“This collection of scandals proves beyond a doubt that Virginia has not progressed as far as it thought it has — and it has a past it still hasn’t come to terms with,” said Mr. Sabato.

Perhaps that is not a surprise for a state that is still littered with Confederate iconography — the new Amazon headquarters in Arlington will sit hard by Jefferson Davis Highway — and just last month celebrated Lee-Jackson Day, a state holiday. The state Capitol is filled with promotional materials trumpeting the 400th anniversary of the first representative assembly in the new world, which is what makes the General Assembly here the oldest continuous legislative body in America. But this year also marks two other milestones: the 400th anniversary of slaves being brought to Jamestown and the 60th anniversary of Prince Edward County closing its public schools to avoid integrating them.

Yet to those who are eager to see Virginia move beyond its racist past, this past week’s tribulations have obscured the real progress the state has made in recent decades.

It is hard to overstate how important race was to the segregationist Democratic machine, led by Senator Harry F. Byrd, that controlled Virginia politics for much of the 20th century.

In his seminal 1949 book, “Southern Politics in State and Nation,” the scholar V.O. Key Jr. famously called Virginia “a political museum piece” for its efforts to keep blacks and poor whites off the voter rolls.

By comparison, Mr. Key wrote, “Mississippi is a hotbed of democracy.”

In fact, the so-called “massive resistance” to integration, which had its origins here, is what extended the political life of the so-called Byrd Organization even as Virginia swelled in the years following World War II.