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The keeper of the secret [washingtonpost.com]

 

 It was cold and snowing, but John Johnson had an appointment to keep. He wasn’t going to let the weather stop him, or the worsening cough he’d been ignoring the past week. He put on his black fedora and drove across town to see a friend.

“John, come on in,” she said, and after they settled at her dining room table, she handed him a piece of paper with the names of 12 people, all of them long dead. He squinted at them through his glasses.

It had been three weeks since Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam pledged to embark on a racial “reconciliation tour” after apologizing for a photo that appeared on his personal medical school yearbook page, showing one person in blackface and another in a Ku Klux Klan outfit. “A forgiveness tour,” is what John called it. He was an 80-year-old African American man, a retired engineer who had calculated that he had six to eight years left on Earth to pursue his own version of racial reconciliation in his corner of southwestern Virginia, which was why he was at the home of a white woman named Beverly Repass Hoch, looking at the names she had written out.

[For more on this story by Stephanie McCrummen, go to https://www.washingtonpost.com...m_term=.247cf9920717]

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