Author Biography

Dr. Clarence Lusane is an author, activist, scholar, and journalist. He is a Professor and former Chairman of Howard University's Department of Political Science. Lusane earned his B.A. in Communications from Wayne State University and both his Masters and Ph.D. from Howard University in Political Science. He's been a political consultant to the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and a former Commissioner for the DC Commission on African American Affairs. He frequently appears on MSNBC and C-SPAN, and was invited by the Obamas to speak at the White House. Author of many books, including The Black History of the White House, Lusane lives and works in the Washington, DC area.Kali Holloway is a monthly columnist for both The Nation and The Daily Beast. She is the former director of the "Make it Right Project," a national initiative dedicated to taking down Confederate monuments and telling the truth about history. She is lead vocalist for the band "Easy Lover" and is currently working on her first book, The Secret Racist History of Everything.

Table of Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTSForeword by Kali HollowayPrefaceIntroductionI. TWENTY DOLLARSOne: Symbolism MattersTwo: Harriet Tubman Represents Solidarity, Struggle, and Genuine DemocracyThree: Andrew Jackson's Face Is a Meme for White SupremacyFour: The Movement to Transform the Faces on U.S. CurrencyFive: The Tubman Twenty—Black Support and OppositionSix: Conservative Hostility to the Tubman TwentyII. AND CHANGESeven: Fear of a Diverse AmericaEight: From 1619 to Covid-19, Racism is a Pre-existing ConditionNine: The George Floyd CatalystTen: Abolishing Symbols of White SupremacyEleven: Black Voters MatterConclusion: Good Trouble and a Harriet Tubman–Inspired FutureAcknowledgments
BibliographyEndnotesIndexAbout the Author

Review

"A timely political and historical study of racism in America, Twenty Dollars and Change: Harriet Tubman and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice and Democracy is informatively enhanced with the inclusion of fifty-two pages of Notes and a fourteen page Index. Of particular relevance and unreservedly recommended for personal, professional, community, college, and university library Contemporary Social Issues, African-American Racial/Political History, and African/American Demographic Studies collections and supplemental curriculum studies lists, it should be noted for the personal reading lists of students, academia, political activists, governmental policy makers, and non-specialist general readers with an interest in the subject that Twenty Dollars and Change: Harriet Tubman and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice and Democracy is also available in a digital book format."—Midwest Book Review
"Dr. Clarence Lusane's recently published Twenty Dollars and Change: Harriett Tubman and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice and Democracy, walks us through the history of the faces that adorn American currency and all the arguments for and against Tubman's ascension to be the face of the twenty. He adroitly covers a vast historical landscape with poetry and precision and places the "Tubman Debate" into the context of current racial hierarchies and politics."—Romi Mahajan, Countercurrents
"Thoughtfully balanced and nuanced, Twenty Dollars and Change explores the ways that American hero and national icon Harriet Tubman resonates across racial, gender, and political divides. Lusane captures not only the significance of historic symbols, but how winning the fight over representation and memory advances the ongoing struggles for racial justice and democracy right now." —Janell Hobson, editor of Ms. Magazine's Harriet Tubman Bicentennial Project and author of When God Lost Her Tongue: Historical Consciousness and the Black Feminist Imagination"Twenty Dollars and Change offers a metaphor about two Americas: one striving to live up to its promise of justice and liberty, and the other mired in the bloody legacy of white supremacy. The historical arc Lusane provides demonstrates that the freedom struggle changes its cast of characters over time, but never forsakes its hope for liberation. A great and refreshing read."—Loretta Ross, author of Calling In the Calling Out Culture"Twenty Dollars and Change travels the back alleys of fear of racist white America. . . .Harriet Tubman's image on the money is an opportunity to establish the symbol of democracy she wanted, one where actions led by a conceived idea of being inferior or superior are crushed. Clarence Lusane has put it where the goats can get it. An extraordinary and wonderful book."—Tina Wyatt, great-great-great grandniece of Harriet Tubman, co-founder of Harriet Tubman Day, Washington D.C."In this original and brilliantly conceived book, acclaimed politicalscientist Clarence Lusane offers an incisive analysis of how racism andinequality shaped—and continues to shape—American society."—Keisha N. Blain, coeditor, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019"Twenty Dollars and Change is a future-gazing guide to who we must be to become who we claim to be." —Kali Holloway, columnist for The Nation and The Daily Beast (from the foreword)"Urgent and inspiring, Twenty Dollars and Change should compel the U.S. Treasury to make real our core value of equality for all with currency images that honor the contributions and humanity of African Americans, Native Americans, women, and all marginalized people of this country. Dr. Lusane sees Tubman as a Founding Mother of American democracy yet to come, and offers a persuasive case how a new twenty and change can get us there sooner."—Barbara Ortiz Howard, Founder of "Women on 20s""Twenty Dollars and Change offers powerful analyses of race and U.S. history and our present crucible moment. . . . A must read." —Barbara Ransby, author of Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century"As challenges to racial justice, women's rights, and democracy itself intensify, Lusane's sober and historically rooted analysis provides much needed clarity and insight. . . .Twenty Dollars and Change is exactly the book we need at this moment."—Karen Bass, Mayor of Los Angeles, CA"Clarence Lusane reminds us that we all can contribute enormously to a more perfect society based on the dignity, diversity, and democracy of the peoples. In that spirit, and with great clarity and integrity, Lusane calls on us to wake up, fight back, and never back down until justice prevails." —Suzan Shown Harjo (Cheyenne Hodulgee Muscogee), Writer, Editor, Curator, Native Indigenous Rights Advocate, and Recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom"Lusane teaches us of the starkly contrasting lives of Tubman and Jackson, and captures blow-by-blow the intricacies of the struggles over changing currency before connecting them to broader ones in the moment of Donald Trump and George Floyd."—David Roediger, author of Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White"Clarence Lusane's Twenty Dollars and Change is truly impressive—a genuinely sweeping work." —Tom Engelhardt, editor of TomDispatch, and author of A Nation Unmade by War

Promotional

•15,000 copy initial print run•Co-op available•Galleys available•National tv and radio campaign to include PBS, MSNBC, CNN, CSPAN, late night programs including The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, and NPR and their affiliates, plus community radio stations around the country.•National print campaign includes pursuit of reviews and features in the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Time, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair among others, with a focus on media located in MD, DC and NY, areas where Harriet Tubman lived and worked, as well as Washington DC, where author Clarence Lusane is located.•Pursuing excerpts in Harper's, The Atlantic, on LitHub and elsewhere.  •Online/social media campaign includes The Root, Well Read Black Girl, The Undefeated, History Channel website, among others. Book promoted on City Lights Social Media: Instagram (47.2 followers); Twitter (135.8K Followers);  Facebook (Over 55,000 fans); City Lights Newsletter (17,000 subscribers)•General tour info: 10 city national tour and open to event requests from booksellers and librarians.•Bookseller/Library promotions: We're pursuing IndieNext  nominations and are open to other bookseller and library promotions that are appropriate for the book.•We'll produce "$20 dollar bill" bookmarks with Tubman's likeness for promotion.• Endorsements: Pursuing Jelani Cobb, Michael Dyson, Karen Bass, Annette Gordon-Reed, Kimberle Crenshaw, Dorothy Wickenden, Theo Horesh, Jonathan Metzl, Heather McGhee, Deirdre Sinnott, Paul Stewart, Karen L Cox, Kali Holloway, Alicia Garza, Tamika Mallory, Loretta Ross, adrienne marie brown, Johanna Fernandez, Derecka Purnell, Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, Jill Lepore, Barbara Ehrenreich, Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates, Mumia Abu-Jamal, George Lipsitz, Marc Lamont Hill, Maya Wiley, & Barbara Ransby.

Long Description

Twenty Dollars and Change places Harriet Tubman's life and legacy in a long tradition of resistance, illuminating the ongoing struggle to realize a democracy in which her emancipatory vision prevails. America is in the throes of a historic reckoning with racism, with the battle for control over official narratives at ground zero. Across the country, politicians, city councils, and school boards are engaged in a highly polarized debate about whose accomplishments should be recognized, and whose point of view should be included in the telling of America's history. In Twenty Dollars and Change, political scientist Clarence Lusane, author of the acclaimed The , writes from a basic premise: Racist historical narratives and pervasive social inequities are inextricably linked--changing one can transform the other. Taking up the debate over the future of the twenty-dollar bill, Lusane uses the question of Harriet Tubman vs. Andrew Jackson as a lens through which to view the current state of our nation's ongoing reckoning with the legacies of slavery and foundational white supremacy. He places the struggle to confront unjust social conditions in direct connection with the push to transform our public symbols, making it plain that any choice of whose life deserves to be remembered and honored is a direct reflection of whose basic rights are deemed worthy of protection, and whose are not. "Engaging and insightful, Twenty Dollars and Change illuminates the grassroots effort to have our national currency reflect the diversity of America and all of its citizens--those ordinary and extraordinary people who have stood up and demanded freedom, equality and justice. A must read!"--Kate Clifford Larson, author of Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero

Review Quote

"Twenty Dollars and Change travels the back alleys of fear of racist white America. . . . Harriet Tubman's image on the money is an opportunity to establish the symbol of democracy she wanted, one where actions led by a conceived idea of being inferior or superior are crushed. Clarence Lusane has put it where the goats can get it. An extraordinary and wonderful book."--Tina Wyatt, great great great grandniece of Harriet Tubman, co-founder of Harriet Tubman Day, Washington D.C. "In this original and brilliantly conceived book, acclaimed politicalscientist Clarence Lusane offers an incisive analysis of how racism andinequality shaped--and continues to shape--American society."--Keisha N. Blain, coeditor, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 "Twenty Dollars and Change is a future-gazing guide to who we must be to become who we claim to be." --Kali Holloway, columnist for the The Nation and The Daily Beast (from the foreword) "In this trailblazing study, Dr. Lusane builds an irrefutable case that justice in representation goes hand in hand with justice in policy. . . . Urgent and inspiring."--Barbara Ortiz Howard, Founder of "Women on 20s" "Twenty Dollars and Change offers powerful analyses of race and U.S. history and our present crucible moment. . . . A must read." --Barbara Ransby, author of Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century "As challenges to racial justice, women's rights, and democracy itself intensify, Lusane's sober and historically rooted analysis provides much needed clarity and insight. . . . Twenty Dollars and Change is exactly the book we need at this moment."--Congresswoman Karen Bass "Clarence Lusane reminds us that we all can contribute enormously to a more perfect society based on the dignity, diversity, and democracy of the peoples. In that spirit, and with great clarity and integrity, Lusane calls on us to wake up, fight back, and never back down until justice prevails." --Suzan Shown Harjo (Cheyenne & Hodulgee Muscogee), Writer, Editor, Curator, Native & Indigenous Rights Advocate, and Recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom "Lusane teaches us of the starkly contrasting lives of Tubman and Jackson, and captures blow-by-blow the intricacies of the struggles over changing currency before connecting them to broader ones in the moment of Donald Trump and George Floyd."--David Roediger, author of Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White

Excerpt from Book

FOREWORD By Kali Holloway One of America''s most fervently held--and desperately clung to--myths is that our racial hierarchy is neither engineered nor rigorously enforced, but the natural and inevitable result of every group getting exactly what they deserve. At the core of this fictive theory is the belief that the innately civilized, law-abiding, industrious, and intelligent nature of whiteness justifies its position atop the racial order, just as the inherent pathology, criminality, ignorance, and self-defeating ways of blackness perpetually constrain it to the bottom. Of the myriad self-absolving and racist lies propagated by white supremacist culture, the notion that black folks have only themselves to blame for their oppression is perhaps the most insidious. It''s a denialist view wholly divorced from both the consequences of American policy and the realities of our past, and its hegemony requires defensive maintenance of a national memory built on lies of historical omission. This whitewashing happens not just symbolically, in textbooks, monuments, memorials, and markers, but materially, in policies that directly impact the life, death, and political power of black Americans. Affronted by black emancipation and enfranchisement after losing the Civil War, defeated Confederates developed the Lost Cause mythos, white supremacist propaganda with multiple aims. Relying heavily on public symbols, it sought to project a Southern antebellum innocence onto the past, while telegraphing absolute white power onto the future. To that end, Lost Cause mythologists portrayed Confederate leaders--men whose most notable contribution to history was armed defense of white folks'' right to buy, sell, and enslave black people--as heroes. Anonymous Confederate combatants, cast in bronze and stone, stood sentry atop lofty pedestals that implicitly demanded public veneration. The Confederacy''s dishonorable fight for black enslavement was tacitly rendered an honorable but lost cause. In town centers, along avenues, and in myriad other public spaces, these statues stood as constant signifiers of racial terror. On courthouse lawns and statehouse grounds, they were strategically erected to serve as reminders to black folks that those institutions had no regard for them. Black folks, then as now, implicitly and empirically understood how white supremacist symbols are inextricably linked to white terror violence, imbuing the environment with harassment and intimidation, race-stamping public spaces as immutably white, and emboldening anti-black vigilantism. Civil rights activist, educator, and Charleston, South Carolina, native Mamie Garvin Fields grew up in the shadow of a statue that went up in 1887 depicting politician John C. Calhoun, a vocal and virulent racist who once called black enslavement a "positive good." "Our white city fathers wanted to keep what [Calhoun] stood for alive," Fields stated in her memoirs nearly a century later. "Blacks took that statue personally. As you passed by, here was Calhoun looking you in the face and telling you, ''Nigger, you may not be a slave, but I am back to see you stay in your place.''" Black folks protested white supremacist symbols littering the landscape, a brave risk under the often lethal threat of Jim Crow, which those same monuments monumentalized and made tangible. When the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) in 1931 erected a "loyal slave monument"--a type of Confederate marker promoting the insane idea that black people were happiest being enslaved by white folks--near the West Virginia site of John Brown''s rebellion at Harpers Ferry, the NAACP demanded a tablet be placed nearby to honor Brown, noting a counter was needed to the "nationally publicized tablet giving the Confederate point of view" and the rising movement of "copperheadism," or Confederate sympathy and slavery apologism. W. E. B. Du Bois, who wrote that the dedication event for the UDC''s monument had been a "pro-slavery celebration," drafted the proposed wording for the Brown memorial, which called the abolitionist''s rebellion "a blow that woke a guilty nation." It was never erected, but the NAACP made its resistance known. Mamie Garvin Fields described how she and other black children would "carry something with us, if we knew we would be passing that way, in order to deface" the Calhoun statue in Charleston, to "scratch up the coat, break the watch chain, try to knock off the nose--because he looked like he was telling you that there was a place for ''niggers'' and ''niggers must stay there.''" Newspaper accounts catalog yet more protests using defacement, as in 1888 when a statue of the figure of Justice positioned at Calhoun''s feet was found with "a tin kettle in her hand and a cigar in her mouth"; in 1892, when someone painted the face of the Justice statue "lily" white; or in 1894, when a young black boy named Andrew Haig shot at the figure of Justice with a tiny pistol. A park keeper was ultimately hired to stop "the nuisances and depredations now committed by goats, boys and night prowlers," but apparently failed in that mission. In 1895, the Calhoun statue was removed. A local newspaper article recounts how, as the statue was being lowered off its pedestal by a rope, a group of black boys watching nearby "skillfully pasted Mr. Calhoun in the eye with a lump of mud." The original Calhoun''s plinth stood forty-five feet in the air. In 1896, a replacement Calhoun was erected on a pedestal some 115 feet off the ground. Officially, the first Calhoun statue was removed because of design flaws, but Fields contends that black "children and adults beat up John C. Calhoun so badly that the whites had to come back and put him way up high, so we couldn''t get to him." The figure was finally removed for good on June 25, 2020. Black protests against white supremacist symbols continued during the Civil Rights era, becoming even more overt. In 1966, after an all-white jury acquitted the white man who admitted to murdering Sammy Younge Jr., a black student activist attending Alabama''s Tuskegee Institute, thousands of protesters congregated at the town''s central Confederate marker, spray-painting its pedestal with Younge''s name and the phrase "Black Power." Less than two years later, just after the April 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., black students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill expressed their grief and rage by dousing a campus Confederate statue known as "Silent Sam" in red paint. After a young black man named James Cates was murdered by a white motorcycle gang in 1970, black students rallied at the foot of the monument. In a call-back to those demonstrations, UNC-Chapel Hill student Maya Little would pour a mixture of her own blood and red ink on the statue in April 2018, in an action that presaged its toppling by protesters four months later, boldly and accurately stating that "the statue and all statues like it are already drenched in black blood." In these and far too many examples to describe here, black folks have protested the iconography of white power from its earliest appearance, as part of a broader movement toward the dismantling of white supremacy, writ large. W. E. B. Du Bois, Mamie Garvin Fields, the early NAACP--all were involved in seeking rights for black folks in various spheres, in calling out white supremacist socio-politics of their day. But in tandem with those efforts to secure black folks'' civil rights, they also noted the way those symbols attempted to write black folks out of American history, and how the net effect of symbols that conveyed anti-blackness and white terror added fuel to the prevalence of both. This was never mere conjecture. In fact, a 2021 study by researchers at the University of Virginia further confirms it, concluding there is a direct correlation between Confederate monuments and white racial terror, and that "the number of lynching victims in a county is a positive and significant predictor of the number of Confederate memorializations in that county." Those markers, most of which still stand, continue to do the work of white supremacy. But there are hints of progress in acknowledging the damage they do, the hostile ambience they create, and the structural inequities their existence perpetuates. In late 2021, a Tennessee appeals court granted a new trial to a black man who had been convicted by an all-white jury who deliberated in a room full of Confederate memorabilia--including a portrait of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, a framed Confederate flag, and a placard displaying the insignia of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The appellate court''s jurists agreed with the argument that white supremacist symbology had an "inherently prejudicial" impact on jurors. Just as the architects of the Lost Cause had hoped they would. In Twenty Dollars and Change, scholar Clarence Lusane makes the same argument about the power of symbols and their impact on public consciousness, but in its inverse, suggesting that the "inherently prejudicial" effect of the images we choose can and should be used to augment larger struggles for real change. Using the debate around the U.S. Treasury''s promise to replace Andrew Jackson with Harriet Tubman on the front of a twenty-dollar bill as a springboard, Lusane argues that "rolling out a Tubman twenty not only disrupts and diminishes the legacies of white supremacy that persist in official narratives, but that doing so is a necessary step toward

Description for Sales People

*President Biden is committed to featuring Harriet Tubman's visage on the $20 bill, and Congresspeople on both sides of the aisle are putting pressure on him to follow through. *Lusane is a seasoned public speaker sought out by A-list media outlets such as NPR, PBS, CNN, and MSNBC. *Lusane will write op-eds for major national papers & websites. His latest on the life of Colin Powell was just published in the Washington Post . *2022 is the 200th birthyear of Harriet Tubman, and we'll insert the author into the media coverage. *This book is unique in discussing the overlap of Harriet Tubman and Andrew Jackson's lives, and the ways in which each of them defined the character of 19th century America. *Special illustrated section includes prototypes of the "Tubman Twenty," and historical images from the Library of Congress. *This book will appeal to the millions of supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement, and more generally to trade and academic readers who follow emerging trends in social and racial justice education and organizing. *Will pursue events at independent bookstore and libraries, The National Museum of African American History and Culture (DC), The Harriet Tubman Museum & Education Center (MD), and elsewhere. Requests are welcomed!

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