When he took command of Virginia Military Institute six months after the murder of George Floyd — and five months ahead of a blistering report on rampant racism and sexism at the institution — Maj. Gen. Cedric T. Wins, a retired Army commander, had a difficult mission: take on an entrenched, racist “good old boy” culture at the nation’s oldest state-funded military college.
Wins, a Black man leading a school whose cadets fought and died for the Confederacy, won some uphill battles, including removing a prominent statue of Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson. But VMI’s powerful alumni network of White politicians and businessmen counterattacked, criticizing Wins for moving the 185-year-old school too far left.
Last month, Wins lost the war. The VMI board — stocked with hand-picked allies of Virginia Gov. Glenn Younkin, a conservative Republican with apparent presidential aspirations — overwhelmingly voted against renewing his contract.
“Abrupt and Unjustifiable Action”
Now, as a group of Black and progressive VMI alumni rally to his defense, Wins says his dismissal stems from the board’s “partisan” decision that walks past his hard-won accomplishments, including an increase in both state funding and enrollment. And an officer of the VMI Keydet Club, an alumni organization, has stepped down in protest.
In an open letter to the school, Wins wrote that his ouster “abandons the values of honor, integrity, and excellence upon which VMI was built” and threatens to drag the school back to its “distant past.”
“My tenure will end because bias, emotion, and ideology rather than sound judgment swayed the board,” said Wins, a VMI basketball star who graduated in 1985. “Their actions undermine the rich legacy of VMI for political gain.”
Meanwhile, in a separate open letter on its website, the Black alumni network, “In Alma Mater’s Name,” decried the board’s closed-door decision. They said it smacks of an end-run around the taxpaying public, which ostensibly funds VMI.
The decision “has sent shockwaves through the VMI community and raises serious concerns about the motives behind this abrupt and unjustifiable action,” the letter states.
Located in Lexington, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley, VMI is one of a handful of what’s known as “senior military academies,” including The Citadel in South Carolina and Texas A&M University. Like The Citadel, VMI’s 1,700 students are all cadets who participate in military training. Most graduates will enter the military as commissioned officers.
Confederate roots
Founded decades before the opening battles of the Civil War, VMI nonetheless has deep ties to the Confederacy. Jackson, the Confederate general, taught at the school, rebel soldiers trained on its grounds, and VMI pays tribute each year to 10 cadets who died fighting the Union Army at the Battle of New Market.
In 1968, VMI admitted its first Black students, becoming the last of Virginia’s public colleges and universities to integrate.
While the number of minority and women students at VMI gradually increased, allegations of racism and sexism remained constant at the school, including during Wins’s early tenure. In 2021 — after reports of a student threatened with lynching, glorification of the Ku Klux Klan, and reverence for the Confederacy at the school — then-Gov. Ralph Northram, a Democrat and VMI alum, ordered an independent investigation.
Investigators found a deep-seated culture of casual racism and blatant sexism, along with strong resistance to change. The campus’s main Parade Ground, for example, featured statues of Jackson, which first-year students were required to salute, and Francis H. Smith, VMI’s first superintendent, who wanted to ship Black people back to Africa. Buildings were named after Confederate heroes and faculty was insensitive.
In his first years as superintendent, Wins won high marks for pushing culture change, including DEI initiatives and helping minority and female cadets feel a part of the institution. Publicly held in regard, Wins regularly earned five-figure performance bonuses for his work.
But the general also faced steady resistance from influential alums, mostly White men, who didn’t like the direction Wins was taking the school. In private meetings and on members-only message boards, they blamed the general for falling enrollment, accused him of giving women and minorities preferential treatment, and argued that he watered down VMI’s standards to get them in.
The Washington Post reports that on Jodel, an anonymous chat app popular at VMI, users openly criticized Win’s tenure at the school, including some outright racist posts. They called the two-star general with three decades of military service a “DEI hire” who should “shut up” about the school’s lack of inclusion and diversity.
“Not made for people of color”
In 2021, Younkin won the Virginia governor’s race with the support of The Spirit of VMI, a conservative political action committee that raised money for his campaign. After taking office, Younkin used his oversight power to quietly replace members of VMI’s Board of Visitors, gradually building a conservative majority.
Wins has said he will stay on at the school until June.
On Feb. 28, after a closed-door meeting that stretched more than two hours, the board voted to dump Wins without explanation, three months before his contract expired.
In his letter to VMI’s community, Wins defended his four-year tenure. Under his leadership, Wins said, the school increased its share of state funding, raised staff and faculty pay, reversed an admissions slide, awarded $2.4 million in scholarships, and rose in national rankings.
The board’s termination of Win despite those accomplishments led Andre Thornton, first vice president of the Keydet Club and a Black VMI alumnus, to resign from the club’s leadership in protest. In a letter to the club’s board, Thornton said Win embodied the school’s values, and letting him go defies explanation.
“Character is the foundation of VMI,” he wrote, “and the decision to remove Maj. Gen. Wins calls into question how we define it.”
One Black student, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Post that, with Wins’ departure, they feel more exposed to the racial harassment on VMI’s campus — mistreatment that never really went away.
“This school was not made for people of color, nor does it want to conform to people of color,” he said.
This article was originally published by Word in Black.
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