× Thanks for reading! Log in to continue. Enjoy more articles by logging in or creating a free account. No credit card required. Log in Sign up {{featured_button_text}}

Standing in the former capital of the Confederacy, America’s first black president didn’t thunder against the row of Confederate statues on Richmond’s Monument Avenue or the hundreds more scattered throughout Virginia.

Instead, former President Barack Obama cracked a joke about his distant relative Jefferson Davis “spinning in his grave” and said America should claim all its history, “the good and the bad.”

In his campaign speech Thursday night at a rally for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ralph Northam and his ticket mates, Obama weighed in, if only tangentially, on the discussions playing out in Richmond and cities across the state over monuments to the Lost Cause and Virginia’s legacy of slavery.

“Ralph believes that if we’re going to talk about history, that we should do it in a way that heals. Not in a way that wounds. Not in a way that divides,” Obama said. “We shouldn’t use the most painful parts of our history just to score political points.”

Obama went on to discuss the duality of Thomas Jefferson, whom he called “one of Virginia’s most famous sons,” as a slave owner who also wrote the words that have come to define American ideals of liberty and equality.