Blackface: reminder of state’s racist past
RICHMOND, Va.— The discovery last week of a racist photo on Gov. Ralph Northam’s 1984 medical school yearbook page has served as a glaring reminder that Virginia — a former bastion of slavery and white supremacy— continues to struggle with mind-sets shaped by its turbulent racial history.
Even as Virginia has grown more socially liberal in recent decades, evidence that its racist tradition is not yet a thing of the past is everywhere. Statues of Confederate leaders remain the defining feature of Richmond’s Monument Avenue and the state Legislature still honors Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and “Stonewall” Jackson every year.
“When Virginia voted for Barack Obama in 2008, there was talk that Virginia was now moving into a new era. In actuality, Virginia faked left and went right,” said Gary Flowers, a Richmond native who is the former CEO of the Black Leadership Forum.
“This is a 400-year mode that’s going to take some time, but there has to be a radical restructuring of values,” Flowers said.
While there is much ugliness to overcome, the commonwealth’s history is a complex one that has been marked by contrasts.
Virginia was the birthplace of American democracy, but also of enslavement; Richmond was the capital of the Confederacy, but also the home of Douglas Wilder, the nation’s first elected black governor. A statue of black tennis champion Arthur Ashe sits on Monument Avenue alongside those of the Confederate generals.
This year, Virginia will mark the 400th anniversary of the arrival in Jamestown of the first Africans to be sold as slaves in North America. Richmond was the site of one of the largest slave trades in the country.
A major blot on the state’s history is its “Massive Resistance,” when Virginia’s governor in the late 1950s closed its public schools rather than heed the U.S. Supreme Court’s order to integrate them.
Northam’s yearbook photo showing someone in blackface standing next to a person in a Ku Klux Klan hood and robe has been but the latest reminder of the state’s hateful past.
The picture sparked outrage and widespread calls for his resignation, including condemnation from Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring. But the scandal escalated Wednesday, when Herring, too, was forced to acknowledge that he had put on blackface in 1980 to look like a rapper during a party as a 19-yearold student at the University of Virginia.
Centuries of history are hard to escape, said Karen Sherry, a curator at the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.
“While Virginia’s demographics and politics have been evolving in recent years, social change and change in people’s attitudes is often very slow in coming,” Sherry said.