UPDATE 1-Virginia governor meets with cabinet amid outcry over racist photo

Virginia Governor Ralph Northam met with his Cabinet on Monday amid a chorus of calls from fellow Democrats to resign over last week's revelation of a racist photo on his 1984 medical school yearbook page. A few dozen protesters gathered at the state capitol in Richmond to demand Northam step down while the state's lieutenant governor, who would take over if Northam resigned, released a statement rejecting a report on a conservative web site accusing him of misconduct.

Northam scrambled to contain the damage following the release of a page from his yearbook depicting one person in blackface standing next to a masked person in the white robes of the Ku Klux Klan. He first apologized on Friday and said he was one of the two people, then changed his story Saturday, saying he did not appear in the photo but had dressed in blackface at another point that year.

The admission drew immediate demands for Northam's resignation from the NAACP civil rights group and at least five of the Democratic White House candidates, including U.S. Senators Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, both of whom are black, and said Northam had lost the moral authority to lead. Northam's office did not respond to questions on Monday about the governor's plans but local medial outlets reported he was meeting with advisers.

Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax, who is black, released a statement on Monday denying a vague online report that a woman suggested Fairfax had sexually assaulted her in 2004. "Tellingly, not one other reputable media outlet has seen fit to air this false claim," the statement from Fairfax's office said, promising "appropriate legal action."

At least two media outlets, including the Washington Post, said a woman had approached them more than a year ago with the same allegation. The outlets said they had been unable to substantiate her claim. The report of the allegation was published on the same website, Big League Politics, that first published Northam's yearbook page.

Northam said on Saturday he had donned blackface in the 1980s to portray pop star Michael Jackson in a dance competition. 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 he should perform Jackson's signature moonwalk dance moves before the cameras before accepting his wife's advice not to.

"What happened Saturday was an unfortunate display, and rather tone-deaf to what the impact really is," Derrick Johnson, the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, told MSNBC on Monday. Florida's newly elected secretary of state last month resigned after a local newspaper published a photo of him in blackface at a 2005 Halloween party.

Should Northam resign, 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. (Reporting by Jonathan Allen in New York; Additional reporting by Gary Robertson in Richmond; Editing by Scott Malone and Bill Trott)

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)