When a Yearbook Is a Current Event
On Thursday afternoon, The Virginian-Pilot, the daily paper based in Norfolk, Virginia, broke news that was at once shocking and deeply predictable: another Virginia politician, another instance of racism captured in a yearbook. This time around, the lawmaker was Tommy Norment, the majority leader of Virginia’s state Senate; the publication was the 1968 issue of The Bomb, the Virginia Military Institute’s yearbook, for which Norment had served as managing editor. Among the images the Pilot cited from that year’s issue were one of a man standing in a bank of snow, clutching a Confederate flag, and another of white men in blackface, their arms slung around one another, grinning, posing, amused, proud. They are wearing sunglasses.
There is racist text, too, in the book meant to mark the passage of another year within the violence and turbulence of the late 1960s. “The N-word is used at least once,” the reports. And “a student from Bangkok, Thailand, is called a ‘Jap’ and a ‘Chink.’ A
