Local

At VMI, Black cadets endure lynching threats, Klan memories and Confederacy veneration

By Ian Shapira
Oct. 17, 2020 at 7:42 p.m. EDT

More than a half century after the Virginia Military Institute integrated its ranks, Black cadets still endure relentless racism at the nation’s oldest state-supported military college. ... The atmosphere of hostility and cultural insensitivity makes VMI — whose cadets fought and died for the slaveholding South during the Civil War and whose leaders still celebrate that history — especially difficult for non-White students to attend, according to more than a dozen current and former students of color.

“I wake up everyday wondering, ‘Why am I still here?’ ” said William Bunton, 20, a Black senior from Portsmouth, Va. ... Keniya Lee, a 2019 VMI graduate, lodged a complaint last year against a White professor who reminisced in class about her father’s Ku Klux Klan membership. The woman still teaches at the Lexington, Va., campus, which received $19 million in state funds this past fiscal year.

In 2018, a White sophomore told a Black freshman during Hell Week that he’d “lynch” his body and use his “dead corpse as a punching bag” — but was suspended instead of expelled. ... In March, after a Black sophomore objected to incorporating Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson’s image into the design of their class ring, a fellow student denounced him by name on an anonymous chat app: “F---ing leave already. People like you are the reason this school is divided. Stop focusing so much on your skin color and focus on yourself as a person. Nobody i[n] your recent family line was oppressed by ‘muh slavery.’ ”

In September, when Vice President Pence gave a speech on campus, Bunton and another Black student boycotted the event — and were each punished with three weeks of confinement on campus, demerits and multiple hours of detention. ... Now the school is under pressure from some alumni and students to remove or relocate its Confederate statues — including one of Jackson — and reconsider its long-held reverence for the Confederacy.

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Ian Shapira
Ian Shapira is a features writer on the local enterprise team and enjoys writing about people who have served in the military and intelligence communities. He has covered education, criminal justice, technology and art crime. Follow https://twitter.com/ianshapira