Until this past weekend, there was only one place you had a chance to see all of Virginia’s living governors come together in the same place, and that was at the inauguration of the next one.
But on May 17, in commemoration of the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling desegregating schools and commemorating Virginia’s role in that case, there they all were, Democrats and Republicans sitting together, sharing the commonality that comes from being part of a group of only 74 Virginians that includes names like Payne and Jefferson.
All were there except for one glaring absence, especially considering the occasion.
Nowhere to be found was the United States’ first black governor, not to mention a descendant of slaves and the first black governor of a former Confederate state, L. Douglas Wilder. Nowhere to be found at the university, Virginia Commonwealth University, where the event was held and where his name graces the School of Government and Public Affairs.
The ceremony was put together to commemorate the role Virginia’s Barbara Johns played in this historic ruling that led to the end of government policies that kept students “separate but equal” based on their skin color, which wasn’t actually “equal” at all. Her civil rights case—Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County—would later become one of the five cases consolidated into Brown.
I know what you are thinking, Wilder, over all the others, should have been there. But he stayed away in protest of Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s executive orders to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion policies at Virginia’s colleges and universities.
Wilder has called it “insensitive” to demand the dismantling of programs that conservatives and other critics say are just reverse racism under the banner of being “anti-racist.” Wilder compared it to “living in a third-world country.”
Strong words from a man who shocked the commonwealth just four years ago when he said he was going to be voting for Youngkin over his own party’s candidate, Terry McAuliffe, in 2021’s gubernatorial race.
A black immigrant woman whose family came up from poverty and is trying to join Youngkin and Wilder as the 75th member of that club of Virginia governors (and be the first female to do so) is Republican Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears. Sears has been assailed for a fundraising email that said, “Slaves didn’t die in the fields so that we can call ourselves victims today.”
Horace Cooper from the black conservative policy group Project 21 says that if you accept the premise of DEI’s defenders that it simply is an economic tool created to incentivize companies into offering equal access to minorities in jobs and education, then it can be seen at best as redundant in a post-14th Amendment world.
However, Ibram X. Kendi, the Boston University professor and author of the seminal work used to build the DEI agenda, “How to Be an Antiracist,” has written, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.”
In fact, DEI does advocate for more discrimination.
That sounds much different than the brave leadership and individual accountability Wilder has repeatedly called on young leaders in the black community to exhibit—like 16-year-old Barbara Johns once did.
