The four WomenOn20s candidates in the final round have been chosen. Per USAToday:
The people – 256,659, anyway – have spoken, and the group pushing for a woman to appear on U.S. paper currency has announced its final four to replace Andrew Jackson’s face on the $20 bill.
From 15 contenders in a “robust” five-week “primary round” that ended Sunday, voters selected Eleanor Roosevelt, Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks and Wilma Mankiller, the first female chief of the Cherokee Nation, WomenOn20s said. The competition began with 100 candidates…
More than half of the Internet voters chose Roosevelt, Tubman and Parks as one of their top three, the group said.
Mankiller was added to the final ballot “because of strong sentiment” that a Native American should be a candidate to knock off the seventh U.S. president, a slave-owning military hero of 19th-century America who helped found Tennessee. He signed the notorious Indian Removal Act of 1830, which relocated several tribes to territory that now comprises Oklahoma, where Mankiller was born and lived until her death in 2010. More than 4,000 Cherokees died during the tribe’s forced march by the U.S. Army in what became known as “The Trail of Tears.”
“There are so few reminders in our everyday lives of great women who’ve contributed to the shaping of our nation,” Ades Stone said. “It’s time to correct that and putting a woman on a $20 is like having a little pocket monument.”
The group is aiming to petition the White House to make the change by 2020, the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which gave American women the right to vote…
You can vote for your choice here. Any of these four women would be a great first honoree. Popular sentiment, insofar as I can judge, seems to be running in favor of Rosa Parks, possibly because she’s been in the news recently enough that people are more aware of her achievements. I’m still praying for my own favorite, Harriet Tubman, not least because she’s the most likely to make right-wingers scream till they injure themselves. (Unimportant but intriguing detail: until I read the Wikipedia page I did not know that the 20-something Tubman was described as “fine looking” by her former owner in the newspaper ad seeking her forcible return after her first escape.)
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Apart from the injustices — small and great — of history, what’s on the agenda for the day?