Norment, 72, a longtime fixture and political broker in the state Legislature, is the first Republican to be swept up in Virginia’s ongoing political crisis over racist behavior in the past. The Virginian-Pilot newspaper first reported on the photos and material Thursday.
As a senior at Virginia Military Institute, then an all-male college that was sometimes called “the West Point of the South,” Norment was managing editor of the 1968 edition of the Bomb yearbook. That edition included students in blackface and slurs aimed at African-Americans, Asians and Jews, according to a copy viewed by The New York Times.
Norment, in a statement released by his office Thursday, said, “The use of blackface is abhorrent in our society and I emphatically condemn it.” He said he was part of a seven-member team at the Bomb, “a 359-page yearbook,” and added, “I cannot endorse or associate myself with every photo, entry, or word on each page.” He noted that he did not appear in the offensive pictures and said he did not take those photos.
The images surfaced in the wake of acknowledgments by two Virginia leaders, Gov. Ralph Northam and Attorney General Mark Herring, that they had each worn blackface as young men. The admissions by those two Democrats have plunged Virginia into turmoil and led to calls for both men’s resignations. A third Democratic leader, Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, is facing an allegation of sexual assault.
The Bomb yearbook includes a photograph of two smiling people in blackface holding a football, one with a cigarette and white military hat. In another photo, a young man is in blackface posing with others apparently at a party.
The yearbook includes page after page of seniors posed in starched white military shirts, or sometimes informally, accompanied by breezy descriptions of their sports and social activities. Some of these descriptions refer to students with slurs and obscenities.
Virginia Military Institute, founded two decades before the Civil War, is a state-supported academy that has long been favored by prominent Virginia families. It only admitted African-Americans in 1968, the year that Norment graduated. Women were first admitted about three decades later.
Northam, the governor, graduated from the institute in 1981, where his yearbook entry included the nickname “Coonman.” He went on to Eastern Virginia Medical School, where a photograph from his 1984 yearbook page surfaced last week showing a figure in blackface and another in KKK robes.
A statement by Norment on the yearbook’s page dedicated to its editors, reads, “It has been the objective of this year’s Bomb staff to concentrate on the VMI as it exists in actuality, not in theory.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.