Symbols matter. In his thrashing, malicious way, former President Donald Trump understood that — which is why he refused to carry out an inherited plan to replace President Andrew Jackson's face on the $20 bill with that of Black abolitionist Harriet Tubman. The technical excuses the White House made at the time barely qualified as a fig leaf to cover what was clearly going on: Trump, as usual, was dog whistling to the racists in his base. The Biden administration's announcement that it will resume and accelerate the Tubman plan is a welcome reversal of Trump's snub.

Tubman has one of America's most fascinating and admirable life stories, one steeped in the fights for both racial and gender justice. After escaping slavery, she helped others to freedom through the Underground Railroad. She later led an armed assault for the Union during the Civil War — the first woman to do so — and, later still, joined the women's suffrage movement.

President Barack Obama in 2016 announced Tubman would be the first woman to adorn U.S. paper currency in more than a century, and the first Black American ever. The choice of Tubman for that honor made abundant sense, and the fact that she would replace Jackson lent a bit of historical irony. America's seventh president was known for his strong support of slavery at a time when the abolition movement was ascendant, in addition to his brutality toward Native Americans, culminating in his genocidal "Indian removal" policies. (Jackson was also America's first populist president — a fact that Trump honored by hanging his portrait in the Oval Office.)

The Obama administration set the wheels in motion with the goal of having the Harriet Tubman $20 bill in circulation by 2020, to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the right to vote for women. Trump had other ideas. During his 2016 campaign, Trump derided the Tubman plan as "pure political correctness" — his usual description of any idea that involved fairness or tolerance. Trump's early derision made it that much more pathetic when, three years later, Trump Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin claimed, straight-faced, that the only reason the Trump administration was postponing the switch from Jackson to Tubman until well beyond the end of even a second prospective Trump term was because of technical printing issues. Please.

White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said last week that the Biden administration will "resume efforts to put Harriet Tubman on the front of the new $20 notes" and is "exploring ways to speed up that effort."

The move, purely symbolic though it may be, is important. After four years of getting clear signals from the White House that they don't matter, Black Americans, women and all those who embrace diversity as a national strength will get a much better message each time they reach into their wallets.

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