By Tyler Palicia, Avalon Pernell and Simona Radeva
When Fatoumata Diallo first enrolled at VMI four years ago, she found a strong community of fellow minority cadets, even though the corps was only 7% Black.
Diallo’s first-class mentor, referred to by cadets as dykes, introduced her to a club at VMI called Promaji when she first entered the rat line, a term used to describe a cadet’s first six months at VMI.
“Every Monday night, we would all go to Promaji meetings,” said Diallo, a member of the class of 2023. “It was really amazing to see other people who looked like me, who had similar experiences like me.”
She served as the group’s president during her final year at VMI. Promaji, a Swahili word that means togetherness, provides a space for minority students to connect with people of similar identities and backgrounds.
Diallo said she appreciates Promaji’s upperclassmen of years past for defending younger minority cadets.
Older cadets of color often took problems up the chain of command, she said. “To me that was impressive. That showed that they cared for us and they looked out for us,” Diallo said.
In March 2022, VMI’s Board of Visitors’ inclusive excellence committee reported that cadets had overwhelmingly positive reactions to diversity training that began in the 2021-2022 academic year. In a survey, the board committee found that 91% of the class of 2025 and 64% of the class of 2022 said the training had helped them connect with their peers.
But the training divided VMI alums. DEI was described as a “cancer” and an attempt to “fight racism with racism” in a Feb. 4, 2023, blog post published on the website of the Spirit of VMI, a political action committee established in 2021.
“In the starting of the Spirit of VMI, it was really to defend not so much the cadets,” said Matt Daniel, chairman of the group. “It was started to affect the politicians, the candidates, so that nothing more would happen so that we could turn the script around to say that VMI is not a racist place.”
Some VMI faculty members and cadets say they believe the Spirit of VMI does not represent all alumni but gets attention because it’s more vocal than most.
“I really do feel that if you just go up to any random student at VMI, they really don’t think about the whole DEI thing. I think that a combination of some more vocal and active cadets and louder alumni have really made VMI to seem what it isn’t.”
— Noah Schagelin, VMI Class of 2023
VMI’s diversity training is also the subject of a civil lawsuit in Rockbridge County Circuit Court. In April 2022, the Center for Applied Innovation sued the Institute because it did not get a contract to provide diversity training for employees and cadets.
The firm’s chief executive officer, Bob Morris, a 1979 VMI graduate, accused VMI of failing to follow state procurement regulations when it awarded the contract to a women-owned consulting firm called NewPoint Strategies in February 2022.
The Center for Applied Innovation’s lawsuit also claims that NewPoint Strategies’ training would be based on divisive racial ideologies. In court filings, CAI’s attorney, Patrick C. Henry II, argues that the contract with NewPoint is “designed to indoctrinate all VMI cadets through behavior/mindset change.”
But VMI’s Board of Visitors has taken numerous steps since late 2020 to implement reforms that included the creation of the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion—and changes to the Institute’s student-run honor system.
In October 2021, VMI’s Superintendent Cedric T. Wins accepted the board’s recommendations for changes in the single-sanction honor system, which prohibits cadets from lying, cheating, stealing, or tolerating those who do. The Board of Visitors recommended that the size of the honor jury increase to 11 from seven. The recommendations also changed the way guilty verdicts are tallied. It now takes nine out of 11 guilty votes to expel a cadet, compared to five of seven previously.
Diallo says cadets of color must pick their battles. For her, it was taking a stand in her second year when her class had to decide the design of their class rings. She said many white cadets campaigned to include the image of Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson on their rings, as some other classes had done.
“When it came time, I was like, ‘I will not buy a ring that has the symbology of someone that kind of didn’t want me to be here,’” she said.
The Class of 2023 ultimately did not include Jackson’s image on the ring. It instead features the Old Barracks, a bald eagle, and images of soldiers fighting in battle.
In October 2020, VMI’s Board of Visitors turned its attention to a 14-foot-tall bronze statue of Jackson when it voted to remove the monument that had stood in front of the Old Barracks since 1912. The statue was taken to the New Market Civil War Museum and Battlefield in December 2020.
Four months earlier, Conor Powell and Michael Purdy, 1999 graduates of VMI, had advocated for the statue’s removal in a June 2020 opinion piece in the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
“Monuments are there to pay respect, to pay homage,” Powell said in an interview. “I think removing the Stonewall Jackson statue was the right thing to do because frankly I don’t think you want America’s future officers to be paying homage to a Confederate leader.”
While at VMI, Powell said, he always wondered about the Confederate iconography on post.
“I remember thinking to myself, ‘It’s pretty strange that when we walk out of barracks that we would salute a statue of a Confederate general over saluting the American flag, which is standing right next to it,” he said.
Purdy said in an interview that he would like to see VMI remove other Confederate iconography on the campus.
“They still have dozens of different pieces of iconography laying around, a lot of things that are put there for veneration purposes,” he said.
For example, the Virginia Mourning Her Dead monument is situated in front of the Nichols Engineering Building. It marks the graves of 10 cadets who died fighting for the Confederacy at the Battle of New Market during the Civil War. Every year, VMI holds a commemoration ceremony that includes a roll call of the names of all fallen cadets, a chaplain-led prayer, a three-volley gun salute, and the placement of floral tributes.
Diallo says the cadet experience at VMI will improve as it attracts more minorities and women.
“Places that remain static and not conducive to change will not grow, will not develop leaders,” she said. “Those people will help change the Institute for the better.”