Jefferson Davis’ name removed from Virginia memorial
Archway marked site of first Africans arriving in state in 1619
HAMPTON, Va. — One of the most incongruous of all of Virginia’s Confederate war memorials has come down with the removal of Jefferson Davis’ name from an archway at the site where the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619.
It appears to be the first case of Virginia eliminating a Confederate memorial from statecontrolled property since a 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville inflamed public dialogue about the issue.
And it was driven by Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat who is working to overcome his own race-related scandal.
“It’s past-due,” Gaylene Kanoyton, president of the Hampton branch of the NAACP, said Tuesday after a ceremony at the now-blank metal arch. “The first Africans arrived here at Fort Monroe, and it’s important we didn’t have Jefferson Davis up here. I mean, he was literally for slavery. So to have this taken down before the commemoration is monumental.”
Later this month, the state will host commemorative events at Fort Monroe to recognize the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first Africans — just as it honored the anniversary of representative democracy at Jamestown last week.
The 50-foot ceremonial arch was erected at Fort Monroe by the U.S. Army in 1956 and paid for by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. It proclaimed “Jefferson Davis Memorial Park” above the stone casemate where Davis was held prisoner by federal troops after the Civil War.
But the old fort — completed in 1834 and not decommissioned until 2011 — was originally Point Comfort, fortified by English colonists in 1609 and used as an arrival point for ships headed up the James River to Jamestown.
In late August 1619, a ship called the White Lion put “20 and odd” African prisoners ashore here, ushering in the era of black slavery in what became the United States, according to historic documents.
“To have a memorial glorifying the president of the Confederacy, a person who worked to maintain slavery, on the same site on which enslaved Africans both first arrived here and were later freed, is not just inappropriate. It is offensive,” Northam said Tuesday at the ceremony.
Northam has been under a cloud since February, when a racist photo from his 1984 medical school yearbook came to light. He first took responsibility for the photo, which showed one person in blackface and another in Klan robes, then disavowed it — but admitted to wearing blackface for a dance contest that same year.
Most fellow Democrats have called on him to resign, but Northam vowed to stay in office.