The superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) has resigned after Black cadets described relentless racism at the nation’s oldest state-supported military college.
The Washington Post reports that Retired Gen. J.H. Binford Peay III, 80, had been superintendent of the 181-year-old Lexington, Va., school since 2003.
In his resignation letter to John Boland, president of VMI’s Board of Visitors, Peay said that he’d been told by Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s chief of staff that Northam and other state legislators had “lost confidence in my leadership” and “desired my resignation.”
During Peay’s tenure, multiple accounts of racist incidents have surfaced at VMI.
The Washington Post has documented how one Black student filed a complaint against a White adjunct professor who reminisced about her father’s Ku Klux Klan membership last year in the middle of class. In 2018, a White sophomore told a Black freshman during Hell Week he would “lynch” his body and use his “dead corpse as a punching bag” — but was suspended, not expelled.
After the article was published, Northam, a 1981 VMI graduate, ordered an independent investigation into the school, which received $19 million in state funds in fiscal 2020. In a letter announcing the inquiry, Northam and other state officials said they had “deep concerns about the clear and appalling culture of ongoing structural racism” at VMI.
Boland rejected that description in a reply to the governor, saying that “systemic racism does not exist here and a fair and independent review will find that to be true.” Peay also emailed the VMI community last week saying he did not believe systemic racism is present at the school.
VMI was the last public college in Virginia to integrate, admitting five Black students in 1968. It took a 1996 Supreme Court ruling to end its resistance to allowing women to attend.
According to the VMI website, Brig. Gen. Robert “Bob” Moreschi, the deputy superintendent for academics and dean of faculty, will serve as acting superintendent.
Northam’s spokeswoman Alena Yarmosky said that “change is overdue at VMI, and the Board of Visitors bears a deep responsibility to embrace it.”
About 8 percent of VMI’s 1,700 students are Black. Many are athletes who said they weren’t fully aware of the school’s history or racial climate when they accepted scholarships.
Peay, who was born in Richmond in 1940, graduated from VMI with a civil engineering degree in 1962, according to his biography.
In the Army, Peay served two tours in the Vietnam War.
By the early 1990s, then a general, he was appointed as the 24th Vice Chief of Staff for the Army. His final role was commander in chief of the U.S. Central Command from 1993 to 1997.
