As the state plans exhibitions and ceremonies to recognize its dark past, Governor Ralph Northam and the state attorney general admitted wearing blackface in the 1980s

It’s 400 years since the ship carrying the first African slaves to what is today the United States of America docked on the coast of Virginia, beginning a process that would see millions of black people forced into servitude.

The state has spent the better part of a decade planning for 2019 to be a solemn remembrance, with a series of exhibitions and ceremonies aimed at recognizing that dark past, and looking to a more inclusive future.

But in the space of a week all that endeavor has been forced into the background, with Virginia’s leaders instead seemingly engaged in an effort to singlehandedly revive the art of blackface.

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Ralph Northam, Virginia’s governor, kicked things off when he admitted to being in a college yearbook photo that showed a man in blackface next to a man in a Ku Klux Klan outfit. As Virginia, and soon the nation, reeled from that revelation, Northam then denied he was in the image, but said he had indeed worn blackface in the past, to impersonate Michael Jackson during a dance competition.

As the governor clung on, the state’s attorney general, Mark Herring, the man third in line to replace Northam should he have to quit, confessed to his own dalliances with blackface. Herring said he had worn “dark makeup” while dressing as the rapper Kurtis Blow.

Sandwiched in-between those incidents, Virginia’s lieutenant governor, Justin Fairfax, was accused of sexually assaulting a female academic in 2004. And on Friday, a second woman came forward accusing Fairfax of rape while the two were students at Duke University in 2000.

As much of the nation has looked on in horror, all three men have refused to resign. Many have been stunned by the efforts of Northam and Herring to attempt to place into context their blackface makeup shenanigans. Both have cited their age at the time – Northam was 25, Herring was 19 – and that the incidents occurred in the 1980s, as providing some sort of reasonable explanation. But others have pointed out that 25 years old is not that young, and 1980 was not that long ago.

Still, for all the surprise outside, and inside, the state, many say they are not shocked.

“For me the scariest part is – and this has been said in the black community for decades – what happened this past week was that things we know exist came to the surface,” said Francesca Leigh-Davis, who co-hosts the RVA Dirt local politics radio show in Richmond, the Virginia state capital.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A Confederate flag flies near the gravesite of Jefferson Davis, former president of the Confederate States of America, at Hollywood Cemetery, in Richmond, Virginia. Photograph: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Leigh-Davis and her RVA Dirt co-hosts, Melissa Vaughn and Jessee Perry, organized a demonstration outside the governor’s mansion. Scores of people held signs and chanted “Northam has got to go” as the governor held a news conference inside – where he told reporters about his shoe-polish-assisted Michael Jackson impression.

Northam hasn’t been seen in public since. He has resisted calls from Democrats, including the Virginia legislative black caucus and candidates for the White House, to resign, and has hired a crisis communications firm.

To the outsider, Virginia has been moving left politically over the past decade, to the extent that some have mused whether the state, which brushes up against Washington DC, in the north-east, should even still be considered part of “The South”, in the parlance of the US civil war.

The state elected Douglas Wilder, the first African American to serve as governor in the US since reconstruction, in 1989. More recently, Virginia voted for Barack Obama in 2008 – the first time the state had pledged for a Democrat in the White House in more than 40 years, and backed Obama again in 2012. In 2016 Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by 5% in the state.

But Cornell Brooks, a Virginia resident and former president of the NAACP, and a current professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, said that while Virginia “is embracing the politics, the economics and the future”, there is a limit to its progressiveness.

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“Virginia is still a southern state. It’s a southern state in the mid-Atlantic, but bear in mind Richmond was the capitol of the confederacy,” Brooks said.

“I hesitate to say that the vestiges of the old south are gone. Simply because when you drive down the street in Richmond, there are Confederate memorials. There are Confederate flags still flying. And there are some people, who may be a minority, who still subscribe to those old ways of thinking.”

Some Virginians say much of the alleged “awakening” is just a northern Virginia thing. The migration of academics, government employees and those with more liberal politics to places such as Alexandria and Arlington, just outside Washington where Amazon will base its new hub, has skewed Virginia’s politics.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A monument to the Confederate general Robert E Lee is adorned with an anti-hate sign. Photograph: Brian Snyder/Reuters

“In theory it might be becoming more progressive, but it’s all surface level,” said Perry, the radio co-host.

She pointed to the Virginia government’s support for a gas pipeline compressor station to be built in the historically black community of Union Hill, 70 miles west of Richmond, despite environmentalists’ fears it could pollute the air. And as recently as last October, Northam dressed as James Barbour, a slaveowner who governed Virginia in 1812-14, for Halloween.

Outside the left-leaning north, the Confederate symbology is hard to miss. Monument Avenue, which runs from west Richmond towards the state capitol, is a veritable rogues’ gallery of Confederate figures.

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There’s Confederate commander Matthew Fontaine Maury, Confederate general Stonewall Jackson and Confederate president Jefferson Davis, looming over the street. The largest monument is of Robert E Lee, with the Confederate commander depicted on a giant horse, looking out over the city.

On Thursday there were again protests at Virginia’s capitol, although this time not over the blackface scandal. Hundreds of anti-abortion campaigners had gathered to oppose a bill which would loosen restrictions on late-term abortions. Days before Northam’s racist debacle, he had drawn ire from the right for his support for the bill.

Rosemary Storaska, a retired teacher, was wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat, one of a number of attendees sporting Donald Trump garb. She thought Northam should resign because of the abortion bill, but was also turned off by the blackface controversy.

“He’s representing something that Virginia is not,” she said. “It’s important enough because it’s hypocrisy. Racism is the Democrats’ tool, it’s how they won over Virginia.”

Storaska didn’t think the state had a race problem. She knows a number of “flaggers”, she said – people who oppose the removal of Confederate monuments and fly, or at least embrace, the Confederate flag – but said they were not racist.

“They’re the most patriotic people you can see,” Storaska said. “And Democrats have labelled them white supremacists.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The McLean House in the Appomattox Court House national historic park is the site of the surrender of the Confederate army in 1865. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian

The most conservative parts of Virginia are clustered in the south and the west, separated from the state of West Virginia, a Republican stronghold, by theAppalachian mountains.

The drive west from Richmond, through a barren landscape , leads to the town of Appomattox where the court house is one of the most important sites in US history. It was here that the Confederate army, under Robert E Lee, finally surrendered to the Union on 9 April 1865, effectively ending the civil war.

Today Appomattox Court House is a national historic park, with a huddle of red-brick buildings restored to their 1865 heyday.

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Visitors were sparse on Thursday afternoon, but those who were out in the mild south Virginian weather were of the same opinion: Northam has to go.

“It’s shocking,” said Andrew Myers, who was visiting Appomattox Court House with his wife and five children.

“I don’t understand why people would do that: dress up in KKK outfits or wear dark-face, even at a party. It’s not funny.”

Myers, 50, is only seven years younger than Herring, yet said he had never seen any of his contemporaries don shoe polish, dark makeup, or any other form of blackface. He was also troubled by the allegations against Fairfax.

“That all three of the top leadership of our state have these shameful issues going on … I pray for Virginia. I don’t think it’s representative,” Myers said.

Charlottesville, an hour’s drive north, has seen one of the most recent examples that the country is yet to put racism in the past.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Members of the Ku Klux Klan and others arriving for a rally, calling for the protection of Southern Confederate monuments, in Charlottesville, Virginia, on 8 July 2017. Photograph: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images

It’s less than two years since hundreds of white supremacists gathered in the city for a “Unite the Right” rally that left civil rights activist Heather Heyer dead and dozens injured.

In the aftermath, Donald Trump infamously claimed there were “very fine people” among the white supremacist marchers.

The Robert E Lee statue in Charlottesville that was a rallying point for the right that day remains in place, surrounded by orange barriers and signs saying “No trespassing”.

A few blocks south is where Heyer was murdered.

There are always flowers, candles and chalked messages at the spot. “Black Lives Matter” is a common post, along with “Love has no color”.

If any good ultimately comes from the sorry scandal in the corridors of state power, then one message at Heyer’s memorial might seem particularly relevant:

“We all can create a better world,” it says.

“Even with our mistakes.”