VMI superintendent resigns after Black cadets describe relentless racism
Source: Washington Post
The superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute, retired Gen. J.H. Binford Peay III, tendered his resignation Monday morning after anecdotes of systemic racism at the 181-year-old school surfaced this month and the governor launched an independent probe, according to the school’s Board of Visitors. Peay, 80, a retired four-star general, has been superintendent since 2003. During his tenure, multiple accounts of racist incidents have occurred.
Most recently, The Post documented how one Black student filed a complaint against a White adjunct professor who reminisced in the middle of a class in 2019 about her father’s Ku Klux Klan membership. In 2018, a White sophomore told a Black freshman during Hell Week he’d “lynch” his body and use his “dead corpse as a punching bag” — but was suspended instead of expelled. After The Post’s story was published this month, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D), a 1981 VMI graduate, ordered an independent investigation into the school’s culture.
In a letter announcing the inquiry, Northam and other state officials said they had “deep concern s about the clear and appalling culture of ongoing structural racism” at the school. But after Northam’s announcement, John Boland, the president of VMI’s Board of Visitors, fought back and claimed that “systemic racism does not exist here and a fair and independent review will find that to be true.” Peay also issued a letter to the VMI community last week saying he did not believe systemic racism was present at the school. In Boland’s letter Monday announcing Peay’s resignation, he said that he accepted it with “deep regret.” He said Peay was a “great American, patriot, and hero. He has profoundly changed our school for the better in all respects.”
The school, founded in 1839, had cadets serve in the Confederacy during the Civil War. For decades, Black students have complained about the school’s constant veneration of those cadets and the statue of Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson, who enslaved six people. In July, Peay defended the statue of Jackson because he said the Confederate general was a “staunch Christian” and a “military genius.”
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/vmi-peay-resignation/2020/10/26/5448f010-1790-11eb-befb-8864259bd2d8_story.html
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