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“Fort Monroe is where the first enslaved Africans arrived on our shores in 1619,” Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam tweeted on Friday – the same day letters spelling out “Jefferson Davis Memorial Park” were taken down by workers.
“A memorial glorifying the President of the Confederacy has no place here.”
“While it is appropriate to discuss and interpret Jefferson Davis’ imprisonment at Fort Monroe, it is not appropriate to glorify it,” Northam wrote before the site’s board agreed to remove the name, the station reported.
"The Fort Monroe Authority on Friday removed the letters that spelled "Jefferson Davis Memorial Park" from an iron archway that honored the one-time Confederate president imprisoned at the former Army post."
"They will be stored in the Casemate Museum and curated as a part of the interpretation of the Jefferson Davis story, Oder said. Davis, a former U.S. Senator and Secretary of War, was imprisoned for treason at the fort following the Civil War."
"The Army built the arch in 1956, on behalf of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The group’s gift to the Army came two years after the Supreme Court’s historic decision in Brown v. Board of Education."
"Davis, who was a U.S. senator and secretary of war before abandoning the U.S. to lead the Confederacy, was briefly imprisoned at Fort Monroe after surrendering."
Gov. Northam said two interpretive signs were erected to provide contextual background. The language on these signs is below:
Sign 1: The Jefferson Davis Memorial Arch was erected in 1956 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, with the permission of the U.S. Army, to commemorate the imprisonment of Confederate President Jefferson Davis at Fort Monroe. The arch was rededicated in 1986.
After the Civil War, Jefferson Davis stood as the most vocal proponent of the claim the war had been a constitutional struggle, not a fight over the future of slavery in the United States. His claim was part of the Lost Cause crusade, in which white southerners sought to elevate secession, the Confederacy it created, and the war it waged into a high-minded crusade.
Sign 2: This memorial to Jefferson Davis, for some, conjures up a sense of heritage and history. For others, it is a symbol of hate and highlights the intent to exclude African Americans from public life and civil liberties. This memorial was placed here during the modern civil rights movement in the 1950s, a time which triggered a wave of Confederate monuments and the renaming of public buildings and spaces. Some Virginia cities and counties closed their schools in “massive resistance” to the Supreme Court’s invalidation of segregation, arguing that it was the state’s right to determine relations between black and white people. The new memorials, such as this arch, celebrated the heroes of the Confederacy as defenders of an unfairly oppressed region, in opposition to this federal ruling.