Must Ralph Northam Resign?
I met Ralph Northam at The Ship’s Cabin, a popular eatery on the banks of the Chesapeake Bay in Norfolk, VA, in late 2006 or early 2007, not long before he officially entered politics as a declared candidate for the Virginia State Senate.
At the time I was working as a journalist for Port Folio Weekly, an “alternative” newspaper I wrote for then (shuttered in 2009). I’d gone to The Ship’s Cabin to sit in on a strategy meeting of a neighborhood committee which had mounted a legal challenge to the City of Norfolk over the use of a 21-acre plot of open space in the bay-front community of East Ocean View.
The City wanted to turn the land over to developers of large, expensive houses with high real-estate-tax value. The citizens wanted to preserve the plot as a public park.
It was a good story it seemed Fate had chosen me to cover. For the previous twelve years my wife and I had been renting a cottage directly across a busy avenue from the site in question. I found myself in the unique position of covering one of the juiciest stories in all the nearly 50 years since I’d trained in journalism–a David-and-Goliath story that ended in a Virginia Supreme Court decision in favor of the plaintiffs–and I hardly had to leave my front porch to do it.
But on that particular night at The Ship’s Cabin the citizen’s committee had no idea victory was just a few months away, and the members met with a conspiratorial awareness. I knew them all but one, a retiring gentleman who sat at a table along the edges of the party. He wore a sleeveless sweater, open white collar, neatly pressed trousers, sturdy leather shoes, and looked on with an alert patience in his observing eye.
One of the women, active as well in the local Democratic Party, introduced me to him–Ralph Northam, a Democrat, she said, who planned to run for the Virginia Senate from our 6th District. She clearly (and correctly) expected I’d want to write about him at some point. I picked up the cue.
“What brings you here?” I asked him.
He said he supported open spaces in urban areas and took an interest as well in citizen initiatives against government policies. He grew up on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, he said, and well understood the need to protect our environment.
I made a note of that, as few politicians–particularly in rural, conservative Virginia–dared prioritize the environment over, for example, relaxation of the government’s environmental regulations. Overall, I found the man personable, yet surprisingly self-effacing for a politician. With his look of undoubted respectability as he humored a listener with his gentlemanly Virginia drawl–a twinkle of merriment in his eye–he struck me as a shrewd choice for the Democrats to run in a district gerrymandered to favor Republicans.
I also learned that he lived in East Beach, a new upscale community within walking distance of The Ship’s Cabin. Like most of the area within a few blocks of the beaches, it was part of the 6th Senatorial district.
Keeping in mind that Northam looked to be a liberal-leaning candidate with the respectability of a good Republican–including military service, a plus in Hampton Roads where the military buttresses the economy like an essential architecture–I made a point of accepting his invitation to show up when he announced his candidacy in early March, 2007, in the barroom of the Ocean View Fishing Pier. There, locals toasted to his certain victory as he laid out an agenda with which no one there could argue–better support for military veterans, especially the war-wounded; adequate, affordable health care for children, families, seniors; “responsible development” with property taxes held in check; transportation solutions for the region’s highway gridlock; protection of the environment, particularly the Chesapeake Bay; an increase in the minimum wage.
“Ralph Northam,” said then-Virginia House of Delegates Representative Paula Miller “is the real deal.”
He won that election and the next, became Governor Terry McAuliffe’s Lieutenant in 2013, and Governor in his own right in 2017. He upheld many of the Democratic Party’s most important issues–women’s and children’s health protections, Medicaid expansion, offshore wind farms, equal pay for equal work, raising the minimum wage. In his persona he radiated a sense of confidence that Virginia had left provincialism behind to join the modern world of multi-cultural equality and international commerce.
But with all his qualifications–as a pediatric neurologist at Children’s Hospital of the Kings’ Daughters, a former military surgeon who served in Iraq, a graduate of Eastern Virginia Medical School, a native of Nassawaddox on Virginia’s heavily rural Eastern Shore–this genuine, home-grown product of southeastern Virginia could not erase the shame of a history so entwined with America’s bright promise that all his good intentions have seemingly ended in disgrace.
Given some of the sad specimens who have occupied the Governor’s mansion in Richmond since I moved here–I think of Jim Gilmore or Hampton Roads’ own Bob McDonnell–we had a man of quality in Northam, it seemed.
And then we found out. Whether he was really in that photo or not, we now know the stain of institutional racism clings to him like that shoe polish that’s so hard to get off your face. Once it’s there it won’t come off.
Though I love the state, I’m not a native Virginian. My wife and I moved to Norfolk in 1994, rented a cottage along the under-developed north shore of the city, and settled into what we hoped would be a quiet, even meditative semi-retirement. That of course was not to be because we landed at the center of a redevelopment revolution, the purpose of which was to tear down the cottages and houses along the Chesapeake Bay, built for another generation’s uses, and transform the beachfront into a mecca–perhaps a retirement mecca–for the emerging ten percent.
It’s a harsh irony that East Beach, where Northam lived with his wealthy peers at the start of his political journey, replaced a neighborhood of cottages and small houses surrounding what was once Norfolk’s legendary “black beach.” That is, during segregation, it was the only Chesapeake-Bay beach where black people could swim.
Officially known as City Beach, it has only recently been recognized as an historical site. But it is also a monument to the bitter days of Jim Crow.
And East Beach itself might well be called a monument to what were once affordable circumstances for local working people, white, brown, and black.
Northam, as an aspiring Democratic elected official, might have known better than to move in with the wealthiest of his would-be constituents, replacing the displaced hard by a site of historically significant racial discrimination. Something about that seemed a little tone-deaf to me. Other politicians in that district lived more modestly.
But he’d done well in life, and it didn’t seem he’d lost touch with the political base he now courted. He won many progressives to his camp with his famous characterization of Donald Trump as “a narcissistic maniac.” Such boldness surprised me, but I appreciated it. And he apparently knew what he was doing. He won the 2017 election. He became Governor.
But Donald Trump no doubt wears a self-satisfied sneer right now, seeing Northam surrounded by members of his own party, all calling for his resignation. I’d be one dunce of a political observer if I didn’t expect him to do just that. By the time you read this article, he may already be gone.
But I’d also be a liar if I didn’t admit I’m disappointed. I watched his climb in state government with satisfaction. I felt a shared pride that I lived in the same general neighborhood and had actually met and spoken with our Governor. I might have been the first journalist to do so! I speculated in my own mind whether I thought he might one day run for President.
Now I’m forced to reconsider. Practically speaking, can he even last the week in politics, let alone go on to a higher office? His prospects seem doomed.
Further, as a white man and a Democrat, how much am I tainted by an impulse to shrug off his probable behavior–or that, as we’ve now learned, of state Attorney General Mark Herring and Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax? It’s tempting to hope Northam and his team can survive this onslaught, which surely is in some sense political revenge. But how can that be justified?
I am guided in that by a friend and fellow-playwright, Norfolk native Sheri Bailey, founder and moving force in the Juneteenth Festival Company. Its mission seeks to educate the general public about the history of slavery as part of a movement “to heal America from the wounds of slavery without shame or blame.”
Juneteenth celebrates the last day of slavery in the U.S. when, on June 19, 1865, word of the Emancipation Proclamation of Jan. 1, 1863, finally reached Texas, freeing the last of the slaves in the country. For Bailey and others in the Tidewater region, the date has special significance, providing a bookend to 1619, when the first slaves landed here at Jamestown, VA.
Virginia, in fact, was a longtime hub of the slave trade in North America and, with the Capital of the Confederacy once in Richmond, the state vibe still reverberates with the twang of discordant racial feelings while old cities ooze memories of a shameful racial past which haunt all, white, black, and brown.
Facing the racial past “without shame or blame” seems to me the best conceptual formula for resolving our present social and political crises.
“Gov. Northam should not resign but devote the remainder of his term to working for racial justice and tearing down racist institutions,” Baily wrote recently in a call to arms to local supporters of the Juneteenth movement.
One of the projects of that movement is to persuade officials to dedicate Fort Monroe in Hampton, VA, “to be a place for conversations about race and the development of anti-racist policies,” she wrote.
Fort Monroe, as Bailey frequently reminds the ill-informed, is where slavery first ended in America when, during the Civil War, run-away slaves escaped to freedom, protected there under a Union flag. Thus the state has played a key role in both the establishment of the South’s “peculiar institution” and its unraveling.
Virginia is at the heart and core of race in America. It seems to me a good thing that Northam, a Virginian if there ever was one, has not rushed to the door in the tsunami of political condemnations coming at him. There is a rare opportunity here to turn around and face the black-faced monster.
Without devaluing anything the “rush-to-resignation” crowd has said–for surely ridicule through racial or ethnic stereotyping has no place in a civil society–I wonder if black-face doesn’t reflect a certain white envy of black folks. I wonder also if, like clowning or puppetry, it doesn’t rise for some to an art form. I’m can’t write it off as a shocking evil unless it explicitly expresses a shocking evil.
The photo under question for Northam could be from a comedy skit. It might have made us all laugh if we’d been there, depending on the material. For those who say there’s nothing funny about black face or the Klu Klux Klan I can only say the only thing the Devil can’t stand is to be laughed at. What is funny and what is not depends entirely upon context. We must assume that there is some level of awareness–perhaps it belongs to what we’d call a Divine Being–where how we behave down here in this world of polarities has them in stitches. We’re a regular Harold Lloyd/Charlie Chaplin/Three Stooges festival of foibles.
Ralph Northam may have the rare opportunity to lead Virginia–and the country at large–out of racism by embracing the truth about this past and making amends rather than disappearing in a torrent of “shame and blame.”
Nothing can be healed that way.
