The Rev. Al Sharpton addresses a full house at Virginia Union University during a program on "Race & Reconciliation." (Photo by Sarah King)
Inside Virginia Union University’s Coburn Hall — the site of the school’s original chapel and library collection — faith leaders, students and elected officials gathered Thursday morning to reconcile the state of the commonwealth’s imperfect union.
Led by the Rev. Al Sharpton — a civil rights activist and media personality who was awarded an honorary doctorate from the institution founded on the heels of the Union Army’s liberation of enslaved people in 1865 — they implored the students in attendance to not sit idly in the face of injustices, such as the wearing of blackface as a means of caricature. Sharpton emphasized the need to address the source of those practices.
”If you have a sore on your body and it keeps growing and keeps coming, you go to the doctor to find out what's under the sore [that] causes it to keep coming,” he said.
In this case, Sharpton said, the sore that keeps coming back in Virginia resurfaced in the former Confederate capital on the first day of Black History Month, on the 400th-year anniversary of the first enslaved Africans landing in the United States in 1619.
On Feb. 1, a conservative media website published a 1984 picture from Gov. Ralph Northam’s page in his Eastern Virginia Medical School yearbook showing one figure in blackface and another wearing a Klu Klux Klan costume. Northam initially apologized, but said during a news conference the next day that he was not either person in the photo.
“If you start with the wrong premise — you come to the wrong conclusion,” Sharpton said, “and they're trying to reduce this to an act of 'boys wanna be boys' — no! It is deeper than that. It is that attitude that causes inferior schools; wholesaling blacks in prison; a disparity in health conditions — because if you can mock us, you can legislate and govern against us and nobody will care.”
Sharpton found Northam’s explanation — he had called former classmates who told him they didn’t think he was wearing blackface in the photo —unconvincing and said it was beside the point, because the governor admitted to wearing blackface in San Antonio, Texas, in 1984 during a dance competition in which he performed a Michael Jackson song.
“So, we’ve already established that in the same year … you were a blackface user,” Sharpton said as the chapel erupted in cheers, laughter and applause.
“The reason I had a problem with that, is, first of all, if you're accused of being a bank robber, your defense in court would not be 'I didn't rob Bank of America — I robbed Wells Fargo,’ ” Sharpton said to more cheers and audience members shouting, “Preach, Al!”
“So whether you're blackfaced in Virginia or blackfaced in San Antonio — you are a blackface user.”
The event fell on an important date for more reasons than the accumulating revelations about elected officials at the heights of state government: VUU President Hakim Lucas also announced at the beginning of the service that Thursday marks the launch of the university’s Center for African American History and Culture “to remind us of these important facts,” Lucas said.
“For over 154 years, VUU has enjoyed a place in our society … where we discuss issues not only bound to higher education, but issues that affect the community in which we live,” Lucas began, citing historical figures such as the Richmond 34 — students who were arrested in 1960 while protesting segregated lunch counters at Thalhimers department store downtown — and the late civil rights leader Wyatt Tee Walker. “Faith, community, race, reconciliation, are all words that are important to who and what we are, and today, … we return to once again to reignite that fire of passion of who we are.”
Other speakers during the two-hour event delved further into the history of blackface and its intersection with policies and disenfranchisement of African-Americans, particularly in Richmond.
“This is an interesting time, especially for me, because I joined with a group about a year ago — led by the former Gov. Bob McDonnell — to organize a group called Reconciliation for Virginia,” said Del. Delores McQuinn, a Democrat whose 70th District includes parts of Richmond, Chesterfield and Henrico counties. “On Jan. 3, I actually patroned a bill designating 2019 as the year of reconciliation and civility in Virginia — so this rather ironic, as I've been working to address the issues of truth, reconciliation and healing.”
McQuinn’s bill passed the legislature this week, in the midst of mounting calls for Northam to resign, including one from the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus, of which she is a member, and as Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax faced an allegation of sexual assault stemming from an encounter during the 2004 Democratic National Convention. The same website that posted the Northam yearbook photo also published the Fairfax allegation on Sunday; this prefaced an announcement by Attorney General Mark Herring on Wednesday that he wore blackface to dress up as a rapper while attending the University of Virginia.
Thursday evening, Virginia's U.S. senators, Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, along with the seven Democratic congressional representatives, released a statement using the words "shocked and saddened" in reference to Herring's announcement and "deeply disturbed" about the allegations against Fairfax, repeating their individual calls for Northam to resign.
"We are brokenhearted that the actions of Governor Northam and Attorney General Herring have reopened old wounds left by Virginia’s long history of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and systemic racism," the statement reads. "There’s no question that Virginians’ faith in their government and leaders has understandably been deeply shaken ... We will continue in dialogue with one another and our constituents in the coming days, and evaluate additional information as it comes to light.”
McQuinn told the VUU audience Thursday that the state has a unique opportunity in 2019 "to promote honest dialogue and accelerate healing racial wounds — we must move Virginia forward in terms of reconciliation economically, politically and legally.”
The wounds she spoke of are rooted in the “peculiar institution” that defined the founding years of American society and reverberates in impact centuries later.
“But this peculiar institution called slavery ... was also the cornerstone of Americans' prosperity that solidified economic security for the dominating race while simultaneously creating impossible hurdles for the basic survival of African-Americans,” McQuinn said.
Those challenges, she noted, “have continued to impact areas of politics, education, generational wealth, voting rights and many other areas necessary for equal rights for all.”
After centuries of systemic racism and injustice, “we should not be surprised about what is happening in Virginia today,” McQuinn continued. “Government was the creator, sustainer and perpetrator of this systemic institution — so if government was right at the forefront of it — then it is incumbent upon government to work to aggressively dismantle, eradicate the system — the same system that created it.”
Ninth District Richmond City Councilman Michael Jones urged members of the Legislative Black Caucus to continue their demands for Northam’s resignation.
“This is not for clapping or soundbites — he is not fit to lead,” said Jones, who is also pastor of Village of Faith Church. “He stood in my church, with my family, and talked about his record. We would not have allowed that had we have known he had done blackface.”
Like Jones, others who spoke Thursday called for a reckoning.
“One of the things that our city has to repent for, is how it has destroyed, systematically, African-American communities in the [interest] of progress,” said Patricia Gould-Champ, an assistant professor of practical theology at VUU and pastor at Faith Community Baptist Church.
Jamar Boyd II, a student in the master of divinity class of 2020 and president of the Georgia State Conference NAACP Youth and College division, said his generation sees the continued effects of racism, pointing to the deaths of Trayvon Martin in Florida and Freddie Gray in Baltimore, the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, and the backlash against former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s protest during the national anthem.
“These moments are etched in our memory and are constantly showing in the theaters of our reality,” Boyd said. He implored his peers to act.
“The time has come for radical transformation,” he told his fellow students. “We must struggle for a broad and deep democracy; we must kneel for justice when ritual and tradition insist we stand for injustice; we must demand a new nation and a new world as we unapologetically declare — and I leave you with this — my blackness is not the problem. It is the foundation of possibility, the possibility of a new society; the possibility of a world where justice [is] held by glory and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
