Why Memorializing America's History of Racism Matters

Driving back to Washington, D.C., from Richmond, Virginia, this Independence Day weekend, I decided to take U.S. Route 1, also known as Jefferson Davis Highway—named for the one and only president of the Confederate States of America. Along the way, my family counted no less than a dozen monuments and markers commemorating areas where important Confederate soldiers marched, defended forts, were maimed, or were killed.

Along the same Richmond-to-D.C. route, we spotted one marker honoring an African American, located in Fredericksburg, Virginia, distinguishing where civil rights leader James Farmer once lived (long after the Civil War). We wondered why there weren’t more markers identifying places where African Americans had also put in footwork and shed blood. Most of the monuments we found had the United Daughters of the Confederacy stamp and/or a Virginia state seal on them.