WASHINGTON — The racial strife roiling the country and its politics has reached an unlikely redoubt of social conservatism, Jerry Falwell Jr.’s Liberty University. Blackface and Ku Klux Klan imagery tweeted by Mr. Falwell, who tolerates little dissent at the evangelical university he leads, has spurred staff resignations, demands for his firing by influential alumni, an incipient boycott and a raucous protest in the university’s home of Lynchburg, Va., over the past week. So heated was the response that on Monday, Mr. Falwell, the university’s president and a vocal ally of President Trump, did something rare for him in the heat of a controversy: He apologized for a May 27 tweet in which he mocked the social-distancing orders of Virginia’s Democratic governor, Ralph Northam. In that tweet was the image of a mask on which was emblazoned the photo from Mr. Northam’s medical school yearbook of a man in black face and another in Ku Klux Klan robes, one of whom might be Mr. Northam. “Based on our long relationships, they uniformly understood this was not my intent, but because it was the result, I have deleted the tweet and apologize for any hurt my effort caused, especially within the African-American community.”

Source: New York Times June 08, 2020 22:30 UTC