Why is Jana’s name not on his No. 13 jersey for UVA?

By Jerry Ratcliffe

You might have noticed during Saturday night’s Virginia win over Duke that senior wide receiver Terrell Jana was without his name printed across the back of his jersey.

It wasn’t a mistake.

Rather, it was a message and a reminder.

“I think about 10 days out, maybe two weeks from the opener and Terrell asked to come into my office to see me,” UVA head coach Bronco Mendenhall remembered. “As he sat down, he said the Enslaved Laborer Memorial had a profound impact on him.”

The coach had recently participated in the “Take Back Our Grounds” march that goes in reverse from the Heather Heyer Way site on the Downtown Mall, back to UVA’s Grounds and site of the aforementioned memorial to slaves that worked on the construction of the university.

For several of the names listed at the Memorial, there was only a first name, because the family surname was unknown or unavailable. 

Jana wanted to honor those people by removing his name off his jersey this season in order to make a statement on their behalf.

“I understood [Jana’s emotions] because I saw the names, or lack of names on the memorial,” Mendenhall said. “And [Jana] just said in his own way he thought that would be really profound to acknowledge those that weren’t even remembered, not a name. Not a mother, father, sibling. Not even a place within the family hierarchy, and not even their occupation.

“So, I thought it was tasteful, I thought it was substantive, I thought it was well thought out and I thought it was powerful,” Mendenhall said of Jana’s request to remove his name from his own jersey. “With him not drawing attention to himself, but possibly just asking folks to contemplate, ‘How could that be,’ and so I was in support of it.”