The Virginia Military Institute (VMI), founded in 1839, promotes itself as "the oldest state-supported military college in the U.S." It promises an educational experience "more complete and transformative than an ordinary college or university can provide." Apparently, according to a well-sourced article in the Washington Post, that complete transformation includes a healthy dose of racism and reverence for the Confederacy.
Racist hazing and lectures from professors who speak fondly of the Ku Klux Klan have been reported by the black students that comprise only 8% its student body of approximately 1,700 cadets. From statues of treasonous Confederate leaders on campus to rituals that force black students to pay homage to the likes of slaveholding traitor "Stonewall" Jackson, VMI is a state-supported breeding ground for racism and a longing for the days of the treasonous Confederacy:
"The atmosphere of hostility and cultural insensitivity makes VMI — whose cadets fought and died for the slaveholding South during the Civil War and whose leaders still celebrate that history — especially difficult for non-White students to attend, according to more than a dozen current and former students of color.
'I wake up everyday wondering, "Why am I still here? ” said William Bunton, 20, a Black senior from Portsmouth, Va.
Keniya Lee, a 2019 VMI graduate, lodged a complaint last year against a White professor who reminisced in class about her father’s Ku Klux Klan membership. The woman still teaches at the Lexington, Va., campus, which received $19 million in state funds this past fiscal year."
The professor that's mentioned is 75 year-old E. Susan Kellogg, who fondly reminisced about her late father being a member of the KKK in the 1930's:
“'KKK parties were the best parties ever, they had candy, clowns, games, and meetings were held there,' Kellogg told the class, according to a memo that Lee wrote three days afterward and that she later delivered to administrators and posted on Twitter in June.
Then Kellogg, a former Maryland state insurance commissioner, recounted how she and her high school friends in Ohio drove around their all-White neighborhood 'looking for people who didn’t belong' — racial minorities — in order to 'bop' them on the head, Lee wrote. Kellogg also told the class that she had little to no contact with Black people until she went to college.
'I didn’t know if they bathed, what clothes they wore, how they ate, what they ate, if they could read, study, or even had the ability to learn,' Kellogg said, according to Lee’s memo."
According to the article, Kellogg confirmed Keniya Lee's account with the exception that she didn't "bop" black people with two-by-fours -- but her friends did. She sounds nice. Interestingly, Kellogg's family doesn't speak to her "because she tells such horrendous lies" according to her older sister.
The Post article is rife with examples of cruelty by white cadets toward the few black cadets, and should be Exhibit 1 in why the State of Virginia should pull its $19 million of taxpayer support from this cauldron of bigotry.
(photo: A statue of "Stonewall" Jackson and Confederate cannons on the VMI campus. Education Images via Getty)
