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10 | JULY 16 • 2020 

guest column
A Monumental Shame
I

magine this scenario: A 
Jewish American family 
takes a driving vaca-
tion. They take the Herman 
Goering Freeway to the 
Joseph Goebbels Bridge, 
where they enter Adolf 
Eichmann County and spend 
the night at the Rudolf Hess 
Hotel. 
Sounds 
absurd, right? 
Now let’
s 
replay that by 
substituting a 
Black family 
and change the 
names of the 
places they pass:
Imagine a Black family 
driving over the Jefferson 
Davis Freeway, across the 
Edmund Pettus Bridge, 
entering Nathan Bedford 
Forest County and staying 
overnight at the Robert E. Lee 
Hotel. 
Each of those locations 
are real places. Most white 
people wouldn’
t think twice 
about those names, not out of 
racism but out of ignorance. 
But take a moment to 
consider the reality of who 
those people were: 
• The Jefferson Davis 
Highway is named after the 
president of the Confederacy. 
He oversaw the rebellion 
against the U.S., staked his 
entire career on preserving 
slavery, stating that B 
lacks 
are “inferior” and “fitted 
expressly for servitude.” 
• Edmund Pettus, whose 
name adorns the famous 
bridge in Mississippi, was 
the Grand Dragon of the 
Alabama Ku Klux Klan 
during a time in which 
Alabama led the nation in 

lynchings. 
• Forest County is named 
after General Nathan Bedford 
Forest, who became the first 
Grand Dragon of the national 
Ku Klux Klan. 
• General Robert E. Lee 
has a modern-day reputation 
as an honorable warrior. 
But he was a fanatical white 
supremacist whose treatment 
of Black people was par-
ticularly harsh. Lee’
s army 
would regularly capture free 
Black Americans and send 
them to the South to become 
someone’
s property. As a slave 
owner, he sometimes chose to 
beat his slaves himself. One 
of his slaves, Wesley Norris, 
once remarked that Lee’
s 
punishment was especially 
severe, saying that Lee was 
“not satisfied to simply 
lacerate our naked flesh.” 
The Confederate States 
of America existed solely to 
preserve slavery. It declared 
war on the United States just 
to preserve the institution, 
which ultimately resulted 
in 620,000 deaths, more 
than every other U.S. war 
combined. Its very consti-

tution explicitly protected 
slavery. 
Yet today throughout 
the South, the landscape 
is littered with tributes to 
Confederate leaders. There 
are over 1,500 Confederate 
statutes, over 200 schools, 10 
military bases, and scores of 
counties, hotels, diners, lakes 
and mountains. 
The debate over renaming 
monuments and places is 
currently raging. It’
s a messy, 
controversial debate that 
America needs to work out 
and, in time, it will. But 
Jews — a people who know 
persecution far too well — 
should approach this debate 
with a profound sense of 
empathy. Our ancestors 
were often surrounded by 
anti-Semitic symbols. Today, 
in photos of this, we can 
instantly feel their pain and 
outrage. We should thus be 
quick to condemn any display 
of such symbols today, par-
ticularly those honoring 
Confederate leaders, a group 
who dedicated their careers 
to enslaving an entire race of 
people. 

American Jews indeed face 
anti-Semitism today, but we 
don’
t live with (and can’
t even 
imagine) seeing symbols all 
around us named after rabid 
anti-Semites. But still, we 
should be able to easily grasp 
how outrageous and demor-
alizing such symbols are to 
Black America. We should 
understand and support our 
fellow Black citizens, more 
than any other group of 
people. Our camaraderie on 
this issue should be powerful 
and instinctual. 
The debate over 
Confederate monuments and 
places will continue to divide 
Americans for some time. But 
it shouldn’
t divide the Jewish 
community. We should 
be solidly unified behind 
the removal of all things 
Confederate. Let them reside 
in a museum, where they 
belong. This should not be a 
political issue for us; it should 
be a visceral one. 
Black Americans have every 
right to feel pain and anger by 
the presence of memorials to 
people who wished to enslave 
their ancestors. Jews would 
be in an absolute uproar if 
we had to witness tributes to 
the leading anti-Semites of 
the past. If we become callous 
to this injustice, we not only 
betray Black Americans, but 
the lessons of our Jewish past 
and the values we wish to 
pass onto our children. 

Mark Jacobs is the AIPAC Michigan 
chair for African American Outreach, 
a co-director of the Coalition for 
Black and Jewish Unity, a board 
member of the Jewish Community 
Relations Council-AJC and the direc-
tor of Jewish Family Service’
s Legal 
Referral Committee.

Mark Jacobs
Statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Va.

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