Often when these racist images or statements resurface, the knee-jerk response is to say that people need to remember the context of the times. In fact, Northam himself used this excuse. While he backtracked on his earlier statements and denied being in the photograph Saturday, Northam did admit to darkening his face that same year to resemble Michael Jackson during a dance contest -- a move he attributed to "the place and time where I grew up."
Well, in this case, the context makes the photograph even more troubling.
What was going on with race relations in the early 1980s? It certainly wasn't the 1950s.
The civil rights movement was alive and well. As the Reagan Revolution pushed American politics to the right, the civil rights movement pushed back on matters of social justice, making it clear that the gains of the 1960s would not be easily reversed. In 1982, civil rights organizations lobbied Congress to extend and strengthen the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibited racial discrimination in voting.
Although there was conservative opposition over several key provisions, the Democratic House and Republican Senate passed the bill by sizable margins (389-24 in the House and 85-8 in the Senate). Reagan signed the bill into law and said, "This legislation proves our unbending commitment to voting rights."
The renewed push to commemorate Martin Luther King Jr. with a federal holiday also sparked a heated national debate in the early 1980s. Rep. John Conyers first raised the idea in Congress just days after King's assassination in 1968, and similar proposals floundered for years after.
King's widow, Coretta Scott King, testified in Congress calling for a national holiday in 1979. She also kicked off a grassroots effort to build nationwide support, while Stevie Wonder's hit song "Happy Birthday" helped keep the debate going.
But President Reagan was skeptical. In January 1983, he said, "I would question creating another national holiday type of thing because, as I say, then we open a door. Where do we stop?" He justified his opposition on the grounds that it would be costly for businesses to close for the day, but many Republicans and southern Democrats were against the idea because they considered King to be a radical figure.
When the bill came up for a vote in the Senate in 1983, Republican Jesse Helms of North Carolina filibustered in an effort to kill the legislation. King's "action-oriented Marxism," Helms explained, was "not compatible with the concepts of this country." After an impassioned debate, Congress passed the bill before Reagan signed it into law. Civil rights organizations were thrilled with the legislation but despondent about the racial backlash that had surfaced. Speaking of Helms and his allies, Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey lamented, "They are playing up to 'old Jim Crow' and all of us know it."
But that wasn't the end of it. In 1984, the year Northam was finishing medical school, Virginia lumped MLK Day together with Lee-Jackson Day, a state holiday celebrating Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson -- a move many saw as disrespectful to the civil rights activist. The state government did not separate the holidays until 2000.
Meanwhile, civil rights leader Jesse Jackson made a serious run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1984, championing traditional liberal causes, including civil rights, and rejecting efforts by some Democrats to move to the center in response to Reagan's success.
The KKK was not a welcome presence in mainstream American politics in 1984. Indeed, when it endorsed Reagan that year, the President wrote a letter to the United States Commission on Civil Rights proclaiming that he had "no tolerance" for their organization and that the "politics of racial hatred and religious bigotry practiced by the Klan and others have no place in this country, and are destructive of the values for which America has always stood."
Nor was blackface seen as some kind of innocuous form of comedy. When Hollywood released the comedy "Soul Man" a few years later, which featured a white man who darkens his skin in order to qualify for a scholarship to Harvard Law School, a critic in Newsday wrote, "'Soul Man' supplies bigots with a few more racial slurs to take to the office and gives the audience a chance to have a hearty laugh at the expense of black people."
These are just some of the debates that were raging at the time the racist photograph was placed on Northam's page in his medical school yearbook. While we still don't know his intentions or what his views on race were at the time, the photo was certainly controversial, even in 1984.
For this, it is difficult to see the legitimacy in his finishing his term given the context in which he now governs.
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