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Sherman Lea has been a driving force in Roanoke since the turn of the millennium. Now mayor, he’s leading the city into its next era.
Liz Long
Gusts of wind whipped the line of people spilling from the Berglund Center on a frigid day in February 2016.
The wait from the back of the line was three hours. In the parking lot, city councilman David Trinkle, clad in a puffy jacket and fleece headband, greeted new arrivals and checked his phone for reports. On the sidewalk, fellow councilman Sherman Lea paced in an overcoat and fedora, shaking hands and consulting with campaign lieutenants.
The race for Roanoke mayor came down to this: a single-location primary on neutral ground. Whichever candidate could get more voters to the polls would win the Democratic nomination, and with it an open path to the mayor’s office.
Lea and Trinkle were the two longest continuously serving members of council, first elected in 2004 and 2006, respectively. If Trinkle lost, his term on council would continue. For Lea, this was all or nothing. He’d considered a run for years, had nearly challenged David Bowers in 2012 before opting against it, and now, in the wake of Bowers’ retirement, he was charging ahead against his colleague of a decade.
Lea ran a coordinated system of vans and church buses that transported voters from their neighborhoods, and that made the tactical difference against Trinkle’s voter database. Faced with a three-hour wait, many potential voters saw the line and drove away. Those who had been transported by Lea’s team, however, couldn’t get that van ride home until they’d cast a ballot.
He won by a razor-thin 134 votes out of 3,027 voters in the firehouse primary. Lea’s primary victory essentially won him the mayor’s office. Although he faced a write-in campaign from activist Martin Jeffrey, Lea easily won the May general election with 82 percent of the vote.
So began the modern era of Roanoke politics.
Lea began his mayorship during an auspicious year in the Star City. One year after Norfolk Southern closed its final administrative offices from the city it all but founded in the early 1880s, two West Coast breweries and an Italian auto-parts manufacturer announced they’d build in the Roanoke Valley, signaling the region’s economic transition away from the railroad.
Roanoke was clearly driving the wave. Office buildings and warehouses downtown had been rebuilt into a new neighborhood that was attracting enough young people to reverse decades of depopulation. As people flocked to regional greenways and trails, an organic outdoor economy took root. The various localities of the Roanoke Valley were finally beginning to work with each other, and through Virginia Tech and Carilion Clinic’s collaborative medical school and research institute, the Roanoke area was partnering with the New River Valley too.
Yet Roanoke’s history haunted it. More than a century of segregation and demolition of ethnic, largely African-American neighborhoods and business districts created a legacy of inequality that lingered even in a broader atmosphere of rising prosperity. In a 2015 study, Roanoke ranked near the bottom in economic mobility for the poor, which means it’s harder to climb the socioeconomic ladder from the lower rungs compared to other cities. In that it’s joined by many other cities in the South and Rust Belt.
In this moment, Roanoke elected Sherman P. Lea, its second black mayor. The first was Noel C. Taylor. City hall is named for him, and numerous city political and civic organizations have played off the name of the reform ticket he built in the ’70s: Roanoke Forward.
Like Taylor, Lea is a quiet leader. He listens. And when he delivers his opinion, other people listen.
“His ability to recognize the importance of consensus building and recognize the needs of the majority are the traits I feel has made him a great mayor and leader,” said Anita Price, who was elected to council on a ticket with Lea in 2008. “I have heard him say many times, being a leader means being able to make the difficult decisions, and that it takes courage.”
“I’d call him a quiet giant in the room,” said Michelle Dykstra, who was elected as an independent to council in 2016. “He doesn’t have to be the loudest voice. He doesn’t have to be the one who is recognized or the one who is given credit. He creates a sense of calm that has been beneficial to how this council operates and works through complex issues. Sherman commands respect because you don’t ever feel like he’s in it just for himself.”
“Usually the first thing you hear above all else, is that he’s just a nice person,” said Brian Wishneff, who ran and was elected as Lea’s ticketmate in 2004. “That’s probably allowed him to stay around.”
Lea grew up outside Danville in rural Pittsylvania County. His father worked at Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company and was a Baptist deacon. His mother labored in a Danville laundry.
When Lea was growing up, Danville was a civil rights flashpoint. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. visited twice and was outspoken in his criticism of police after they injured 65 peaceful demonstrators in what became known as Bloody Monday. He remembers how his father responded when Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
“He was adamant about getting people to register to vote,” Lea said. “We’d knock on doors, and he’d tell people, ‘You need to go get registered to vote. This is how you do it.’ I always had an interest in politics, and I began to put together how registering to vote made a difference.”
Lea graduated from Virginia Union University and went to work in 1976 for the Virginia Department of Corrections. He became the first African American chief probation and parole officer in Virginia. Lea was transferred to Roanoke in 1992, the same year that Taylor completed his 17-year stint as mayor. The Leas got to know the city by doing what they’ve always done: diving in.
“We’ve always been a family that gets involved,” Lea said. “My kids got involved with sports and band. My wife and I were presidents of the band booster club. I’m officiating in the high schools. We went to church. I got to meet people.”
When the family moved to Roanoke’s Westwind Apartments, Lea noticed neighborhood children trying to cross nearby Hershberger Road. He wrote a letter to then-William Ruffner Middle School Principal Doris Ennis his concerns. That resulted in a new stoplight and eventually Lea’s appointment to the Roanoke school board, where he met Brian Wishneff, a former city economic development official.
“I felt like he and I both, mostly him, were definitely concerned and interested in what the public had to say,” Wishneff said. “Sherman is of that mold, to take the people’s side first.”
Wishneff suggested they run for council as a ticket.
He said, ‘Let’s do it together. We can help each other because we come from different communities,’” Lea said. “I said OK.”
In 2004, city politics had run aground on Victory Stadium, an iconic but aging stadium on the banks of the Roanoke River. Lea had used it for the Western Virginia Education Classic, an annual football game played between two black college teams. He and Wishneff ran on a platform of preserving the stadium. They won election to council, but the stadium battle continued on. Even after a 2006 election sweep by the independent For the City ticket doomed the stadium, hard feelings lingered.
What did Lea learn from the Victory Stadium fight?
“You can’t let it get too deep,” Lea said. “You have to learn to accept that sometimes you may fail. You have to get back up and go forward. From failure, you can come back stronger. The thing I said back then was that I wanted the stadium, but once it did not materialize and we lost, let’s do the best that we can for the kids we’ve got in schools. Don’t lose sight of why you’re doing what you’re doing.”
Price remembers that when she was president of the Roanoke Education Association, Lea advised her “that there are times when one steps out, that you have to have a thick skin, don’t take things personally and remember that as a public servant, you are representing others.”
With Lea coming up for re-election in 2008, he broke from Wishneff. That year Lea was elected vice-mayor as the top voter-getter in the council election, while Wishneff finished fourth, short of re-election. The 2008 election marked a major step from the polarized politics of the Victory Stadium era toward a calmer, more stable dynamic, with a consistent group serving from 2010 until 2016. When Bowers announced his retirement in 2016, Lea and Trinkle both ran to replace him, leading to the showdown at the Berglund Center.
Lea’s election as Roanoke’s second black mayor came just as Roanoke became a hot destination for talented young people who love the outdoors. He’s continued his efforts to use sports as a tool to bring people together, both with a high-profile basketball event and a summer youth basketball league using police officers as coaches.
“As mayor, I’m proud of where we are in terms of economic development,” Lea said. “I still feel we can do more with poverty. There are certain aspects of the community that do not feel the resurgence we’re having. I look out and feel good about what we’re doing, but I also want to make sure that I’m doing the best that I can to give people an opportunity.”
The mayor of Roanoke does not carry the strength that many people associate with the title. Local governments in Virginia are tightly restricted by the state in what they can do. And in Roanoke, the city manager handles the day-to-day operation of the city, relegating the mayor to a largely symbolic role. And yet, effective individuals can transcend the technical limitations of the office to become true community leaders who can motivate and inspire citizens.
“Titles are important,” Dykstra said. “At the end of the day, Mayor Lea is one of seven votes. But he’s also a central point of contact. People want all of city council to take action on something, but they will go to the mayor. He is representative of the council body as a whole.”
When you walk into Noel C. Taylor Municipal Building and gaze at the portrait of Roanoke’s first black mayor in the lobby, you don’t think about what he couldn’t do because of the restrictions of the office. Instead, you think about what Taylor accomplished, and how his council transformed Roanoke in the ’70s and ’80s in a way that made possible its current resurgence.
Lea is a little more than two years into his first term as mayor, and his fourth term on city council. During that time he’s survived vicious factional feuds and played a role in the city’s emergence in the 21st century as a hip, revitalized mountain town. The ending of his political story—and that of Roanoke under the Lea mayorship—remains unwritten.
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