The superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute, retired Army Gen. J.H. Binford Peay III, stepped down days after the Washington Post documented “relentless racism” suffered by the Black cadets at the state-sponsored school. 

The retired four-star general wrote in a public resignation letter that Gov. Ralph Northam and other state politicians had “lost confidence in my leadership” and “desired my resignation.”

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One 2019 graduate, Keniya Lee, told the Post that a professor “reminisced” about her father’s membership in the Ku Klux Klan. Another Black student claimed a white classmate told him he would “lynch” him and use his “corpse as a punching bag.”

At that time, Peay said that any attitude of racism or discrimination would be “investigated and properly punished if proven”.

Northam, who graduated from VMI in 1981, launched a formal investigation and a third-party review in an order signed by Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax, Attorney General Mark Herring, and the president of Virginia’s Black Caucus Legislative.

Peay’s letter said that VMI cadets “continue to be educated in a physical environment that honors the Confederacy and celebrates an inaccurate and dangerous version of ‘The Lost Cause’ of Virginia’s history. It is past time to send these relics to the trash can of history. “