Matrix Founding for Backstories provided by an anonymous donor, the National Dama for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

From Virginia Humanities, this is Backstory.

Welcome to Backstory, the show that explains the history behind the headlines. I'm Nathan Connolly.

Each week, my colleagues Joanne Freeman, Brian Ballot, Ed Ayers and I explore a different part of American history.

In this episode, we're bringing you a show that's a little different.

We're going to play an extended interview about the history of menstrualcy and blackface in the United States.

And a warning, this episode includes a recording that contains some offensive language.

Last week, a photo surfaced from Virginia Governor Ralph Northam's 1984 Eastern Virginia Medical School Yearbook page.

The picture is of one person in blackface, alongside another, in a Ku Klux Klan outfit.

Politicians across the country denounced the photo, including Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring.

But Herring later released a statement saying he also regrets donning blackface for a costume in 1980, while he was in school at the University of Virginia.

When the news broke about Ralph Northam's Yearbook photo, he admitted to being in the picture and apologized.

But a day later, he held a press conference and said neither of the people in the photo or him.

I stand by my statement of apology to the many Virginians who were hurt by seeing this content on a Yearbook page that belongs to me.

It is disgusting. It is offensive. It is racist.

And it was my responsibility to recognize and prevent it from being published in the first place.

While I did not appear in this photo, I am not surprised by its appearance in the EVMS Yearbook.

In the place and time where I grew up, many actions that we rightfully recognize as a warrant today were commonplace.

Even if Northam wasn't in the photograph, it is important to note that in the 1980s, costumes like this were still in Northam's own words, commonplace.

The thing that I thought was most interesting in the response to that image is so many people would write to me and say things like, you know, he lived through the Civil Rights Movement.

Why would he do that? And he has to know better. He lived through the Civil Rights Movement.

That is historian Ray Lynn Barnes.

...