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Who Is Justin Fairfax, Virginia’s Lieutenant Governor? Who Is Justin Fairfax, Virginia’s Lieutenant Governor?
(about 4 hours later)
Justin E. Fairfax, the lieutenant governor of Virginia, is the next in line to become governor should Gov. Ralph Northam step down. When he was sworn in last year as Virginia’s lieutenant governor, Justin Fairfax kept in his pocket the document that freed his great-great-great-grandfather from slavery. When state legislators moved to honor the Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, Mr. Fairfax left the Senate dais as a form of quiet protest. And after a violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017, Mr. Fairfax offered his support for efforts to remove a statue of Lee.
Mr. Northam is under intense pressure to resign after initially admitting and then denying that he posed in a racist costume as a medical student more than 30 years ago. A photo of two people dressed in blackface and as a member of the Ku Klux Klan appeared on Mr. Northam’s page in a 1984 yearbook. Mr. Fairfax, the second African-American ever to win a statewide election in Virginia, finds himself surrounded once more by the commonwealth’s painful racial history. As calls mount from both parties for the resignation of Gov. Ralph Northam, a white Democrat whose medical school yearbook page included a photo of people in blackface and in Ku Klux Klan robes, Mr. Fairfax is next in line for the state’s highest office.
After acknowledging Friday night that he was in the photo and apologizing, Mr. Northam said at a news conference on Saturday that he was now sure it wasn’t him and resisted widespread calls to resign. Mr. Fairfax, a 39-year-old Democrat who presides over the State Senate as lieutenant governor, a part-time post, has built a reputation as an affable and effective politician who can speak passionately about racial divisions while also appealing to a broad base of voters.
Here is some of what you should know about Mr. Fairfax: Should Mr. Northam resign soon — and for now, he seems to have no intention of doing so — Mr. Fairfax’s ascendance could help Democrats repair some of the mounting political damage, or at least change the conversation, in time for next year’s presidential election. Joseph R. Biden Jr., the former vice president, and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont were among the potential Democratic presidential candidates who posted hopefully about the possibility of a Fairfax governorship.
• Mr. Fairfax, 39, a Democrat, was elected lieutenant governor in November 2017, becoming only the second African-American elected to statewide office in Virginia. “Governor Northam has lost all moral authority and should resign immediately,” Mr. Biden wrote on Twitter. “Justin Fairfax is the leader Virginia needs now.”
• He is a descendant of slaves. When he was sworn in last year as lieutenant governor, his father, Roger Fairfax Sr., gave him his great-great-great grandfather’s manumission papers from 1798. Among Democrats in Virginia, the message about Mr. Fairfax was much the same.
“As I raised my right hand to take the oath of office as lieutenant governor of Virginia, I had in my breast pocket the papers that freed my three-greats-ago grandfather,” Mr. Fairfax told the Virginia television station NBC 12. “He’s got charisma; I think he’s got vision; he’s got stick-to-it-iveness,” said Representative A. Donald McEachin, who called Mr. Fairfax’s approach to discussing racial issues “a breath of fresh air” and who urged Mr. Northam to step aside.
• There were at least five black candidates for governor in 2018, including in Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Maryland and Wisconsin. No black candidate won any election for governor, which would make Mr. Fairfax the only current black governor in the United States if Mr. Northam resigns. In the dizzying hours since the yearbook photo surfaced on Friday, Mr. Fairfax, who would be the state’s second black governor, has treaded cautiously in the public eye.
• Mr. Fairfax would be Virginia’s second African-American governor. The first, Douglas Wilder, served from 1990-94. Mr. Wilder was also the first African-American to be elected governor in the United States. Mr. Northam, who at first apologized for the yearbook photo, changed course on Saturday in a strange, lengthy news conference, insisting that he was not either of the people depicted. But even as Mr. Northam resisted calls to resign, he acknowledged having once applied shoe polish to his face to imitate Michael Jackson in a dance contest.
• Mr. Fairfax last month silently protested tributes at the State Senate for the Civil War generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson. Both times, Mr. Fairfax, who presides over the Senate, quietly stepped away and let a Republican carry out the tributes. After the governor spoke, Mr. Fairfax issued a statement saying that Mr. Northam’s actions “at the very least” indicated “a comfort with Virginia’s darker history of white supremacy, racial stereotyping and intimidation.”
“There are people in Virginia history that I think it’s appropriate to memorialize and remember that way, and others that I would have a difference of opinion on,” Mr. Fairfax said to reporters after he protested General Jackson’s tribute. “I just wanted to, in a very respectful but very definite way, make it clear that these were not adjournment motions that I felt comfortable presiding over, and I was not going to do it.” “At this critical and defining moment in the history of Virginia and this nation, we need leaders with the ability to unite and help us rise to the better angels of our nature,” Mr. Fairfax said in the statement, which did not call for Mr. Northam’s resignation. A spokeswoman for the lieutenant governor did not respond to a request to interview him.
• He graduated from Duke University with a degree in public policy studies in 2000 and earned his law degree at Columbia Law School. Mr. Fairfax, a married father of two, grew up in Washington, D.C., in a neighborhood that he described on his campaign website as having shifted “from a close-knit middle-class community to one ravaged by a growing drug epidemic, increasing violence, and dwindling economic opportunities.” He attended Duke University on a scholarship, graduated with a degree in public policy and got a low-level job on Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, compiling briefing books for Mr. Gore’s wife, Tipper.
• He served as an assistant United States attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia in the major crimes and narcotics unit of the Alexandria division. “There was just sort of a dynamism and kind of an ebullience to him,” said Bruce Jentleson, a Duke professor who worked in the State Department during Bill Clinton’s presidency and who helped Mr. Fairfax get the job on the Gore campaign.
From there, Mr. Fairfax’s career moved fast. He graduated in 2005 from Columbia Law School, where he worked on the Law Review, and served as an intern and clerk for a federal judge in Virginia, Gerald Bruce Lee.
Judge Lee, who later officiated at Mr. Fairfax’s wedding and administered his oath of office as lieutenant governor, recalled one occasion when he granted a prisoner’s handwritten habeas corpus petition because of an advanced legal analysis that Mr. Fairfax had performed as an intern.
“I knew that he wanted to be engaged in impactful work as a lawyer, and I detected early on that he was also interested in public service,” said Judge Lee, who is now retired.
Zuberi Williams, who worked as a clerk for Judge Lee alongside Mr. Fairfax, recalled staying up late at night with him talking through legal issues in the case against Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, an American citizen who was charged and ultimately convicted of training with Al Qaeda and plotting to assassinate President George W. Bush.
“When you’re thrown into the fire like that at age 24, 25,” said Mr. Williams, now a state court judge in Maryland, “it’s like baptism by fire.”
When the clerkship ended, others picked up on Mr. Fairfax’s political potential. He worked for a time for John Edwards, the former senator from North Carolina and vice-presidential candidate, who described his ex-aide in an email on Saturday as “bright, idealistic and a natural leader.” When Mr. Fairfax returned a few years later to work as an assistant federal prosecutor in Virginia, Judge Lee said, some in the courthouse referred to him as “Senator Fairfax.”
“If he becomes governor, he’ll combine the sunny, inclusive style of President Reagan and the hope and inspiration of President Obama,” Neil H. MacBride, the former United States attorney who hired Mr. Fairfax and assigned him to help lead a sex trafficking task force, said in an email on Saturday.
Mr. Fairfax made his first bid for public office in 2013, running a close second in the Democratic primary for attorney general. He is in the liberal mainstream of the party on most policy issues, from gun control and abortion rights to addressing climate change and raising the minimum wage.
Republicans have been less entranced by Mr. Fairfax over the years — he has been criticized especially for supporting a “Medicare for all” health care system — but few of them seemed eager to speak ill of him on Saturday.
During the 2017 race for lieutenant governor, Mr. Fairfax’s Republican opponent, Jill Holtzman Vogel, said during a debate that he was not informed enough “to talk intelligently” about campaign issues. The National Rifle Association has given him an F rating.
Several Republican state legislators replied to emailed requests for interviews about Mr. Fairfax on Saturday with statements calling on Mr. Northam to resign, or did not immediately respond at all. The Virginia Republican Party, which called for the governor’s resignation, declined to make of any of its leaders available to discuss Mr. Fairfax.
For Democrats, who by Saturday afternoon had mostly abandoned Mr. Northam, the prospect of a Fairfax governorship loomed as a tantalizing alternative to what seemed likely to be months of controversy and unflattering news coverage with Mr. Northam still in office.
Seeking to avoid that, Susan Swecker, the chairwoman of the Virginia Democratic Party, called for Mr. Northam to step down and “let Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax heal Virginia’s wounds and move us forward.”