbia administration when I was asked to do so by a representative of the university. “You are a Columbia graduate and a scholar and gentleman and as such ought to say you’re sorry for your actions,” I was told by Professor Quentin Anderson. In the eyes of the university I would not be an outside agitator if I kissed its academic ass. That I would not do.

I still feel like a member of the extended family of Columbia insurgents. I identify with  the students who protested the invasion and occupation of Gaza this spring and who have been arrested.

As an undergraduate at Columbia in the early 1960s, when I marched against segregation and nuclear testing, my mentors and role models were off-campus radical intellectuals such as Carl Marzini and Paul Sweezy, civil rights activists like MLK and Rosa Parks and further afield Che Guevara, the continental revolutionary who was born in Argentina, joined Fidel Castro in Mexico, fought on the side of the guerrillas in Cuba and later against imperialism in the Congo and Bolivia.

When we referred to the Cuban revolutionaries by their first names as though we were brothers-in-arms, our Cold War profs  – who saw Moscow gold behind all insurrections – were shocked. Like Che, only far more modest than he, American agitators belong to the world and to the legacy of homegrown anti-slavery men and women like Harriet Tubman and John Brown. Slavers didn’t respect boundaries and neither did abolitionists. Nightstick-wielding cops on campuses are “pigs.” I haven’t used that word, which I learned from the Black Panthers, for decades. But it’s as timely now as it was in ’68.

Jonah Raskin is the author of Beat Blues, San Francisco, 1955.

Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton respond to George Floyd's death

By UPI Staff

President  TYRANT Donald Trump delivers remarks in the Rose Garden at the White House on Monday on the death of George Floyd in police custody. 
June 3 (UPI) -- In the wake of nationwide protests over the Memorial Day death of George Floyd in the custody of Minneapolis police, President Donald Trump, as well as former Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton have spoken out.

Here are their words:
President Donald Trump

Trump made these remarks in the Rose Garden of the White House on Tuesday, as quoted by a White House transcript:

"My fellow Americans,

My first and highest duty as president is to defend our great country and the American people. I swore an oath to uphold the laws of our nation, and that is exactly what I will do.

All Americans were rightly sickened and revolted by the brutal death of George Floyd. My administration is fully committed that, for George and his family, justice will be served. He will not have died in vain. But we cannot allow the righteous cries and peaceful protesters to be drowned out by an angry mob. The biggest victims of the rioting are peace-loving citizens in our poorest communities, and as their president, I will fight to keep them safe. I will fight to protect you. I am your president of law and order, and an ally of all peaceful protesters.

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But in recent days, our nation has been gripped by professional anarchists, violent mobs, arsonists, looters, criminals, rioters, Antifa, and others. A number of state and local governments have failed to take necessary action to safeguard their residents. Innocent people have been savagely beaten, like the young man in Dallas, Texas, who was left dying on the street, or the woman in upstate New York viciously attacked by dangerous thugs.

Small-business owners have seen their dreams utterly destroyed. New York's finest have been hit in the face with bricks. Brave nurses, who have battled the virus, are afraid to leave their homes. A police precinct station has been overrun. Here in the nation's capital, the Lincoln Memorial and the World War II Memorial have been vandalized. One of our most historic churches was set ablaze. A federal officer in California, an African-American enforcement hero, was shot and killed.

These are not acts of peaceful protest. These are acts of domestic terror. The destruction of innocent life and the spilling of innocent blood is an offense to humanity and a crime against God.

America needs creation, not destruction; cooperation, not contempt; security, not anarchy; healing, not hatred; justice, not chaos. This is our mission, and we will succeed. One hundred percent, we will succeed. Our country always wins.

That is why I am taking immediate presidential action to stop the violence and restore security and safety in America. I am mobilizing all available federal resources -- civilian and military -- to stop the rioting and looting, to end the destruction and arson, and to protect the rights of law-abiding Americans, including your Second Amendment rights. THIS IS THE ONLY AMENDMENT HE KNOWS 

Therefore, the following measures are going into effect immediately:

First, we are ending the riots and lawlessness that has spread throughout our country. We will end it now. Today, I have strongly recommended to every governor to deploy the National Guard in sufficient numbers that we dominate the streets. Mayors and governors must establish an overwhelming law enforcement presence until the violence has been quelled.

If a city or a state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them.

I am also taking swift and decisive action to protect our great capital, Washington, D.C. What happened in this city last night was a total disgrace. As we speak, I am dispatching thousands and thousands of heavily armed soldiers, military personnel, and law enforcement officers to stop the rioting, looting, vandalism, assaults and the wanton destruction of property.

We are putting everybody on warning: Our 7 o'clock curfew will be strictly enforced. Those who threaten innocent life and property will be arrested, detained and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

I want the organizers of this terror to be on notice that you will face severe criminal penalties and lengthy sentences in jail. This includes Antifa and others who are leading instigators of this violence.

One law and order -- and that is what it is: one law. We have one beautiful law. And once that is restored and fully restored, we will help you, we will help your business, and we will help your family.

America is founded upon the rule of law. It is the foundation of our prosperity, our freedom, and our very way of life. But where there is no law, there is no opportunity. Where there is no justice, there is no liberty. Where there is no safety, there is no future.

We must never give in to anger or hatred. If malice or violence reigns, then none of us is free.

I take these actions today with firm resolve and with a true and passionate love for our country. By far, our greatest days lie ahead.

Thank you very much."

Former President Barack Obama

Obama released this statement on Medium and via Twitter on Monday:

"As millions of people across the country take to the streets and raise their voices in response to the killing of George Floyd and the ongoing problem of unequal justice, I've heard many ask how we can sustain momentum to bring about real change.

Ultimately, it's going to be up to a new generation of activists to shape strategies that best fit the times. But I believe there are some basic lessons to draw from past efforts that are worth remembering.

First, the waves of protests across the country represent a genuine and legitimate frustration over a decades-long failure to reform police practices and the broader criminal justice system in the United States. The overwhelming majority of participants have been peaceful, courageous, responsible and inspiring. They deserve our respect and support, not condemnation -- something that police in cities like Camden [N.J.] and Flint [Mich.] have commendably understood.

On the other hand, the small minority of folks who've resorted to violence in various forms, whether out of genuine anger or mere opportunism, are putting innocent people at risk, compounding the destruction of neighborhoods that are often already short on services and investment and detracting from the larger cause. I saw an elderly black woman being interviewed today in tears because the only grocery store in her neighborhood had been trashed. If history is any guide, that store may take years to come back. So let's not excuse violence, or rationalize it, or participate in it. If we want our criminal justice system, and American society at large, to operate on a higher ethical code, then we have to model that code ourselves.

Second, I've heard some suggest that the recurrent problem of racial bias in our criminal justice system proves that only protests and direct action can bring about change, and that voting and participation in electoral politics is a waste of time. I couldn't disagree more. The point of protest is to raise public awareness, to put a spotlight on injustice and to make the powers that be uncomfortable; in fact, throughout American history, it's often only been in response to protests and civil disobedience that the political system has even paid attention to marginalized communities. But eventually, aspirations have to be translated into specific laws and institutional practices -- and in a democracy, that only happens when we elect government officials who are responsive to our demands.

Moreover, it's important for us to understand which levels of government have the biggest impact on our criminal justice system and police practices. When we think about politics, a lot of us focus only on the presidency and the federal government. And yes, we should be fighting to make sure that we have a president, a Congress, a U.S. Justice Department and a federal judiciary that actually recognize the ongoing, corrosive role that racism plays in our society and want to do something about it. But the elected officials who matter most in reforming police departments and the criminal justice system work at the state and local levels.

It's mayors and county executives that appoint most police chiefs and negotiate collective bargaining agreements with police unions. It's district attorneys and state's attorneys that decide whether or not to investigate and ultimately charge those involved in police misconduct. Those are all elected positions. In some places, police review boards with the power to monitor police conduct are elected as well. Unfortunately, voter turnout in these local races is usually pitifully low, especially among young people -- which makes no sense given the direct impact these offices have on social justice issues, not to mention the fact that who wins and who loses those seats is often determined by just a few thousand, or even a few hundred, votes.

So the bottom line is this: If we want to bring about real change, then the choice isn't between protest and politics. We have to do both. We have to mobilize to raise awareness, and we have to organize and cast our ballots to make sure that we elect candidates who will act on reform.

Finally, the more specific we can make demands for criminal justice and police reform, the harder it will be for elected officials to just offer lip service to the cause and then fall back into business as usual once protests have gone away. The content of that reform agenda will be different for various communities. A big city may need one set of reforms; a rural community may need another. Some agencies will require wholesale rehabilitation; others should make minor improvements. Every law enforcement agency should have clear policies, including an independent body that conducts investigations of alleged misconduct. Tailoring reforms for each community will require local activists and organizations to do their research and educate fellow citizens in their community on what strategies work best.

But as a starting point, here's a report and toolkit developed by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and based on the work of the Task Force on 21st Century Policing that I formed when I was in the White House. And if you're interested in taking concrete action, we've also created a dedicated site at the Obama Foundation to aggregate and direct you to useful resources and organizations who've been fighting the good fight at the local and national levels for years.

I recognize that these past few months have been hard and dispiriting -- that the fear, sorrow, uncertainty and hardship of a pandemic have been compounded by tragic reminders that prejudice and inequality still shape so much of American life. But watching the heightened activism of young people in recent weeks, of every race and every station, makes me hopeful. If, going forward, we can channel our justifiable anger into peaceful, sustained and effective action, then this moment can be a real turning point in our nation's long journey to live up to our highest ideals.

Let's get to work."

Former President George W. Bush


Bush released this statement Tuesday:

"Laura and I are anguished by the brutal suffocation of George Floyd and disturbed by the injustice and fear that suffocate our country. Yet we have resisted the urge to speak out, because this is not the time for us to lecture. It is time for us to listen. It is time for America to examine our tragic failures -- and as we do, we will also see some of our redeeming strengths.

It remains a shocking failure that many African Americans, especially young African-American men, are harassed and threatened in their own country. It is a strength when protesters, protected by responsible law enforcement, march for a better future. This tragedy -- in a long series of similar tragedies -- raises a long overdue question: How do we end systemic racism in our society? The only way to see ourselves in a true light is to listen to the voices of so many who are hurting and grieving. Those who set out to silence those voices do not understand the meaning of America -- or how it becomes a better place.

America's greatest challenge has long been to unite people of very different backgrounds into a single nation of justice and opportunity. The doctrine and habits of racial superiority, which once nearly split our country, still threaten our union. The answers to American problems are found by living up to American ideals -- to the fundamental truth that all human beings are created equal and endowed by God with certain rights. We have often underestimated how radical that quest really is, and how our cherished principles challenge systems of intended or assumed injustice.

The heroes of America -- from Frederick Douglass, to Harriet Tubman, to Abraham Lincoln, to Martin Luther King Jr. -- are heroes of unity. Their calling has never been for the fainthearted. They often revealed the nation's disturbing bigotry and exploitation -- stains on our character sometimes difficult for the American majority to examine. We can only see the reality of America's need by seeing it through the eyes of the threatened, oppressed and disenfranchised. That is exactly where we now stand.

Many doubt the justice of our country and with good reason. Black people see the repeated violation of their rights without an urgent and adequate response from American institutions. We know that lasting justice will only come by peaceful means. Looting is not liberation, and destruction is not progress. But we also know that lasting peace in our communities requires truly equal justice. The rule of law ultimately depends on the fairness and legitimacy of the legal system. And achieving justice for all is the duty of all.

This will require a consistent, courageous and creative effort. We serve our neighbors best when we try to understand their experience. We love our neighbors as ourselves when we treat them as equals, in both protection and compassion. There is a better way -- the way of empathy and shared commitment and bold action and a peace rooted in justice. I am confident that together, Americans will choose the better way."

Former President Bill Clinton

File Photo by Ian Halperin/UPI

Clinton released this statement on Saturday:

"In the days since George Floyd's death, it is impossible not to feel grief for his family -- and anger, revulsion and frustration that his death is the latest in a long line of tragedy and injustice and a painful reminder that a person's race still determines how they will be treated in nearly every aspect of American life.

No one deserves to die the way George Floyd did. And the truth is, if you're white in America, the chances are you won't. That truth is what underlies the pain and the anger that so many are feeling and expressing -- that the path of an entire life can be measured and devalued by the color of one's skin.

Fifty-seven years ago, Dr. [Martin Luther] King [Jr.] dreamed of a day when his 'four little children would be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.' Today, that dream seems even more out of reach, and we'll never reach it if we keep treating people of color with the unspoken assumption that they're less human.
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We need to see each other as equally deserving of life, liberty, respect, dignity and the presumption of innocence. We need to ask ourselves and each other hard questions, and listen carefully to the answers.

Here's where I'd start.

If George Floyd had been white, handcuffed and lying on the ground, would he be alive today?

Why does this keep happening?

What can we do to ensure that every community has the police department it needs and deserves?

What can I do?

We can't honestly answer these questions in the divide and conquer, us vs. them, shift the blame and shirk the responsibility world we're living in. People with power should go first -- answer the questions, expand who's 'us' and shrink who's 'them,' accept some blame and assume more responsibility. But the rest of us have to answer these questions, too.

It's the least we can do for George Floyd's family, and the families of all other Americans who have been judged by the color of their skin rather than by the content of their character. The future of the country depends on it."