Tennessee governor says he regrets wearing Confederate uniform
Days after Gov. Bill Lee’s staff members said they were unaware of any photos of the Tennessee governor wearing a Confederate uniform, his office confirmed he is pictured doing so in a 1980 Auburn University yearbook.
The photo, included on a page in the Kappa Alpha section of the yearbook, shows Lee and another man smiling while wearing Confederate Army-style uniforms and posing with two women in period costumes.
Lee attended the public university in Alabama from 1977 to 1981 and was a member of the Kappa Alpha Order, a fraternity that held annual “Old South” parties in which members dressed up in Confederate uniforms.
The fraternity, which displayed a large Confederate flag outside the Kappa Alpha house, also held an annual celebration of the birthday of Confederate army commander Robert E. Lee.
In a statement previously given to the USA Today Network-Tennessee, Lee said he regretted his participation in the parties nearly four decades ago.
“I never intentionally acted in an insensitive way, but with the benefit of hindsight, I can see that participating in that was insensitive and I’ve come to regret it,” Lee said.
His office declined to provide further comment on Thursday.
Notably, Lee has said he is against the removal of a bust of Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest from the Tennessee Capitol, saying he
believes it would be “a mistake to whitewash history.”
According to 2018 Kappa Alpha national order guidelines posted online, chapters have been prohibited from displaying Confederate battle flags at fraternity functions since at least 2001.
In 2010, the organization prohibited members from wearing Confederate uniforms at events.
“Chapters shall not sponsor functions with the name Old South or functions with any similar name. All functions and activities must be conducted with restraint and dignity and without trappings and symbols that might be misinterpreted and objectionable to the general public,” according to the organization.
Kappa Alpha’s Old South parties also were held at Vanderbilt University and the University of Memphis, formerly known as Memphis State University, among other schools. Old South parties also were held at the University of Georgia in 1983, when that state’s current governor, Republican Brian Kemp, was a student, according to The Associated Press. Kemp was a member of a different fraternity, and there is nothing in his yearbooks to suggest he attended the parties, the AP reported.
Kemp did not respond to an AP survey seeking information from governors across the nation after the scandal involving Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, who initially admitted to being pictured in a racist photo in his school yearbook and later walked back that admission.
Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey attended Auburn a decade earlier than Lee. Her sorority’s 1967 yearbook photo shows five members with black masks portraying “minstrels” in a rush skit, but Ivey said she is not in the photograph. Its caption reads, “Alpha Gam Minstrels welcome rushees aboard their showboat,” the AP reported
The photo is on the same page as a description of the sorority and the accomplishments of its members. The page notes that Ivey was vice president of the student body.
Ivey, a Republican, said she did not recall the skit.
“When I was shown that picture, it had to be a rush skit or something at the sorority at some point in time, but no, I didn’t remember it,” she said. “I certainly wasn’t a part of it.”
Ivey said “there is no place” for blackface and that she had never worn it. When asked if she had ever made a remark perceived as racially insensitive, she replied that she hoped not, according to the AP.
After photos emerged of Northam’s 1984 medical school yearbook page featuring a person wearing blackface and another in a KKK hood, reporters from the USA Today Network undertook a comprehensive review of more than 900 publications at 120 schools around the nation.
The review offers perspective on an array of cases that have emerged since the Northam reports and showed that throughout the 1970s and 1980s, a stunning number of colleges and university yearbooks published images of blatant racism on campus.
At Cornell University in New York, three fraternity members are listed in the 1980 yearbook as “Ku,” “Klux” and “Klan.” For their 1971 yearbook picture, a dozen University of Virginia fraternity members, some armed, wore dark cloaks and hoods while peering up at a lynched mannequin in blackface. In one of the most striking images — from the 1981 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign yearbook — a black man is smiling and holding a beer while posing with three people in full KKK regalia.
Reporters collected more than 200 examples of offensive or racist material at colleges in 25 states, from large public universities in the South, Ivy League schools in the Northeast, liberal arts boutiques and Division I powerhouses.
No other politicians were identified by the USA Today Network’s review that focused on the same time period as Northam’s yearbook in the era after sweeping civil rights reform. Few images had captions to provide names or context, and people’s faces often were hidden behind hoods or blackface.
In one yearbook, from Arizona State University, reporters discovered that USA Today Editor Nicole Carroll had designed a page that included a photo of two people, at a fraternity’s Halloween party, in black makeup as actress Robin Givens and boxer Mike Tyson. Carroll, who was editor of the yearbook in 1989 when the photo ran, expressed regret after learning of the photo.
Experts say that even if school officials don’t have direct oversight over the yearbooks, responsibility rests with the entire institution: A campus culture that fostered racist behavior; yearbook staffs that chose to memorialize it; and administrations that failed to condemn the images when they were published for the world to see.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
“I never intentionally acted in an insensitive way, but with the benefit of hindsight, I can see that participating in that was insensitive and I’ve come to regret it.” – GOV. BILL LEE