Virginia lawmakers to meet for first time after governor racist photo row

Virginia lawmakers were due to meet on Monday for the first time since the revelation of a racist photo on Governor Ralph Northam's medical school yearbook page sparked widespread calls from fellow Democrats for the first-term governor to resign. Northam apologized on Friday and said he was one of the two people in the 1984 photo, which depicts one person in blackface standing next to another dressed in the white robes of the Ku Klux Klan. The next day he denied he was in the photograph.

The admission drew immediate demands for Northam's resignation from the NAACP civil rights group and at least five of the Democratic candidates seeking the party's 2020 nomination for the White House, including U.S. Senators Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, both of whom are black. It was not immediately clear how or if the Republican-controlled state legislature would address the matter in its formal session in Richmond.

Northam resisted calls over the weekend to resign, even after saying he had donned blackface on another occasion to portray pop star Michael Jackson in a dance competition while a medical student. The origins of blackface date back to 19th-century minstrel shows, when white actors covered themselves in black grease paint to caricature slaves. During the Saturday news conference, Northam made light-hearted remarks about how hard it is to clean black shoe polish from one's face and whether or not he should perform Jackson's signature moonwalk dance moves before the cameras before accepting his wife's advice not to.

The moments of levity and his suggestion that blackface was less taboo in the 1980s drew fresh criticism. "It was one of the most bizarre weekends I've witnessed," Derrick Johnson, the president of the civil rights group the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, told MSNBC on Monday. "What happened Saturday was an unfortunate display, and rather tone-deaf to what the impact really is."

Johnson said the NAACP would continue to pressure Northam to resign, echoing calls from prominent members of Northam's party. Northam continued to meet with advisers over the weekend about his future, the Washington Post reported.

Should he resign, Virginia's lieutenant governor, Justin Fairfax, would become governor. Fairfax, 39, would be the second black governor of Virginia, where his great-great-great grandfather was held as a slave. Fairfax said he was "shocked and saddened" by the yearbook photograph and that Northam had apologized to him personally. 

(With inputs from agencies.)