Ralph Northam Is Still In Office A Month After Racist Yearbook Photo Scandal

It’s been over a month since Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) apologized for a racist photo that ran on his 1984 medical school yearbook page . Despite a wave of calls for his resignation from both sides of the aisle, Northam is still in office and doesn’t appeared to be going anywhere.

His attempt at a statewide apology tour got off to an awkward start when he was forced to withdraw from a Feb. 21 ceremony to honor the Richmond 34 civil rights activists at the historically black Virginia Union University. 

Northam instead invited several members of that group, who were arrested in 1960 over a lunch counter sit-in, to a breakfast event at the executive mansion the following day.

“This last few weeks have been difficult and hurtful for Virginia and for this country, and I regret that,” Northam said, according to a video recording by an Associated Press photographer who was allowed in at the beginning of the event. “I will do everything that I can to bring good from what’s happened.”

Asked about Northam’s refusal to resign, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) said last week, “We reached a conclusion, all of us, our legislative delegation. We communicated what we thought should happen. It’s up to him. The same way with the lieutenant governor. We’ve got our day job. We reached our conclusion but they’re going to make the decision they’re going to make.”

Virginia politics have been in a state of tumult since the racist image from Northam’s Eastern Virginia Medical School yearbook page was resurfaced by Big League Politics on Feb. 1. The photo shows a person wearing blackface standing next to another person wearing the Ku Klux Klan’s white hood and robe.