Author Margaret Edds (Photo by Jay Paul)
Margaret Edds never intended to write another book. The award-winning journalist and author of six books didn’t think she would publish again. But on a June evening three years ago, she and her husband, Bob Lipper, heard strange sounds, growing louder and coming nearer to their Grove Avenue home.
“It was the night after [Gov. Ralph] Northam said he was going to take down the [Robert E.] Lee statue [in Richmond], at about 9:45,” she says. “We heard this low hum, and it got louder and louder.”
At first it was a little frightening. Then it was joyous.
“It was a throng of people who marched for about 45 minutes. There were flatbed trucks, bicycles, motorcycles, and it was just jubilation,” Edds recalls. “Suddenly [Northam] was doing something that for numbers of years Richmonders have talked about, debated about, stewed over and done nothing about. What an amazing story for Northam, from the blackface scandal to this moment.”
Image courtesy The University of South Carolina Press
It is a story that Edds captures in the gripping tale “What the Eyes Can’t See: Ralph Northam, Black Resolve and a Racial Reckoning in Virginia,” which received the Library of Virginia’s 2023 Virginia Literary Award in nonfiction. Beyond the theater of 2019 partisan politics, the book tells a redemption story, “a story of how you face adversity, and you do something with it,” Edds says.
Northam, a Democrat, was elected governor on Nov. 7, 2017, and took office the following January. The honeymoon was short lived, ending abruptly on Feb. 1, 2019, when a photo from his 1984 medical school yearbook page appeared online, showing a man in blackface standing next to someone in a Ku Klux Klan costume. Apparently caught off guard, Northam at first said the man in blackface was him, but a day later he recanted. After two extensive investigations, the man in the photograph has not been identified, nor has the source of the image been found.
The blowback was immediate and significant. The media coverage was blistering. Politicians of every stripe, both statewide and nationally, called on Northam to resign. Reaction in Richmond, particularly among Black activists and leaders, was stunned outrage: This was a man they had worked hard to get elected.
Rather than cave to the pressure of his critics, Northam made a concerted effort to listen and learn, to understand the pain the photograph symbolized. Then, when Democrats took full control of the state legislature in January 2020, it set the stage for what Edds calls “the most startling change in Virginia since the 1880s, because you had both a progressive governor and legislature.” During his final 2 1/2 years in office, Northam went from being a pariah to a governor that U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., described as the most consequential Virginia governor of the modern era.
“As time went on, I realized this was more than Northam’s story,” Edds says. “It was the story of the Black activists who had pushed and prodded. It was important to tell their part of the story. Eventually I came to the place that the most important part of the book was encouraging other whites to look at, ‘What is your blackface moment? Where have you been blind to some situation, to some slight, to some place you had advantage, to some benefit that propelled you forward that you weren’t even aware of, just because you’re white?’ Why are there these huge disparities in almost every aspect of American lives, in terms of income, in terms of education, in terms of housing? Why does that persist? … Is there something systemic that has been built into our culture, both in terms of personal biases, deeply embedded in many cases, and in terms of our structures and how we do things?”
As the General Assembly reporter for The Virginian-Pilot in the 1970s, Edds had a front-row seat to old-school Virginia politics, where bankers made laws for banking and doctors wrote bills related to medicine. “It was an old boys’ club with very few women there,” she says.
In 1985, she got a closer look at the racial disparities faced by Blacks. She won a journalism fellowship from the Alicia Patterson Foundation to study the impact of the Voting Rights Act put in place 20 years earlier. “I traveled around the South, really talking to people from Atlanta, where tremendous things had changed, to places like Sunflower County, Mississippi, where there was a majority Black population and, I think, one Black elected official with a very minor role.”
The book she wrote from that experience, “Free at Last: What Really Happened When Civil Rights Came to Southern Politics,” was nominated for the National Conference of Black Political Scientists Outstanding Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award.
Edds’ career took her back to the newsroom as an editorial writer for the Pilot until 2007. She also wrote “Claiming the Dream: The Victorious Campaign of Douglas Wilder of Virginia,”
which details the historic election in 1989 of the first Black governor in the United States, and “We Face the Dawn: Oliver Hill, Spottswood Robinson, and the Legal Team that Dismantled Jim Crow,” a finalist for the Library of Virginia’s nonfiction book award in 2019.
“It’s a good thing for everybody to be in a racial minority, to suddenly see what that feels like, and to be ignored or perceive yourself to be ignored,” Edds says. “When you are in a racial majority, you just don’t recognize those things you see when you are in the minority.”
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