In The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf makes an argument that it’s time the United States put Martin Luther King on the $20 bill:
During the 2008 election, Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote an article for Culture11 about the significance of a Barack Obama victory. “On television screens from Bedford Stuyvesant to South Central Los Angeles, images will be broadcast of a black family — a father, a mother, and two little girls — moving into the White House,” he wrote. “Whatever you think of policy, the mere fact of electing a black man president, sending him to live in the nation’s most iconic, so far whites only house, would puncture holes through the myth of black inferiority, violating America’s racial narrative so fundamentally as to forever change the way this country thinks of blacks, and the way blacks think of this country — and themselves.”
I still think Williams had a point. Today’s six, seven, and eight-year-olds have no memory of an America with anything other than a black president. What seemed improbable to us as recently as 2007 is, for them, a reality so normal that they don’t even think about it. Yet these same kids are still growing up in a country where the faces celebrated on the paper currency are all white. I don’t want to overstate the importance of that. There is a long list of suboptimal policies that are vastly more urgent to remedy. Still, the lack of diversity in this highly symbolic realm is objectionable, and improving matters would seem to be very easy.
Martin Luther King, Jr. is a universally beloved icon who led one of the most important struggles for justice in American history. When Gallup asked what figure from the 20th Century was most admired, MLK beat out every single American, and was second overall in the rankings, placing behind only Mother Theresa. Putting him on money would not be a case of elevating a man simply for the sake of diversity. Yet it would address the fact that, but for racism, our money would’ve long been more diverse. The only loser here would be the historic figure kicked off of a bill.
[…]
MLK is the best symbol of the civil rights movement, but many preceded him in that long struggle. They ought to be featured on $20’s flip side. Perhaps it could include a timeline stretching from Harriet Tubman to Rosa Parks, putting them in the company of Susan B. Anthony and Sacajawea, the women featured on U.S. coins. I suppose Jackson might be upset at my judgment that he is less deserving of our esteem than those figures. Then again, he might well support my plan. After all, few men in American history were as adamant about their hatred of paper money.
Much like love, wooing voters sometimes requires dabbling in the art of seduction.
