February 23,2019

Accusations

A few weeks ago, reporters discovered a disturbing picture on Virginia Democratic Governor Ralph Northam’s 1984 Eastern Virginia Medical School annual yearbook profile page. The picture was of two people, one dressed in Klu Klux Klan attire and the other sporting “blackface”.

Northam came out the next day and acknowledged that he had appeared in the picture. He went on to say that he was “deeply sorry for the decision….to appear as I did in this photo and for the hurt that decision caused then and now,” he said. “This behavior is not in keeping with who I am today and the values I have fought for throughout my career in the military, in medicine, and in public service. But I want to be clear, I understand how this decision shakes Virginians’ faith in that commitment”.

A few days later, the Governor did not help his defense by declaring that he was not in the picture after all. One can just imagine the howls of laughter coming from Republican quarters. In a lame attempt to come clean, Northam also related that one time he had appeared in blackface while imitating Michael Jackson. More howls.

Ralph Northam is a 1981 graduate of my alma mater, the Virginia Military Institute. In the 1981 VMI Bomb, the Institute’s annual yearbook, his given nickname was “Coonman”. Northam has not explained that. I suspect that it does not refer to a raccoon.

But Northam is not the only state official to get in racial hot water. A few days after the Northam revelations two women came forward and accused Democratic Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax of sexual assault in one instance and rape in another. Fairfax flatly denied the allegations and claimed any sex related activity was consensual.

Yet another Virginia state official, this time Democratic Attorney General Mark Herring, next in line to serve as governor if Northam and Fairfax were to resign, admitted to wearing blackface at a college party in 1980. That college, by the way, was the University of Virginia.

Not to be outdone Republicans got into the act. Recent news reports named Thomas Norment, the Republican majority leader in the Virginia Senate and himself a VMI graduate, as one of several editors of the 1968 Bomb that included photographs of students in blackface as well as racist slurs.

So, there you have it. Three prominent Democratic politicians in Virginia and one Republican are beset by allegations of racist or sexual misbehavior. Two of these gentlemen are VMI graduates.  

In the days after these findings, many prominent state and national democratic and republican politicians called for Northam, Fairfax, and Herring to resign or be impeached if no resignation was forthcoming. But surprise, surprise, the three democrats are standing firm

After these revelations, I decided that Northam should resign. It pained me to make that decision. Northam excelled at VMI and his classmates chose him to preside over the honor court during his time there. After medical school, he served in the United States Army for eight years as a medical officer. Then he became a pediatric neurologist and worked at Children’s Hospital of the King’s Daughters in Norfolk until becoming Virginia’s governor. His politics are progressive, left of center. He is a Democrat’s governor for sure. And I am one of those.

Nobody can know what was in Ralph Northam’s heart during these decades’ old incidents. He says he is now going to embark on a journey to fix racial inequity in our society, a daunting task for sure because racism, bigotry, and prejudice surely are not dead.

Jonathan Myrick Daniels, and Ruby Sales

Jonathan M. Daniels graduated from the Institute in 1961, just five years before my matriculation there. Daniels was valedictorian of his class at VMI, and the Institute awarded him the prestigious Danforth Fellowship for post-graduate study. After VMI he enrolled at Harvard University to continue his study of English literature but left that to enter the seminary at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts

On August 6, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act and Dr. Martin Luther King began to call for clergy to become more active in the Civil Rights Movement. Young Daniels answered that call and traveled to Alabama to aid with voter registration efforts in the South.

There he worked alongside other young white and black activists, including seventeen-year-old Ruby Sales, a student at Tuskegee University. Daniels and Sales toiled together in the face of white hatred and rage to register blacks to vote, a dangerous enterprise indeed in 1965 in Alabama.

The Murder of Jonathan Myrick Daniels

On August 14th, 1965, Daniels, Sales, and twenty-seven other colleagues were in Fort Deposit, Alabama protesting the community’s whites-only stores. A mob of howling white men wielding baseball bats, shotguns and knives met the young protesters in the street. The local sheriff arrested the protestors and transported them to the nearby town of Hayneville. The police released five juvenile protesters the next day. The sheriff held the rest of the group for six days in a non-airconditioned jail. This was August in Alabama when you can cook an egg on the pavement. Their jailers gave them toilet water to drink.

Finally, on August 20 the sheriff released the prisoners without provision for transport back to Fort Deposit. After release, the group waited near the courthouse jail for a ride back to Fort Deposit. Daniels and Richard Morrisroe, a white Catholic priest, and two black female activists, Ruby Sales, and Joyce Bailey, walked to Varner’s Cash Store to buy a cold soft drink.

There they met Tom L. Coleman, an unpaid special deputy who was holding a shotgun and had a pistol in a holster. Coleman threatened the group and leveled his gun at seventeen-year-old Sales. He said to her, “bitch, I’ll blow your brains out”. In an instant, Daniels pushed Sales down and inserted himself between her and Coleman. Coleman fired, killing Daniels instantly. Father Morrisroe grabbed activist Joyce Bailey and ran away with her. Sales also fled. Coleman shot Morrisroe, severely wounding him. He shot the man in the back as he was running away.

Coleman gunned Jonathan Daniels down in cold blood in full daylight in full view of witnesses. Jonathan Daniels, VMI graduate and valedictorian, Harvard and Episcopal Divinity School student and civil rights worker, gave his life to save Ruby Sale’s life that day. What greater gift is there? I cry every time I tell this story. My chest swells with pride every time I think to remember this brave man and that I attended the same school as he.

The Aftermath

Can you imagine that moment? When Jonathan Daniels stepped in between Coleman and Sales, that exact moment when Tom Coleman pulled the trigger and blew a hole in Jonathan Daniels’ chest. How traumatic that moment must have been for Sales, Morrisroe and Bailey to see such barbarity. In fact, it was so traumatic for Sales that she did not utter a word for six months after the murder and finally spoke out at Coleman’s trial despite many death threats hurled at her and her family.

Coleman claimed self-defense and an all-white, male jury acquitted him of manslaughter charges and he never spent a day in jail. Why were there no black people on the jury? Because in Alabama then one had to be a registered voter to serve on a jury and white society in the south had very effectively suppressed black voter registration.

The courage these two people displayed in their young lives is nothing short of remarkable.  Daniels a young activist Episcopal priest from New Hampshire and Sales, a young black woman from Alabama fighting for racial equality in her state, had many cards stacked against them.

But they had courage, commitment, honor, and integrity. That’s pretty good cards to hold.

The Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, adopted in 1870, says that the “right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or earlier condition of servitude.” However, the fifteenth amendment did not stop states and localities, particularly in the south, from instituting onerous regulations for making it almost impossible for black people to vote.  

The Voting Rights Act of 1965, signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson, intended to remove legal barriers at state and local levels that denied Black Americans their right to vote. But white supremacists continued to enact voter suppression measures in the south.  And, of course, today voter suppression is still alive and well in many quarters in America. Shamefully, much of that suppression aims at black Americans.

This law brought Daniels and Sales together in 1965 in Lowndes County, Alabama. They worked to help disenfranchised people register to vote. Dangerous work it must have been with the KKK breathing down your neck.

In 1991 the Episcopal Church recognized Daniels as a martyr. Ruby Sales eventually went on to study at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge where Jonathan Daniels studied. She received her Master of Divinity degree in 1998. In the ensuing years, she dedicated her life to social activism and improving civil rights. In 2000, in Washington, DC she founded SpiritHouse, a nonprofit organization dedicated to Jonathan Daniels and focused on community organizing. She lives in DC still.

Today there are memorials to Daniels at VMI and in Hayneville, Alabama. Every time I go to visit VMI, I go to the Daniels memorial, a solemn place indeed. To stand quietly and contemplate the life and courage of this extraordinary man who died too young is always an overwhelming and uplifting experience for me.

The Redemption of Ralph Northam

A hate-filled racist threatened Ruby Sales in Hayneville, AL in 1965, and she lost her young friend and colleague, Jonathan Daniels, in a brutal and horrific murder performed right before her very eyes. If anyone deserves revenge for what happened to her it is Ruby Sales.

But it turns out that Ms. Sales does not seek revenge. She speaks about a “consuming “deep hurt” in people, a hurt that leads to hate and racist attitudes. She speaks about how we can make progress in stamping out racism if we find that deep hurt and sooth it. She shows deep empathy for the haters and says we must offer forgiveness and the chance at redemption.

Ruby Sales changed my mind about Ralph Northam.

Now he is talking about redemption. He says he intends to work diligently on racial inequity for the rest of his tenure as governor. Maybe, just maybe he is serious. Ironically, having his past bad behavior exposed might ultimately be a good thing if he follows through with on the ground change. Maybe Northam can address the “deep hurt” in Virginia that expresses itself as racial hatred. I bet Ruby Sales would give him that chance.

Ralph Northam can redeem himself, in or out of office. But if he stays in office, we who put him there can hold him accountable. We can hold him to specific actions that look to ferret out the deep hurt Sales speaks about and sooth it.

After the Northam story broke, I was thinking that no way can this man be an effective governor. He must go, if for no other reason than to save the Democratic party in Virginia. Then I listened to Ruby Sales and changed my mind.

I guess we all could use a little redemption now and again.