Boston church stamping all $20 bills in collection plates with Harriet Tubman’s face

After the Trump administration delayed a plan to replace former President Andrew Jackson with abolitionist Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill, a Boston church took matters into its own hands.

The Hope Central Church located in Boston’s Jamaica Plains neighborhood has been using a stamp to put Tubman’s face on all the $20 bills put into its collection plate, Religion News Service (RNS) reported Monday. 

{mosads}Pastor Laura Ruth Jarrett said that Tubman is a “worthy replacement,” according to RNS. 

“The U.S. Treasury said they will not,” Jarrett told her congregation this week. “And we say we will.”

One congregant told RNS that since the church began stamping the bills in early May, she has noticed an increase in the number of $20 bills given to the church.

“Everyone who does this just gets giddy about it,” Marylou Steeden said. “It just feels so good, like a little rebellion.”

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said last month that designs for a new $20 bill featuring Tubman will be delayed several years, after his Obama-era predecessor first announced the redesign in 2016.

“The primary reason we’ve looked at redesigning the currency is for counterfeiting issues,” he said. “Based upon this, the $20 bill will now not come out until 2028. The $10 and the $50 will come out with new features beforehand.”

RNS reported that the church used a 3D-printed Tubman stamp created by artist Dano Wall that would allow people to put Tubman’s face on currency.  

“My goal is to get 5,000 stamps out there,” Wall told The Washington Post. “If there are 5,000 people consistently stamping currency, we could get a significant percent of circulating $20 bills [with the Tubman] stamp, at which point it would be impossible to ignore.”

Some have called for Jackson to be removed from the currency because of his slave ownership and role in the Trail of Tears, the massive forced relocation of the Cherokee Nation.

Tubman helped lead dozens of enslaved people to freedom via the Underground Railroad network. 

President Trump has denounced the Tubman bill as “pure political correctness,” and suggested that she should instead be featured on a new $2 bill or other denomination. 

“Andrew Jackson had a great history, and I think it’s very rough when you take somebody off the bill,” Trump said in 2016. “I would love to see another denomination. … I think it would be more appropriate,” Trump said of Tubman, who he called “fantastic.”