A photo on Ralph Northam's page in the Eastern Virginia Medical School's 1984 yearbook
Source: Eastern Virginia Medical School
This 1942 poster, titled "This is the Enemy," circulated in the United States following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
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Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) must feel like he’s riding aimlessly on an old dilapidated raft in an ocean of impending peril, circled by ravenous sharks, anxiously waiting their next feeding.
It’s just a matter of time before he’s devoured.
The 73rd governor of the Old Dominion is being strongly encouraged to resign after pictures from his Eastern Virginia Medical School yearbook (1984) emerged showing one person in a black face, another in a KKK robe.
Northam, as widely reported, initially admitted being in the photo; but later retracted his statement, saying that it’s not him in the photo, after studying the photo in more detail.
The Virginia governor, however, does admit to once polishing his face black to make him appear as the King of Pop, Michael Jackson, for a dance competition.
What’s striking about this furor, calling for Northam to resign, is that it happened 30 years ago before he entered the political arena.
Admittedly, polishing your face black, no matter the circumstances, is hard to ignore or downplay as mere youthful indiscretion.
The entire picture is appalling, tasteless, and difficult to look at.
Still, we don’t have to go back in history very far to think of the dumb and insensitive acts people have committed in their youth; only to change course, evolve as they got older, and blaze a new path in their professional careers, far removed from their reckless past.
Racist blunders from politicians isn't uncommon in U.S. 20th century history. From Richard Nixon's endemic anti-Semitism (captured on White House tapes), former Mississippi Senator Trent Lott’s praise for Strom Thurmond’s racist 1948 campaign to Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell posing in front of a Confederate flag (in the early 1990s) have been well documented.
What’s even more interesting is that some of America’s most liberal lions had a racist past; but historians, for the most part, have swept them under the rug for fear it would damage their political legacy.
Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W. Va), a child from Appalachia’s coalfields, in the 1940's, long before he entered the political arena, recruited 150 of his friends and associates to form a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in Crab Orchard, W.Va. Byrd's affiliation with the Klan remained until 1952.
Returning to West Virginia after World War II, he wrote a letter to one of the Senate's most notorious segregationists, Theodore Bilbo (D-Miss.), complaining about the Truman administration's efforts to integrate the military.
Even during his political career when he renounced the Klan and all it stood for-his racism still clung to Byrd.
In 1964, he joined with other southern Democrats to oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The W. Va. senator filibustered the bill for more than 14 hours, arguing it violated principles of states' rights. Three years later, he voted against the nomination of Thurgood Marshall to the U.S. Supreme Court, a black Solicitor General of the United States.
Interestingly, over time, Byrd’s views on race evolved; so that by the time he died in 2010, he was hailed as not only the longest-serving member of the Senate and longest-serving member of Congress in American history, but one of the liberal icons of the U.S. Senate who became a strong advocate for the working class, ensuring accessibility to health care and greater educational and employment opportunities for constituents back home in W. Va.
Speaking at his funeral in 2010, President Obama said " We know there were things he [Robert Byrd] said, things he did, that he came to regret." “I remember," Obama continued, "talking about that the first time I visited with him. There were things I regretted in my youth. You may know that.’ I said, ‘None of us are absent some regrets, Senator. That’s why we enjoy and seek the grace of God.’ … Robert Byrd possessed that quintessential American quality — the capacity to change, to learn, to listen, to be made more perfect.”
In 1936, 18 African American athletes left the Berlin Olympics with 14 medals. None of them, including Jesse Owens (who came away with four medals) were invited to the White House. Only the white Olympians were invited by President Franklin Roosevelt.
Photo Credit: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
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Franklin Delano Roosevelt, another liberal lion, who guided America through the Great Depression to a miraculous national recovery; then boldly joining with our allies to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, is often considered one of the greatest presidents to have occupied the White House during his 12 years in office.
But through all the valiant tributes and glorious adorations heaped on FDR by historians, little about his blatant racism is ever discussed.
In 1936, Jesse Owens, an Alabama native, (son of a sharecropper) and Cleveland, Ohio high school and Ohio State University track star, made America proud by winning four gold medals, equaling the world record (10.3 seconds) in the 100-meter race and broke the world records in the 200-meter race (20.7 seconds) and in the broad jump (26 feet 5 3/8 inches).
In 1936, in fact, 18 African American athletes left the Berlin Olympics with 14 medals, a quarter of the total medals won by the U.S. team that summer.
FDR might be remembered for the New Deal; but he gave Jesse Owens and other black Olympians the Raw Deal, by not inviting any of them to the White House. Only white Olympians were invited to the White House. Roosevelt, the “all we have to fear is fear itself,” U.S. President didn’t even send Owens a telegram for his heroic achievement in Berlin. Possibly, Roosevelt feared a backlash from voters. Owens told reporters, “Hitler didn’t snub me; it was our president who snubbed me."
It was 80 years later, that President Obama (in September, 2016) cleaned up FDR’s mess by inviting relatives of the 16 men and two female black athletes of 1936 Olympics to the White House, where they finally received their long overdue recognition by a U.S. president.
FDR’s racism reared its ugly head, yet again, during World War II when he issued Executive Order 9066, which sent 120,000 Japanese expatriates and American citizens of Japan to internment camps. This unconscionable act led to abrupt expulsions, mass detentions and the persecution of thousands, based solely on their ethnicity.
The internment of Japanese Americans was carried out despite the fact that two secret investigations commissioned by Roosevelt himself confirmed that Japanese Americans posed no threat to national security.
Taken together, over 100,000 Japanese Americans were confined to grimy and unlivable concentration camps, which included some Japanese being stripped of property, separated from families, along with a number of deaths due to the appalling conditions of the camps.
President Johnson was known to use racist epithets in private conversation.
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Lyndon Johnson, the gregarious Texan and 36th U.S. President, aside from dragging the United States deeper and deeper into the morass in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, is best remembered for the Great Society, a series of domestic programs whose chief objective was the elimination of poverty and racial injustice in the United States. His ambitious domestic agenda included improvements in education, medical care, urban decay, rural poverty, and transportation, among others.
Johnson is additionally remembered for bringing the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 to fruition.
What’s generally overlooked is LBJ’s frequent derogatory term for blacks when talking with colleagues or White House cabinet members.
According to Robert Dallek’s book, "Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Times" (1991), when LBJ was discussing the appointment of Thurgood Marshall as associate justice of the Supreme Court, he told an aide in 1965, "Son, when I appoint a nigger to the court, I want everyone to know he's a nigger."
Another time, as reported in Ronald Kessler's book, "Inside the White House (1996)," when discussing the virtues of his 1964 Civil Rights Bill, Johnson supposedly told two governors (their names were omitted), "I'll have them niggers voting Democratic for two hundred years."
So, it’s puzzling that liberal icons like Robert Byrd, FDR and LBJ’s shameless racism are forgiven or barely mentioned--while someone like Ralph Northam watches his political career go up in flames for acting foolishly for one snapshot in his wayward youth.
Northam seems about as much of a racist as Prince Harry is a Nazi, for foolishly dressing up in a Nazi uniform (in 2005) for a costume party.
Much like Robert Byrd, I think Ralph Northam should be allowed to prove his liberal chops in the here and now, instead of judging the man on one foolish act before, long before, he ever became governor of Virginia.
The embattled Virginia governor, after all, while campaigning for governor, reaffirmed his call for Confederate statues and monuments in the state to be taken down and moved into museums. "That means," Northam reportedly said, "memorializing civil rights advocates like Barbara Johns and Oliver Hill, who helped move our Commonwealth closer towards equality."
Northam also said that "Virginia should do more to elevate the parts of our history that have all too often been underrepresented."
During his State of the Commonwealth Address delivered on January 9th, the new governor of the Old Dominion said, "we're a state that supports our veterans, embraces diversity and inclusion, and attracts visitors from around the world. We work every day to make sure that Virginia is a place of opportunity, where everyone can build the life they want to live."
Unfortunately for Northam, the standard bearers of the Democratic Party, like Nancy Pelosi, are using the Virginia Governor as a political football-hoping to score some quick political points with liberals while ignoring that fact some people in this country are permitted the freedom to evolve, and to be judged on what they’ve accomplished during their long arduous journey through the political landscape.
–Bill Lucey
February 6, 2019
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