Todays panel has to do with Harriet Tubman and Harriet Tubman, the decision of april 20, 2016, to put her on the 20 bill. It was announced at that time. As many of you know, it was met with some degree of controversy. There are those american citizens who said this was just Political Correctness and there were others who, in fact, did not even know who Harriet Tubman was, and various pictures of Harriet Tubman appeared on the internet and people, women who were not, in fact, Harriet Tubman. Harriet tubman has usually been a subject of childrens fiction and very few people really know, at least american citizens we historians know who Harriet Tubman was. But that wasnt the thats not the case with the american public. It was irony noted or the irony was noted in having tubman on the front of the 20 bill and Andrew Jackson on the back. As many of you know, Andrew Jackson was not only a slaveholder himself, but he was also he oversaw indian removal and is renowned for being really an indian killer. In addition to that, many people pointed to the fact that here you have Harriet Tubman who was commodified, who had value, whose worth was, for many people, defined by the amount of money that people paid for her. And here she is in the 20th century being put on perhaps the most popular symbol of american capitalism, the 20 we have today some very distinguished historians who are going to talk about the placement of tubman on the 20 bill and, perhaps, deal with the controversy. I am going to announce everyone as they speak. In as much as i dont want somebody to tune in to cspan at some point and say, who is that. Our first speaker is Catherine Clinton. Catherine clinton is the chair of American History at the university of texas, san antonio, and is International Research professor at Queens University belfast. Mistress womans world in the old south, and Harriet Tubman the road to fr freedom was determined one of the best books by the chicago tribune, having written one of the few biographies, adult biographies of Harriet Tubman. She has published over 25 books, including awardwinning books for children such as, i too sing america. She is a member of the Screen Writers Guild and was an adviser for Steven Spielbergs lincoln following publication of mrs. Lincoln alive in 2009. Her 2012 fleming lectures stepdaughters history, southern women and American Civil War will be published later this year. Professor clinton was on the committee, or, excuse me, the smithsonian summit for putting a woman on the american currency. Im sure she will share some of her experiences on that summit. So without further ado, Catherine Clinton. Thank you. [applause] i do want to say, its so great to be here at the 101st meeting. Being here last year for the very rousing 100th celebration. I was especially heartened by the recognition of africanamerican womens history, its inclusion and this panel today is something im very grateful for and very grateful to be able to come here and talk about the subject about which im so passionate. I want to contextualize a bit my role in this. When i began my doctoral degree in American History at princeton, it was celebrations of the u. S. Bicentennial and working on africanamerican subjects and women subjects. During an era when they were teaching us the age of jackson was something that was quite a struggle. Deborah is laughing here because we know womens history hadnt cracked the curriculum. And she and i were engaged in populating a womanless landscape with our work in the 1980s, battling against academic determinism to keep women out of the academic narrative. One of my professors said that women couldnt decide on history because they didnt get to vote. I went into it trying to really change the narrative. When i stepped off the tenure ladder to write full time, i found that Harriet Tubman was really languishing on the childrens shelf. No new work, no new writings. History needed to engage the public. And so when i went into my sons classroom, i found the fascination with Harriet Tubman was a constant, persistent theme. Although i was often asked questions about harriet beacher bathtub and all kinds of other characters. I was working on an encyclopedia article and found that the last biography had been from 1942. This, he wrote, was the subject of more than two dozen juvenile and picture books by 1990 with childrens literature on tubman increasing exponentially. Her contributions, however, before 1860 were always foregrounded. She made significant contributions as a scout and a spy for the union during the civil war. After 1865 she had a strong and steady record for africanamerican rights, for womens suffrage. Yet the half century following the abolition of slavery, until her death in 1913, remains relatively neglected in the juvenile accounts. By the time my Harriet Tubman the road to freedom appeared in 2004, scholars seemed very eager and ready to integrate her. Along with other icons in womens history. As i said just, in my biography, she had a very adaptive persona. The black panthers celebrated her as a guntoting comrade in arms while contemporary survivors of Domestic Abuse invoked her with safehouses and to protect women and children escaping. Finally, the academy was ready to embrace her as a longlost hero. When the women in the 20s campaign emerged in the spring of 2015, it followed in the wake of rosie rios, president obamas appointment of u. S. Treasurer, campaigning with the secretary of the treasury, tim geit nechlt r and then secretary jack lew to put women on the face of american currency. The Internet Campaign raised important issues about putting women on the money. Harriet tubman was the winner with over 600,000 ballots cast. This petition was sent to the Obama White House in may of 2015. It coincided with the new 10, which was a campaign that lew had conceived to open up the question of who should appear on the new, redesigned bill of american currency. The 10 bill was actually scheduled in terms of the treasury parade of bills and so over a million americans in the summer of 2015 sent in their nominees. This became, in many ways, a populist campaign to educate people about women in American History. As some of you might have seen, apparently the republican nominees battling it out in debates needed some education on women in American History as well. But over the summer of 2015, additionally a save Hamilton Campaign was launched and there were competing agendas about who should appear on the newly redesigned bill. The secretary of treasury invited a group of scholars to discuss ongoing efforts to put a female face on the currency. This was part of several meetings around the country and the launching of the website. The smithsonian summit elicited passionate opinions and heated exchanges. I was grateful to be a part of it. I presented my book to the secretary treasurer and the treasurer herself. With specialists ranging from early america to late 20th century. Experts in womens history, religious studies. Now i suggested during our lively debate that a woman of color must be the first female honored on any redesigned currency. I was not alone in the conviction nor the only one who advocated Harriet Tubman was the woman to fit the bill. It was quite surprising to me that as i felt the group tilting toward tubman one of the scholars who advocated quite passionately for another woman brought up the question that the American People might not be prepared to accept a mammy on the money, even if it was Harriet Tubman. Im not quoting exactly the full comment that this scholar made. But it really did, at that moment, crystallize for those of us arguing passionately. There it was, Harriet Tubman, defined by surviving and achieving. She might be up against the mammy but she was part of a new generation of africanamerican scholarship that including disremembering alongside om omitting. Flesh and blood women as fleshy and bloody as necessary to replace the cartoon characters. The stories have been fantastic. As a little girl born into slavery who liberated and renamed herself as Harriet Tubman, her name being famous in underGround Railroad literature, but in late 20th century, her legacy should be remembered in a very different way. Like many, i followed Media Chatter on this topic. Secretary of the treasury, jacob lew, predicted that there would be an outpouring of interest, as there was. The outcry of hamilton followed. But with the final decision on april 20th, i want to emphasize that not only will Harriet Tubman be put on the front of the 20, but on the back of the redesigned 10, susan b. Anthony, and Sojourner Truth will also appear as well as on the redesigned 5 bill you will have marion anderson, Eleanor Roosevelt and Martin Luther king. Historians, biographers, professors, students, pundits all have their controversial remarks on this. But change is really afoot. Certainly, when i began my academic career, the idea that such a sea change would happen in my lifetime that, my students would come familiar not only with Harriet Tubman but beacher stow and jacobs seemed unbelievable. Particularly women of color being recovered. Now vicki ruiz reminded her audience of her president of the aha, women are capable of everything and anything. Writing my biography of Harriet Tubman last century i adopted the mantra, harriets bloom and the u. S. Treasury has pledged that well have billions of tubmans in circulation. Thank you. [ applause ] thank you. You know, i neglected to introduce myself. I am deborah gray white. Im the board of governors distinguished professor of history at rutgers university. For those of you who just came in, i am introducing everyone as they speak because we are fortunate enough to have this recorded for posterity for all of posterity by cspan. This will be airing this is a surprise to us, but a very pleasant surprise. It will be airing at 8 00 pm Eastern Standard Time on november 1st. Check your local listings. Our second presenter and we are going through this relatively quickly because we really do want to have time for an extensive question and answer period. But our sn second presenter is jessica millward, associate professor in the department of history at university of california irvine. Her research focuses on slavery in early america, africanAmerican History as well as women and gender. Dr. Millwards first book finding charitys folk, enslaved and free black women in maryland was by the university of Georgia Press in 2015. She is currently working on book length project that discusses africanamerican womens experiences with Sexual Assault and intimate Partner Violence through the long 19th century. Jessica . [ applause ] i want to make sure all the apparatuses are working. It leans back. There we go. Good morning. Thank you all for coming today. I would like to thank my panelists, because i actually put this panel together. It came out of a conversation some of us were having, actually using modern media. We were texting back and forth and talking about what this bill meant, what the representation of this bill meant, what it meant for slavery scholars. So in that moment, professor of itny gill and professor daina berry quickly agreed to do a panel and we invited the members you see before you today. Thank you very much for joining this panel. When the u. S. Treasury announced that Harriet Tubman would be on the 20 bill i had a mixed reaction. Because people went over time trying to explain just how happy they were about this. One of my favorites was in black vernacular, now instead of let me hold 5, theyll say let me hold a tub. Can i hold a tub for a week and get back to you, as in Harriet Tubman. So that was the funny side. That was the joyful side. I, like many people, are happy to see an africanamerican woman will be on u. S. Monetary bill. However, i also had extreme sadness. As someone who works on enslaved women and enslaved women in maryland in particular, i was conflicted about what this means about images, of public memory. What it means about the archive of slavery and finally what it means about the continued commodification of black womens bodies. I dont mean the women we know. I mean the women that we dont know. What is lost when we only represent one iconic person . Public memory is as much about what we want to forget as it is about what we would like to remember. So as historians, our job is to deal with these consequences of cause and effects of events in history. But if you were assigned the role as public historian you speak to larger audiences and sometimes crucial details can be lost. What that allows us to happen as a nation is to have a cognitive dissidents, the steps to take to get someone on a bill of money or rise to iconic status. We forget what the lived experiences may have been like. For africanamerican women, this has particular implications because even today in the public imagination, in public media, africanamerican women are still a curiosity. Sometimes theyre on display in music videos. Now with the advent of Michelle Obama in the white house theres a different type of image, strong black family, a mother with her two children and her husband. When we look at early american enslaved women as the scholar Jennifer Morgan notes, early travelers considered african womens bodies a mons trtrocity. In thinking about that, im thinking about the moments that she left behind when she fled to freedom. We know she ran away, left her family. She travels back to the south several times. What is actually not spoken many of the times is that Harriet Tubman was well versed in freedom. Her family, many of her family members were freed by will. So this notion for freedom didnt come out of nowhere. It was organic. It had been bred in to her. She could see other family members who were enjoying lifes freedom. We know Harriet Tubman is more well formed than other women in history. We have more complex readings of her thanks to historians like ca Catherine Clinton. At one point black women were a monstrosty. Very often black women arent entered into the archive. They werent deemed important enough to enter their names or family members unless they are jotted down in an account book by slave hold ers. Scholar fuente says how do we narrate the fleeting glimpse of slaves in the archives and still meet the demands of history . In other words basically how do we build the story from the bottom up . How do we search for women who arent supposed to be there . In my own work i stumbled upon a woman named Charity Folks, who was enslaved in the 1700s. She earned her freedom slightly after the american revolution. She earned her freedom, her childrens freedom and her grandchildrens freedom. And her family of annapolis, maryland, go on to be a very privileged family in both annapolis, baltimore and new york. And even with unearthing her in the archive, i had to contend with the fact, is she like other black women or is she exceptional . In some ways looking at Charity Folks and Harriet Tubman, we see two people, one well known, one not as well known. But their lives intermingled in some ways, given that they both had experiences with slavery and freedom. Harriet tubman runs away from maryland and then returns. Charity folks is enslaved in maryland, then freed in maryland and she lives in maryland. Should both be in some ways in slavery. Again when enslaved women entered the archive, they are usually recorded as pieces of property and as free black women we have much more information about them. Continue to wrestle with laws preimposed on them. History by its very nature is a restorative process. If we use money, and we think about it as historic evidence, 100 years when people go into this archive, standing building, digital building or lives somewhere in the cloud, i wonder what people would think about this moment, to look at Harriet Tubman on a 20 bill at the same time that the u. S. So truly devalues black lives. And in a moment where historian daina rameyberry reminds us africanamericans were worth more enslaved than they are as free people and even as citizens today. Finally as i close, how the black womans body functions as its own form of memory and own form of archive. We know that history was grafted on the body either in terms of physical punishment, in terms of the fact that their wounds literally recreated the enslaved population and everything they did in some ways to sometimes stop having pregnancies, stop trying to further the system of sla