To the Editor:
The name of the Jefferson Davis Highway should be changed.
It needs to be pointed out that slavery was not "widely viewed as a normal institution" (Gazette, Aug. 11) in America. Certainly our slave-owning presidents didn't endorse it. In 1785, for example, Thomas Jefferson tried to get it abolished by Virginia's legislature. In 1819, James Madison proposed a program of gradual emancipation, with the federal government reimbursing slave owners for their loss of property.
In the event that these American leaders forgot for a moment how hypocritical they were being, British intellectuals were happy to parody their two-faced calls for freedom, and, of course, the French made abolition of slavery here a condition of their helping us in the war, only to be let down.
But in any case, though we can't do anything about the past, except to understand it better, we can do something about the future. At a minimum: immediate change of the Jefferson Davis Highway's name, and an agreement, cast into law, that for the next 250 years all our streets will be named either for Alexandrian soldiers or police officers killed in the line of duty, or for renowned African Americans, and, when those names are used up, the names of slaves associated with Alexandria. This will cost nothing and inconvenience no one, and benefit us all.
Elisabeth Vodola
Alexandria