In the process, Mr. Northam, a Democrat, persuaded many Virginians to allow him a season of penitence. Not least among them are African Americans who were stunned when the governor first admitted, then denied, appearing in the photo in which one figure is in blackface and another is in a Ku Klux Klan costume, while adding that he did don blackface, appearing as Michael Jackson at a dance contest, the same year the yearbook was published.
In February, most of Virginia’s lawmakers, Democrats and Republicans, called on him to resign, as did an editorial on this page. Few of those calls were repeated for long, although the question of who is in the photo, if it is not Mr. Northam, remains unanswered. It helped Mr. Northam that his potential Democratic successors were quickly enmeshed in their own scandals, which shifted the spotlight and forced his party to consider whether it would prefer a Republican governor. (It wouldn’t.) It helped that Virginia Republicans, rarely bothered by President Trump’s race-baiting, lack any credibility to criticize Mr. Northam, a former lawmaker whose record on race was strong before he was elected governor in 2017.
Most potent, it helped that he set himself an agenda on racial equity and pursued it single-mindedly. Scarcely a week or month has passed without Mr. Northam visiting a racially significant site, seeking out counsel from black leaders or announcing an initiative to advance racial justice. He hired Virginia’s, and possibly the nation’s, first state director of diversity, equity and inclusion. He established a commission to comb state law for racist language and provisions, much of it left over from the Jim Crow era. He ordered measures to expand access to state contracts for women- and minority-owned firms, to which less than 3 percent of state contracts were awarded a decade ago. He set up a commission to recommend reforms in the way black history is taught in Virginia’s public schools.
Throughout, Mr. Northam, a self-effacing pediatric neurologist, has expressed remorse and projected what many Virginians regard as genuine humility. “I’ve had to confront some painful truths,” he said in August at an event commemorating the arrival 400 years ago of the first African slaves in North America, where Hampton, Va., is today. “Among those truths was my own incomplete understanding involving race and equity.”
That speech earned Mr. Northam a standing ovation from a crowd that was heavily African American. Quite a comeback, and a hard-earned one, for a governor who could scarcely show his face in public in February.
