Race and sex row engulfs Virginia’s top Democrats
As he leaves his mansion each day Ralph Northam, the governor of Virginia, passes a statue of a young black girl commemorating the end of segregation in schools. It is a stark reminder of his state’s racist past.
That past caught up with Mr Northam, a Democrat, this week when his medical college yearbook emerged. His personal page featured a photograph of people in blackface and Ku Klux Klan robes. Mark Herring, his attorney general and also a Democrat, then admitted to having donned blackface too.
The scandal reverberated through the Democratic Party and the US, but both men refused to step down, raising questions over how much race relations in the country have really evolved.
Dr David Randolph, one of the few black students who attended Eastern Virginia Medical School with Mr Northam in the Eighties, told The Sunday Telegraph the college had been rife with racism long after segregation ended.
Black students were “invisible” to the “cliques” of privileged young whites like Mr Northam.
“These pictures were hurtful then, and they’re hurtful now, but nobody cared,” he said. “Often that was the norm. It was the prevailing attitude, they were just ‘white boys having fun’. We are still working our way up from slavery.
“Northam chose that picture to represent him. How could it be worse, maybe a swastika? I think he’s a very decent man now, but he has to resign.” Dr Randolph, an oncologist in Richmond, Virginia’s capital, recounted how as a student he had the “N-word” written on his door. There was no investigation. “It was as if it didn’t matter,” he said.
Mr Northam’s race scandal erupted in a year that marks 400 years since the first slaves arrived in Virginia. Everywhere in Richmond, the legacy of slavery and the US Civil War is still evident. The city was the capital of the Confederacy and the “White House of the South,” its seat of power, still stands next to the main hospital. There are gigantic statues of Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson, the generals who fought to protect slavery. Outside town a towering Confederate flag flutters in a field.
Indeed, while the rest of America was stunned by the behaviour of Mr Northam and Mr Herring, many in Virginia itself were not. Outside the Capitol Building there was only one protester, who was white, and he soon left.
Reggie Bates, 33, a black Virginian, said: “This is Virginia. it’s Richmond, what do you expect? I’m not surprised at all.
“It doesn’t matter how much you decorate a house, if its built on horrible foundations, it’s pointless. And this place was built on slavery.” Mr Bates, an architectural finisher, added: “As for the Democrats – Nathan Forrest [the first grand wizard w of the Ku Klux Klan] was a Democrat. They don’t care about us, they never did. Northam should resign, but he won’t.” The practice of dressing d up in racially offensive costumes appears to have pervaded whitedominated colleges across Virginia for decades, long after the civil rights movement. This week a picture of white students posing for a staged lynching emerged. At Mr Northam’s old college they were still wearing Confederate uniforms in 2014.
Virginia was supposed to have turned the page on its past when it voted for Barack Obama in 2008. But in 2017, white supremacists rioted in Charlottesville, just west of Richmond.
Shawn Utsey, the African-American studies chairman at Virginia Commonwealth University, said: “Having a black president, we thought real progress was being made. But then the scab is peeled back, and you see racism has never gone away. If the governor sincerely regrets his behaviour then he should remove the statues of Confederate generals, the symbols of racial hatred. Then, maybe we’ll be even.” Rev Al Sharpton, the civil rights activist, was more forthright as he addressed students at Virginia’s oldest historically black college. “If you sin, you must pay for the sin,” he said of Mr Northam.
For the Democrats, the scandal has potentially far-reaching consequences. It was compounded as Mr Northam’s designated successor, Justin Fairfax, the black lieutenant governor, faced allegations from two women of sexual assault this week. It was reported that, following the disclosure, Mr Fairfax said of one alleged victim: “F--- that b---”. He denies wrongdoing, though pressure is mounting for him to resign.
The implosion of the three leading Democrats in the state could help deliver Virginia, a key state, to the Republicans, with the fourth in line for the governorship a member of the opposition. The crisis also plays into Donald Trump’s hands for the 2020 race. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won it by five points, relying heavily on black votes. The population of 8.5million is 20 per cent black.
“Democrats at the top are killing the great state of Virginia,” Mr Trump wrote gleefully on Twitter. “Virginia will come back HOME in 2020!”
As he scurried back into his mansion, avoiding a forest of news vans, Mr Northam may have reflected on the inscription attached to the school segregation statue. “It seemed like reaching for the moon,” the plaque reads. For many black citizens of Virginia, who feel betrayed by Mr Northam, it still seems that way.