The ongoing blackface controversy roiling Virginia politics has ensnared its first Republican.
State Senate Majority Leader Tommy Norment edited the 1968 Virginia Military Institute yearbook, publishing a number of racist photos and slurs, according to the Virginian-Pilot.
The 1968 edition of “The Bomb” featured one photo of a student in blackface posing with peers in other costumes, and another image of two men in blackface with a football.
The Virginian-Pilot reported that the N-word was printed at least once, and the terms “Chink” and “Jap” were also used.
“He was known as the ‘Barracks Jew’ having his fingers in the finances of the entire Corps,” another caption read.
Norment has served in Virginia’s Senate since 1992, and is one of the highest-ranking Republicans in the state.
Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam, himself a graduate of VMI, has come under intense scrutiny after his 1984 Eastern Virginia Medical School yearbook page was resurfaced earlier this month. The image was of a man in blackface and another in Ku Klux Klan garb. Northam insists he isn’t depicted, but admitted to putting shoe polish on his face for a Michael Jackson costume for a dance party that same year.
Northam, who has faced increasing pressure to resign, is not the only Virginia official to have posed in blackface in the past. Virginia state Attorney General Mark Herring, third in line for the governor’s mansion, admitted this week to dressing as a black person at a college party in 1980 when he was a student at the University of Virginia.
Northam’s second in command, Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, is embroiled in his own controversy. Politics professor Vanessa Tyson has accused him of forcing her to engage in oral sex in a hotel room during the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston. Fairfax has said the encounter was consensual.
