NORFOLK, Va. | The racist yearbook photo that could sink Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s career may have been mistakenly placed on his profile page — but even it were put there intentionally, it’s unlikely that many students would have noticed it, according to alumni who put together the publication or submitted pictures to it 35 years ago.
Giac Chan Nguyen-Tan, a physician practicing in Connecticut, remembers that a page he laid out for the 1984 Eastern Virginia Medical School yearbook was changed without his knowledge before publication.
“Could (the offensive photo) have been slipped in there? Absolutely,” he said, adding that he doesn’t remember laying out Northam’s page, which ended up including a photo of one person in blackface and another dressed in Ku Klux Klan hood and robes.
Fellow yearbook staffer Dr. William Elwood disagrees. Elwood said he doubts any photos were mixed up — and he says it’s unlikely that someone could have pulled a prank because a limited number of people had keys to the yearbook room. He said he took his job seriously and received no complaints after the yearbook was published.
Regardless of how the photo got there, it’s possible not many noticed what was in the yearbook; few students enrolled in the intense medical school program took the publication very seriously — or even looked at it — after it was published, several classmates said. For many, the yearbook was simply not a priority. Northam and his former roommate, Dr. John “Rob” Marsh, rushed off to the military immediately after graduation. Others embarked on their residencies.
“The yearbook comes out in the fall when you’re gone,” said Marsh, who roomed with Northam for two years before graduating in 1983.
The half page that Northam was allotted in the yearbook includes three pictures, including one of him in a suit. A fourth photo shows a man in blackface standing next to a person in a full KKK costume. At a news conference Saturday, Northam remarked that a former, unidentified classmate told him he thought “numerous pages” of the yearbook had received the wrong photos.
The offensive image was one of at least three blackface photos in the yearbook’s 1984 edition. One photo in the yearbook, which was reviewed by an Associated Press reporter, shows a man in blackface, dressed up as a woman wearing a wig. A caption reads: “‘Baby Love,’ who ever thought Diana Ross would make it to Medical School!”
Calling the photos “shockingly abhorrent,” school leaders said have commissioned an investigation into all past yearbooks and the school’s culture. The investigation will be led by high-powered attorney Richard Cullen, a former Virginia attorney general and a former U.S. Attorney in Virginia who directed investigations into financial institutions and defense contractors, the school said in a statement.