It's Time America Honors It's True History (Of Freedom)

Rather than honor Jefferson Davis, who was hailed as the “champion of a slave society” when he was chosen to lead the Confederacy in 1861, it seemed to me far more appropriate to name these Arlington roads in honor of Freedman’s Village (or for other historic events in Arlington, possibly the “Pentagon 9/11 Memorial Highway”).

Besides the inconvenient truth that Jefferson Davis was a white supremacist and a slaveholder, the man had no connection to Arlington County. He was born in Kentucky and owned a plantation in Mississippi.

Plus, there’s the troubling reason why his name was attached to some southern sections of Route 1 in the 1920s. It was because the Daughters of the Confederacy were outraged that there were plans for a Lincoln Highway in the North (honoring Abraham Lincoln). At the height of the Jim Crow era, when whites in the South were enforcing racial segregation by lynching blacks, these apologists for white supremacy were making a political statement by attaching the name of the Confederate president to these roads, including those in Arlington County that passed near predominately black neighborhoods.

Then, in 1964, as Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement succeeded in gaining passage of a landmark civil rights law, the Virginia legislature added Jefferson Davis’s name to a section of Route 110 that passes by the Pentagon. In other words, during the last century, the naming of these roads after Jefferson Davis represented a protest by white supremacists who were expressing their resentments over the end of slavery and the demise of segregation.

Thus, to leave Jefferson Davis’s name on these roads is an affront to African-Americans and, indeed, all Americans who are ashamed of this vile part of our history.