RICHMOND, Virginia — When an 80-year-old white state legislator recently came out against a resolution apologising for slavery because blacks, he said, should “get over it,” he ignited a storm of protests from black leaders.The furore has illustrated once more that when the issue is race, the past is never far from the surface in Richmond, a city where one of the main boulevards is lined with grand statues of white southern heroes.

Two black legislators — Sen. Henry L. Marsh III and Delegate Donald McEachin — have proposed that the Virginia General Assembly “acknowledge with contrition” the state’s role in slavery. McEachin said an apology would promote healing among many descendants of slaves.

The resolution has yet to be put to a vote. But Delegate Frank Hargrove, the white Republican who spoke out against an apology, said there is no point in issuing one because no slaves or slave owners are alive today.

Black leaders exchanged heated words with Hargrove. In a confrontation in Hargrove’s office, King Salim Khalfani, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Virginia, told the legislator his comments were insensitive “when you haven’t walked in our shoes.”

“You’re damned right they owe an apology,” Khalfani said in an interview later. “They need to repair the damage.”

Debates over whether to celebrate or suppress Virginia’s history continue to divide a state where about a fifth of the residents are black.

In 1999, blacks complained that murals newly put up along the Richmond floodwall depicted white Southern heroes but no black leaders. Three years earlier, the city was split by plans to add a statue of black Richmond-born tennis star Arthur Ashe. Ultimately, murals of black leaders were added to the floodwall and the Ashe statue went up.

Virginia has made considerable political progress.

Voters made Democrat L. Douglas Wilder America’s first elected black governor in 1989, and in 2004, elected him mayor of Richmond, a majority-black city.

The 140-member state legislature has 17 black members. And the state recently created a scholarship programme for blacks denied an education in the 1950s when some Virginia school systems chose to close rather than integrate. The state also plans to build a civil rights memorial near the Capitol.

Wilder, whose grandparents were slaves, said he supports an apology but does not believe it would do much to solve economic and educational disparities between blacks and whites.

Michael Massie of the National Leadership Network of Black Conservatives said an apology would not cure poverty or broken families in black communities. He also questioned the need for an apology given by people who never owned slaves, to people who never were slaves.

We see black leaders on every level,” Massie said. “America has apologised.”