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 Teresa. The case for putting him on money is not just 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. Do any of them deserve the boot? The options are all of the following:

George Washington – $1 bill Thomas Jefferson – $2 bill Abraham Lincoln – $5 bill Alexander Hamilton – $10 bill Andrew Jackson – $20 bill Ulysses S. Grant – $50 bill Benjamin Franklin – $100 bill

As if to underscore how much MLK belongs, notice that most of the men on this list—Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Hamilton, and Franklin—were arguably indispensable to the nation in its struggle to realize the promise of its founding ideals. King meets that standard.

Whatever one thinks of Jackson and Grant, they do not. So which of them to replace? Before drawing straws or picking a name out of a hat, I thought to ask, "Was either particularly instrumental in genocidal acts?" Then the choice was clear.

Just months ago, Jillian Keenan argued the following at Slate:

My public high school wasn’t the best, but we did have an amazing history teacher. Mr. L, as we called him, brought our country’s story to life. So when he taught us about the Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears, Andrew Jackson’s campaigns to force at least 46,000 Cherokees, Choctaws, Muscogee-Creeks, Chickasaws, and Seminoles off their ancestral lands, my classmates and I were stricken. It was unfathomable that thousands of Native American men, women, and children were forced to march West, sometimes freezing to death or starving because U.S. soldiers wouldn’t let them bring extra food or blankets. It was hard to hear that the Choctaw Nation lost up to a third of its population on the death march. It was disorienting to learn that what amounted to ethnic cleansing had come at the insistence of an American president. But then it was lunchtime, and we pulled out our wallets in the cafeteria. Andrew Jackson was there, staring out from every $20 bill. We had been carrying around portraits of a mass murderer all along, and had no idea. Andrew Jackson engineered a genocide. He shouldn’t be on our currency.

After granting that Jackson's rise from humble beginnings was symbolically inspiring, Keenan noted that the Tennessean accumulated much of his fortune as a slave trader. "Even in historical context, our seventh president falls short," she argued. "His racist policies were controversial even in his own time. After the Indian Removal Act only narrowly passed Congress, an 1832 Supreme Court ruling declared it unconstitutional. Jackson ignored that decision. In 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a passionate letter calling Jackson’s policies '… a crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokees of a country, for how could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our government, or the land that was cursed by their parting and dying imprecations our country any more?'"