Woke is as woke does

The strange come-to-Jesus moments of two Southern statesmen

In 2019, Virginia’s Gov. Ralph Northam was accused of posing in blackface — or maybe he was the guy dressed as a sheeted member of the KKK — in a photo that ran in his medical school yearbook at Eastern Virginia Medical School, from which Northam graduated in ‘84.

At first Northam apologized, and then he recanted, and insisted the man in the photo was not him. After a fairly thorough investigation (55 pages’ worth), the medical school could not say definitively who was in the photo. Northam, however, did admit that he’d once darkened his face to participate in a Michael Jackson dance contest.

Lord.

The calls for him to resign were loud and plentiful, but Northam stayed, and yesterday, the New York Times called his subsequent pivot to political progressivism a “journey.” Earlier, CNN called him a “progressive champion.”

Since that mess with the blackface, the champion has restored voting rights to former felons. He’s tightened the state’s gun laws. He abolished Virginia’s death penalty. He’s signed legislation that limits voter suppression. He has turned Virginia into a progressive beacon, which came about because after his public downfall, he said, he listened to constituents, particularly constituents of color who weren’t calling on him to step down.

He doesn’t get much credit for it, but Alabama Gov. and frequent presidential candidate George C. Wallace, too, also had a late-in-life turn-around. Wallace is probably known best for his “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” 1963 gubernatorial inauguration speech, and for — there is no other description that fits — his general fuckwittery as a staunch opponent to civil rights.

But as he got older, Wallace, whom Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once called “the most dangerous racist in America,” Alabama’s demographics were shifting, and Black people were voting, and the former flag bearer for the Old South found himself outside the mainstream. Slowly, he set about undoing some of his nonsense, and hiring Black employees at what was then a record pace.

Better, let’s let the Drive-By Truckers tell the tale:

Wallace insisted in his last days that his battle wasn’t against equality, but against Big Government. I do not believe that as it smacks of crying ‘states’ rights” to justify slavery, but Wallace’s turn-around may have started in the early ‘70s, when Shirley Chisholm, who was running against him as a Democratic candidate for President, halted her campaign to visit Wallace in the hospital, after he was shot by a would-be assassin.

(If you’ve never heard the story, it’s here, and it’s incredible.) Family members say that was probably Wallace’s come-to-Jesus moment, when he not only turned his back on his earlier racist speeches and actions, but he set about to do the right thing.

Might both men have been purely political animals who were strictly responding to a desire to stay in office? Perhaps. Might that show us the political influence of communities of color? Definitely. Did the journey of either men change the racism that’s baked into our culture? Maybe only a little, but systems are built by people. They are built by people, they are torn down by people. I take comfort in that.