Northam says he did wear blackface — but as Michael Jackson, not in yearbook
by Allison Elyse Gualtieri
| February 02, 2019 03:20 PM
| Updated Feb 02, 2019, 03:50 PM
The Virginia governor under fire for a racist photograph on his medical school yearbook page said that he was neither the person pictured wearing blackface nor the one wearing Ku Klux Klan robes.
But Democrat Ralph Northam did admit to wearing blackface in 1984.
"That same year, I did participate in a dance contest in San Antonio in which I darkened my face as part of a Michael Jackson costume. I look back now and regret that I did not understand the harmful legacy of an action like that. It is because my memory of that episode is so vivid that I truly did not believe I am in the picture in my yearbook. You remember these things," he said, reading a prepared statement to reporters in a press conference Saturday.
A photograph surfaced Friday from his page in the 1984 Eastern Virginia Medical School yearbook, showing a man wearing blackface and another dressed as a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Northam said Saturday he had never been in a KKK uniform.
Northam said he saw the photo for the first time Friday and had never owned a copy of the yearbook but that he took responsibility for the photo's appearance on its page.
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