Establishing a national slavery memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. is a good idea.

It is something Democrats and Republicans can all support together, incumbents and challengers. There is nothing embarrassing about agreeing on a shared belief. If Germany can have their Holocaust Memorial right in the center of their capital city, Berlin, we can have our national slavery memorial right in the center of our capital on the Washington Mall.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, East and West Germany were unified into one country. They took it upon themselves in June 1999, as a consolidated nation, to build the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in their nation’s capital. Over six million Jews had been murdered over the 12-year reign of the National Socialist regime from 1933-1945. Germany, to my knowledge, is the only major economic or military power that has a memorial in its nation’s capital to a major historic wrong of that nation. You will not find such a thing in the capitals of France, Britain, Russia, China, Japan or the United States, for example.

At our nation’s founding in 1776, there were approximately 400,000 enslaved African Americans in the original 13 colonies. By the time the Civil War broke out in 1861 there were approximately four million enslaved African Americans in the United States.

If Germany can have their Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in their nation’s capital, steps from the Reichstag, their capitol building, the United States can have a national slavery memorial to honor the humanity that suffered and fell to the institution of slavery in our capital.

A national slavery memorial would be a recognition of the imperfect beginning of the United States in 1776. Though our Declaration of Independence stated that “all men are created equal,” slavery and the suffering of enslaved African Americans continued with the subsequent drafting of our constitution in 1787, which did not eliminate slavery or enslaved persons in the north or south. This inhumane institution and the Slave Power almost destroyed our nascent democracy, which resulted in the Civil War.

It should be installed on the National Mall in view of the Lincoln Memorial and visible through the woods to the Jefferson Memorial — monument to a president whose children (with his partner and enslaved person, Sally Heming) were deemed by the 1857 Dred Scott Supreme Court decision to not be citizens of the United States within the meaning of our Constitution and had no rights under it.

Furthermore, there was an outpouring of support for African Americans by the wider citizenry after the killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. This supports the creation of a national registry of donors to the national slavery memorial.

If people were willing to don shirts with “Black Lives Matter” on them or to put “Black Lives Matter” signs in their yards or bumper stickers on their cars to the same effect, then these and other citizens are likely to financially contribute for the design, permitting, construction, and dedication of a national slavery memorial. Were these same citizens to learn that the excess monies donated for the construction of the slave memorial would go directly to our historically Black colleges and universities, the donors would be likely to contribute even more and repeatedly over the years.

For as little as a dollar, citizens could get their name on the registry. It would be an opportunity for all Americans to go on record acknowledging the nation’s grievous past injustice and in demanding that our federal elected representatives support the national slavery memorial initiative.

For all their partisan bickering, it is reasonable to expect and demand that all of our 435 members of Congress co-sponsor this legislation as well as all 100 U.S. senators! President Biden should confirm that he would sign the legislation and both presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris should commit to supporting and signing the same.

Tell your neighbors of your support and tell your elected representatives that they should support this.

We need to honor the enslaved persons who fell as well as those who persevered and, through their offspring and progeny, strengthened our land and made it better. The proposal for a national slave memorial and a registry of donors knows no party. This is something we can all do together to make our nation better.

Peter Thalheim lives in Stamford and is the author of “The Case for the National Slavery Memorial and Aid to our HBCUs.”