Leader’s racial slurs surface
NORFOLK: A Virginia Military Institute yearbook overseen by future state Senate Majority Leader Tommy Norment in 1968 features a host of racist photos and slurs, including blackface.
The revelation about one of Virginia’s most powerful Republicans comes as the state’s Democratic governor and attorneygeneral face calls to resign over their own admissions they wore blackface as young men.
Norment, RJames City County, was managing editor of the Bomb publication that year. He went to VMI in Lexington and has been a state senator since 1992.
On one page of the yearbook, a student poses in blackface, surrounded by others in costumes at a party. Another page features a photo of two men in blackface holding a football.
The Nword is used at least once. A student listed as being from Bangkok, Thailand, is referred to as a ‘‘Chink’’ and ‘‘Jap.’’
A blurb under one man’s picture says: ‘‘He was known as the ‘Barracks Jew’ having his fingers in the finances of the entire Corps.’’
The Bomb has been published continuously since 1897.
When a reporter asked Norment to talk about the yearbook yesterday, the majority leader said: ‘‘The only thing I’m talking about today is the budget.’’
Virginia’s lawmakers are already reeling after a series of disclosures about the state’s top three Democratic officials.
Many have called for Governor Ralph Northam to resign after a page from his 1984 medical school yearbook surfaced, showing a photo of a man in blackface and KKK robe. Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax has been accused of sexually assaulting a woman at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, and Attorneygeneral Mark Herring admitted this week he had dressed in blackface during his time at University of Virginia.
‘‘It has been the objective of this year’s Bomb staff to concentrate on the VMI as it exists in actuality, not in theory,’’ Norment wrote in the yearbook on a page for its editors.
‘‘There is an everbroadening chasm between the two positions. With the completion of this editorial and the 1968 Bomb, I regretfully leave behind the theme ‘Honor Above Self’ and the loyalty of a few selected Brother Rats. Work on the Bomb has permitted me to release four years of inhibitions. And now, I am sorry our work is completed. It is a feeling only genuinely understood by those of us who labored in the ‘den of inequity.’ ’’