What Northam’s Black VMI schoolmates endured 40 years ago: ‘We don’t want you here’

Virginia’s governor has ordered an investigation into racism at his alma mater, but he acknowledges that the bigotry at Virginia Military Institute didn’t register when he was a cadet

By Ian Shapira
APRIL 26, 2021

Darren McDew felt the sting of racial slurs as soon as he arrived at the nearly all-White Virginia Military Institute in 1978. ... Three of his White classmates, he said, freely slung around the n-word. Same for the racist insults “jigaboo” and “spear chucker.” It got so bad that McDew — a future four-star Air Force general — confronted them and demanded they stop. ... “I was shocked at how often they used the terms in my presence,” said McDew, now 60 and one of VMI’s most prominent Black alumni.

McDew became a “rat,” as freshmen at the nation’s oldest state-supported military college are known, just one year after a White cadet named Ralph Northam moved onto the Lexington campus. Northam, a future governor of Virginia, would become another of the college’s most distinguished graduates — and one of its most controversial.

Last fall, in a move that infuriated many VMI students and alumni, Northam (D) ordered an investigation into the school’s racial climate after current and recent Black students described disturbing acts of bigotry to The Washington Post.

[At VMI, Black cadets face lynching threats, Klan memories and Confederacy veneration]

The independent probe, which is expected to be finished in June, is largely focused on the experiences of recent Black cadets. But racism is not a new phenomenon at VMI, which was the last public college in Virginia to integrate, in 1968, and didn’t admit women for three more decades.

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