Richmond, Va.
Sen. George Allen’s re-election campaign stumbled again last week, as several college acquaintances of the Virginia Republican told reporters they had heard him use racial slurs. Three men who played on the University of Virginia football team with Allen in the 1970s said he regularly referred to black teammates as “niggers.” One of the three, radiologist Ken Shelton, said Allen once put the severed head of a deer in the mailbox of a black family in rural Virginia. Allen, at one time a top contender for the GOP presidential nomination in 2008, said he never uttered racial slurs, and he denied the deer-head incident. Allen has been dogged by accusations of racism since August, when he singled out a dark-skinned man at a campaign rally and called him “macaca”—a racial insult in some cultures. Allen says he made up the word.
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