Va. Senate majority leader edited yearbook filled with racist photos

NORFOLK, Va. — 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 attorney general are facing calls to resign over their own admissions they wore blackface as young men.

Mr. Norment, R-James City County, was managing editor of The Bomb publication that year. He went to VMI in Lexington after graduating from James Blair High School in Williamsburg 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 N-word is used at least once. A student listed as being from Bangkok is referred to with Asian slurs.

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.

Virginia’s lawmakers are already reeling after a series of disclosures about the state’s top three Democratic officials. Many have called for Gov. 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. Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax has been accused of sexually assaulting a woman at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, and Attorney General Mark Herring admitted this week to dressing in blackface during his time at University of Virginia.

Mr. Norment said in a statement Thursday that he was “not surprised that those wanting to engulf Republican leaders in the current situations involving the Governor, Lt. Governor, and Attorney General would highlight the yearbook from my graduation a half century ago.”

He called the use of blackface “abhorrent in our society and I emphatically condemn it.”

“However, I am not in any of the photos referenced on pages 82 or 122, nor did I take any of the photos in question,” he said.