It was an alarming spectacle to see just two weeks before Christmas. After most of the city of Richmond had gone to bed on Dec. 10, 1966, police spotted a burning cross behind the governor’s mansion.

“Police discovered the burning cross shortly before midnight on Governor Street,” reads an article in the Dec. 12, 1966, Times-Dispatch. “It was propped up against a wall that surrounds the Governor’s Mansion.”

Just four days earlier, Gov. Mills Godwin Jr. in a speech had decried the “reprehensible” practice of burning crosses, which he said had been “long associated with the record of bigotry compiled by the Ku Klux Klan.” He had also offered $1,000 as a reward for anyone with information leading to the arrest and conviction of a cross burner.

Despite the timing, Godwin brushed off the sug

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