Community Newspaper for Blaine, Birch Bay and Semiahmoo, Washington

VIEWPOINT

By Frank Thompson

Although I have entered the U.S. at the Peace Arch crossing numerous times since moving to Vancouver from Seattle in 1975, it was not until 1999 that I noticed the monument standing six feet from the road as one drives into the U.S.

“Jefferson Davis
Highway No. 99
Erected by the
Washington Division
United Daughters
of the Confederacy
September 1940”

I contacted the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) to learn why the monument was here. E-mails to a web-page eventually brought three short Washington-related paragraphs from the UDC archives which included, “The official name [Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy] was designated in this state in 1938 as part of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of Washington as a state and in recognition of the services of Davis to the cause of good roads [here] when he was U.S. Secretary of War in 1857.”

An astonishing stretch to honor a man who, four years later, became the President of the Confederacy, fought to preserve that “peculiar institution” – slavery in America – and when the Civil War ended, was hunted down by federal forces and indicted for treason. How did this obscenity wind up here?

After the Civil War, after Andrew Johnson’s presidency, after Reconstruction, southern blacks were effectively re-enslaved by contrived political and economic sanctions. By 1924 the Democratic party, in convention, almost evenly split on the Ku Klux Klan which had become a powerful political movement.

As John Blum wrote in The National Experience: A History of the United States, “To the party’s shame a motion not to include a plank condemning the Klan by name passed by 543 to 542 votes.”

The next year, 40,000 Klansmen and supporters marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC. The night-riding marauders and lynchers strutted and cadenced down the nation’s main street in their white sheet camouflage. The country as a whole yawned and looked the other way.

The U.S. Department of Transportation says, “The idea of a highway commemorating Jefferson Davis was conceived in1913 during a convention of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The UDC identified a route from Washington, D.C., to San Diego, California, to be called the Jefferson Davis National Highway.

In addition to the transcontinental route, the UDC designated two auxiliary routes, including one from a link with the main highway at the Davis home, Beauvoir, on the Mississippi gulf coast to Fairview via Paducah and Benton, Kentucky. Eventually, the UDC extended the main Jefferson Davis National Highway through California, Oregon, and Washington to Canada.”

When the United Daughters of the Confederacy dedicated the marker at Blaine, prominent U.S. and Canadian citizens were present. A bagpipe band from New Westminster, B.C. performed alongside the Blaine high school band – and the president-general of the UDC, Mrs. Charles F. Bolling, came all the way from Virginia to speak, bringing the Old South to the liberated Pacific Northwest. Representatives of veterans organizations joined in the program.

The old Southern way of life was never part of this community. Here in the year 2002 – it is removal time. The Jefferson Davis monument was a mistake and is an embarrassment to our region.

It is good to be aware of the most famous segment of the highway. It’s the U.S. 80 segment between Selma and Montgomery, Alabama. Here Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., led the march in 1965 that helped prompt Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act which changed the face of governments around the country.

In 1996, this stretch of highway [dedicated by the UDC to the President of the Confederacy earlier in that century] was officially designated the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail, and as such, has become an international symbol of freedom.”
Now, that’s relevant.
.