One year after angering many students and alumni by ordering an investigation into racism at the Virginia Military Institute, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) told about 1,700 cadets Monday night at his alma mater that he shares their pride in the school but defended the push to make VMI more inclusive.
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“If you haven’t experienced sexism or racism yourself — perhaps because you look like me,” said Northam, who is White, “and you haven’t paid much attention to what it looks like, you’re going to have a very hard time recognizing it. Until you learn what it looks like. Until you learn how to see it.”
According to a copy of his prepared remarks, Northam argued that, “For VMI to survive and thrive for generations to come, we must continually ask ourselves a few simple questions ... Do we reflect the people that we serve? ... What do prospective students experience when they come on post? Does our reputation invite new students and faculty from diverse backgrounds, or do they simply never consider VMI in the first place?”
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Northam’s speech at VMI’s Cameron Hall was not open to the public or live-streamed, and students were ordered to leave their cellphones in their rooms, ensuring that none of them could record the reaction of the cadets or post any remarks online until after the appearance was over.
Shortly before the speech, VMI’s new commandant, Col. Adrian T. Bogart III, urged the corps to be gracious to their speaker, according to cadets who spoke to The Washington Post after the speech. They were.
“It was really respectful, and everyone behaved exactly as they were supposed to,” said one upper-class cadet who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.
A second cadet said Northam connected well with his audience: “He was very humble — he was one of us.”
Northam graduated from VMI in 1981, less than 15 years after the nation’s oldest state-supported military college admitted its first Black students. Women were not admitted to VMI until 1997, after a legal battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court. The cadets at the Lexington campus, who fought and died for the Confederacy during the Civil War, remain mostly White and male.
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“Here at VMI, we have built up a lot of traditions over the generations,” Northam said. “Many of those traditions have great value in molding young people. But others do not ... Gone are the statues that glorify rebellion against the United States. In place are new provisions for privacy and safety for all — especially women. The Institute has now stated a commitment to diversity, and to making certain that all cadets, faculty and staff, feel safe and welcome. This needs to continue for VMI to succeed.”
Northam omitted any mention of the $1 million investigation that he and other state leaders ordered in October 2020, two days after The Post published an account of bigotry at the 182-year-old college. A cascade of changes followed: the resignation of the school’s longtime superintendent, the appointment of its first-ever Black leader, Cedric T. Wins, and the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson from its prominent perch on the campus.
At VMI, Black cadets endure lynching threats, Klan memories and Confederacy veneration
“This last year has been an incredibly difficult time for everyone who loves this place. And I want you to know, that includes me,” Northam said.
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Northam defended VMI’s ongoing transformation, which includes hiring a chief diversity officer, Jamica Love, the school’s highest-ranking Black woman.
In an interview after the speech, Wins praised Northam’s remarks and its reception by the students. “It was exactly as I would have expected it from our Corps of Cadets,” he said. “And the one thing that I’ve asked them to do, which they’ve demonstrated time and time again, contrary to the narratives that are put out, is that they demonstrate the very best of who they are as VMI cadets.”
Wins said Northam’s speech underscored the efforts both men have undertaken to help transform the school. “The governor, as am I, we’re forward looking. We’re interested in doing the things that we believe need to occur here at the school to move it forward,” he said. “We are not averse to change in the right way.”
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The governor also tried to make amends with students, who have frequently denounced him online over the last year. (At least one cadet, though, is likely in his corner: his nephew Travis Northam, a sophomore. “Travis, your dad says hi,” Northam said during his speech.)
“I want you to know that as an alumnus, and as your governor, I support each and every one of you in the corps of cadets, and I have your back. I am one of you,” Northam said. “My experience at VMI, and the way it shaped me and my life, have led me to do everything I can to make this institution we all love a better, stronger place.”
Northam talked about his own time as a 17-year-old freshman “rat,” during the late 1970s, when students played “Dixie” and brandished the Confederate flag. He acknowledged that he didn’t scrutinize VMI’s history or traditions back then.
What Northam’s Black VMI schoolmates endured 40 years ago: ‘We don’t want you here’
“It didn’t occur to me to ask, who is that a statue of? When was it erected? Why is that person being honored? Who decided that we would all salute him?” Northam said. “When I saw the Confederate flag, it didn’t occur to me to ask, what does flying the Confederate flag, or playing ‘Dixie,’ symbolize? Why are we glorifying the Lost Cause? And might these symbols be offensive to some of my fellow cadets?”
But Northam did not use the speech to mine his own past controversies with race.
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Shortly after the college informed students Thursday that Northam would speak on campus, many cadets and alumni complained that he had no business setting foot on campus, let alone launching an investigation into VMI’s racial climate.
In February 2019, the conservative news outlet Big League Politics posted an article featuring an image from Northam’s 1984 medical school yearbook page showing one person dressed in blackface and another in a Ku Klux Klan robe. Northam initially apologized for appearing in the photograph, but didn’t identify which person he was. Then he said he wasn’t in the photo, didn’t know how it made it onto his yearbook page and hadn’t seen the image until the scandal broke.
His 1981 VMI yearbook also listed his nickname as “coonman,” a racial slur. And during a news conference trying to explain the yearbook controversy, he admitted that he attended a 1984 dance contest in San Antonio, where he used shoe polish to darken his face and dress up as Michael Jackson.
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At the time, some of his strongest allies called for his resignation, but Northam refused to step down. Instead, he vowed to make racial equity a top priority for the remainder of his tenure.
A cascade of scandals rocked the Democratic Party in Virginia in 2019 after a racist photo was discovered on Gov. Ralph Northam’s medical school yearbook page. (Lee Powell, Patrick Martin, Joyce Koh/The Washington Post)
But among some in the VMI community, the nuances of Northam’s scandal matter little.
“A lot of students here are past the point of forgiveness,” said one senior, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal and who has been supportive of the school’s changes. “They think he’s a hypocrite.”
In recent days, VMI students have aimed multiple insults at the governor on Jodel, the anonymous social media app popular on the campus. He’s been attacked as a “Disgrace to the Institute” or “Gov. Blackface.”
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“Going to the speech to ask Northam how he can accuse VMI of being racist but can wear blackface #turncoat,” one cadet wrote late last week.
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The least he could do, some cadets argued, would be to offer them “amnesty,” an act — conferrable by the college’s superintendent, Virginia’s governor or a U.S. president — that suspends students’ punishments, such as penalty tours and campus confinement. (During his 2018 inauguration, Northam granted the Corps amnesty, according to the college, as his “first official act as governor.”)
“Preview of Northam’s speech: Good job, you’ve come a long way of not being racist, etc. Here’s amnesty because I want to give it to you before Youn[g]kin so you will like me better,” wrote another cadet on Sunday, referring to Republican Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin, who takes office in January.
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Cadets urged classmates not to clap or boycott the speech altogether. Others said they should cheer “Let’s go Brandon,” the anti-President Biden mantra. “When he leaves stand up and turn your back to him,” wrote another person Sunday.
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On Monday morning, a college regimental captain emailed the Corps of Cadets saying that no cellphones would be allowed, “so we may focus on his speech.”
“The Governor has something to say of great interest to the Corps, listen and be respectful,” wrote Dane Hamilton, a senior who is Regimental S5 Captain.
Five or so hours later, someone in the VMI Jodel thread wrote, “Let’s own this libtard tonight boys. Let’s all go in black face to protest,” in a post that got 17 upvotes.
At the end of Northam’s speech Monday, he bade farewell with the ultimate VMI-style olive branch: amnesty.
“Tonight, as we approach the holidays, and in the spirit of treating others as I would have liked to have been treated, I have an announcement,” he said. “By the powers vested in me as the Governor of the Commonwealth and as the Commander-in-Chief of the Virginia Military Institute Corps of Cadets, I hereby grant amnesty to those cadets with penalty tours and confinement currently in effect.”
The cadets cheered.
Read more:
Derision, misogyny, sexual assault: VMI women face attacks on campus and online
A Black VMI cadet was threatened with a lynching, then with expulsion
VMI cadets attack Black students, women on anonymous chat app as furor over racism grows
VMI, under fire for expelling Black cadets, considers changes to prized honor system