When Onzlee Ware was in the House of Delegates, he would have breakfast every other Saturday at the Hotel Roanoke with a fellow Roanoke Valley legislator, Greg Habeeb.
On the surface, that might have seemed an odd pairing — Ware, a Black Democrat, and Habeeb, a white Republican — but it was very much in keeping with a side of Ware that the general public didn’t often see.
“He was clearly my legislative mentor,” Habeeb, now a lobbyist in Richmond, said Saturday. “We were different ages, different races, different parties — but he saw we should bring our individual skills together for the valley.” Habeeb remembers something else from those regular meetings: the parade of people who came by to shake Ware’s hand. “He could hardly eat his food because of people coming up to him to thank him. ‘Thank you, Mr. Ware, for this thing you did for me’ or ‘Thank you, Mr. Ware, for helping me get this job.’”
Ware, Habeeb said, was more than just a legislator, and later a judge. He was “a giant” whose impact in the community went far beyond the legislature and the law. “He was just a legit giant,” Habeeb said. “The thing about Onzlee — Onzlee is worthy of a news obit if only he had been a lawyer. He was one of the few Black lawyers in Roanoke at the time. If he had just been a delegate, that would have made him newsworthy.” He was the first Black legislator from the western part of the state, one of the few Black legislators to represent a majority white district. He served on the House Appropriations Committee and played a crucial role in helping Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell get his transportation plan passed — a plan that helped pave the way for restoring Amtrak service to Roanoke. “If he had just been a judge, that would have made him newsworthy,” Habeeb said. “How many people have that many moments in their life that are newsworthy?”
Ware died just after midnight Saturday, at age 70, after a short bout with cancer. “He was so humble I don’t think many people knew he was sick,” Habeeb said. “He’d been having health issues. I just found out not long ago that he was very, very sick. It was literally just weeks” between diagnosis and death.
Ware’s final year was marked by allegations from a Roanoke woman, whose son had been charged with murder, that he’d offered to help get a lighter sentence if she had sex with him. The Roanoke Rambler reported this week that the state’s Judicial Inquiry and Review Commission had suspended Ware from his position as a circuit court judge sometime last year while it investigated. The Rambler reported that the commission “failed to obtain credible evidence” of a sex-for-help arrangement. The woman’s son did not get a lighter sentence; he was sentenced to life imprisonment. The commission, however, found that Ware had violated two rules of judicial conduct in his consensual relationship with the woman, the Rambler reported. In a Jan. 23 letter, the commission lifted Ware’s suspension, with one year of supervision. By then, however, Ware was too ill to return to the bench.
“He had a bad year this last year,” said U.S. Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Salem, who counted Ware as a friend. As news of Ware’s passing spread through the legal and political world on Saturday, both Democrats and Republicans hailed Ware as a significant figure whose legacy should be defined by the larger impact he had on the Roanoke Valley. “I don’t think Onzlee ever met anyone he wasn’t friendly with,” Griffith said. Even after he had left politics and become a judge, Ware would often have trouble walking downtown without people coming up to him to talk. He could sometimes be found outside the bus station, chatting with passengers who had flagged him down.
“Obviously as a Black professional in a city like Roanoke, there’s a racial component to the role he was able to play, as a Black man wearing those very successful titles and interacting in his community,” Habeeb said.
Ware was born in North Carolina. He grew up in a single-parent household and for a time was sent to live with his aunt. “She, and later his schoolteachers, noticed he was a little different from other boys and told him God had something in mind,” The Roanoke Times reported in 2007. Ware made it to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro, but fell prey to what he later called “fast living.”
“I got involved with some guys who were involved with heroin, and they showed me how I could make a few dollars — and I tried it,” he told The Roanoke Times. In September 1975, he was arrested by Greensboro police and was charged with possession of heroin and marijuana. Those charges were dismissed as part of a deal for Ware to become a police informant. He called it a “wake-up call from God.”
A year later, Ware’s role as an informant was revealed in court. The next day he was shot and critically wounded. He eventually lost his left leg, which explained the slight hobble that he walked with, but he asked doctors to leave the bullet. “I need to be, every now and then, able to reach back and grab my butt and remember where I was and how far I’ve come,” Ware told The Roanoke Times in 2007.
Few in Roanoke knew that backstory until it came out during one of his later political campaigns, but that run-in with the law shaped Ware’s view of life. “Because of his experience, and life in general, he believed in giving people second chances,” Griffith said.
When Ware came to the Roanoke Valley in the 1980s, his first job was working for the Boy Scouts. That’s where Griffith met him. Later, Griffith ran into Ware again in court, after he’d received his law license. Ware was just starting his practice and had no “form files,” the templates that lawyers use for routine court filings. Griffith invited Ware to his office in Salem and one night they spent hours photocopying files for Ware to use. “That sealed our friendship,” Griffith said.
Ware became active in Democratic politics and was well-known in the 1990s as a key organizer of Black voters in Roanoke. When a House of Delegates seat came open in 2003, he ran for it. He won the Democratic primary with 56% of the vote. That night, he had an unusual visitor at his victory party: Griffith, by then the Republican majority leader, who came by to congratulate his friend. Griffith was discreet about his visit so as not to discomfort Ware — “I waited until everything was done,” he said — but that visit symbolized how Ware would go about his business in Richmond. He made a point of making Republican friends. At the time, Republicans had what seemed an impregnable majority in the House of Delegates. Ware was quite pragmatic; if he wanted to get things done, he’d have to have some Republican allies. Griffith was one, and, in time, there would be others.
In 2007, an elderly white Republican legislator provoked controversy by questioning why the General Assembly needed to pass an apology for slavery (the apology passed) and said that Black Virginians should “get over it.” While others were quick to condemn the legislator for his remarks, Ware responded that was “not the Frank Hargrove I know.” Ware told the Daily Press in Newport News: “He’s been one of those delegates who has always reached out to me. He’s given me good sound advice. We’ve had plenty of conversations. I’ve never felt any racial tension between us. Although we disagree with Del. Hargrove’s statement, this is America. It’s OK for him to feel that way. But my job is to enlighten him, not to try and further incite the debate.”
When Griffith was elected to Congress in 2010, and Habeeb was elected to replace him, Ware quickly reached out to the new Republican legislator. “He was one of the first people to wrap his arms around me and welcome me, not just as a colleague representing the Roanoke Valley but also guiding me in the relationship side of Richmond,” Habeeb said. “I don’t think many people back home know how important Onzlee was to the Roanoke Valley.” For a long time, the Roanoke Valley was home to some of the most senior legislators in Richmond. By the 2010s, there was a generational turnover, prompting worries about the region’s lack of clout in the General Assembly. “When I got to Richmond I realized that Onzlee had done such an extraordinary job building relationships, especially his role on House Appropriations, that he was a more significant player than people recognized.”
That’s because Ware was one of those quiet legislators who said little in public, preferring to work behind the scenes. “Onzlee was beloved across the aisle,” Habeeb said. It wasn’t just Republicans whom Ware befriended, though. After Democrat Luke Torian of Prince William County was elected in 2009, Ware “took me under his wing and mentored me,” Torian said. “We remained consistent friends up until his passing.” Today, Torian is one of the most powerful figures in Richmond as chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.
Ware’s most public role in Richmond came in 2013, when McDonnell was trying to get his transportation plan passed. The governor needed help from Democrats because some Republicans refused to support the measure, which raised the sales tax (while eliminating the tax on gasoline). Ware became one of those key Democratic votes. He was the only House Democrat who served on the conference committee that worked out the final details. That final plan included a funding mechanism to extend passenger rail to Roanoke — which has proven to be so successful that there are now two trains a day to the city, and plans to extend the service to Christiansburg and possibly Bristol.
McDonnell singled out Ware for praise in his final State of the Commonwealth address.
Ware abruptly resigned the legislature a week after being reelected to a sixth term in 2013. At the time he said he needed to spend more time with his ailing mother, who had recently suffered a stroke. It was widely expected that the Republican-controlled legislature would reward him with a judgeship — and it did — but Habeeb said Ware’s concern for his mother was legitimate. “Onzlee’s mom lived with him,” he said. “She dealt with significant health issues as she got older. Having to be a lawyer, a legislator, taking care of your mom, driving back and forth to Richmond” — that was a burden.
Ware was succeeded in the House by Democrat Sam Rasoul, who has since risen to become chairman of the House Education Committee in a Democratic-controlled legislature, something that was hard to envision in Ware’s time in Richmond. Rasoul said that after he was elected, Ware gave him two pieces of advice: “Number one, I need to sit down and be quiet. Number two, that I will need to learn to work with both sides of the aisle to get anything done.”
Rasoul said Ware also had an unusual request. “He then told me he’d like me to take his place in the Black Caucus. That’s not exactly how membership works, you don’t take someone’s place.” Rasoul also isn’t Black; he’s of Palestinian heritage. However, Rasoul said Ware thought it important for the western part of the state to be represented in the Black Caucus. Rasoul said Ware called the caucus chair, state Sen. Mamie Locke, D-Hampton, to make his case, and Rasoul followed up with a visit. “She said, ‘Because we love Onzlee so much, we are going to adopt you.’ So for the first year of my tenure, I was always introduced as the adopted member. Today I serve as the only non-Black member of the Black Caucus because of his advocacy.”
As expected, Ware was soon made a judge in juvenile and domestic relations court, only the second Black judge in the western part of the state (George Harris of Roanoke was the first). “While he was always true to the law, he viewed his job as more significant than the law,” Habeeb said. “I think he felt the weight of being a Black man in a robe in a courtroom where frequently young Black men are standing before him. He was going to get one brief moment in time to impact another human.” Ware would often come down off the bench to talk to defendants in a very personal way. “I saw him talk to people about the way they were dressed in court,” Habeeb said. “He’d do it in a stern way, but also a loving way because often the person didn’t own the clothes they needed to wear and no had one had ever talked to them about that.”
Griffith echoed that. “He was always a good example when on the juvenile bench that you can turn your life around. You don’t have to be a hoodlum. I think that brought a real special meaning to the court.”
Habeeb said that the burden of that role may have prompted Ware to seek, and receive, a later position as a circuit court judge. “I’ve never seen anyone be as successful as he was following a second chance,” Habeeb said. “I think that’s what made him so special; he really understood redemption. … The messages I’ve gotten as word has gotten out about Onzlee have come from most significant political figures, business figures, in the law, white and Black. Onzlee mattered.”
When Torian received word of Ware’s illness, he made a special trip to Roanoke last Saturday to meet with his mentor one last time. On Monday, when the House of Delegates reconvenes, Torian and Rasoul will deliver tributes to Ware.
“I will be reminding folks that we have lost a great statesman from our ranks,” Torian said. “Those of us who knew him, we will miss him dearly. Those who did not have the opportunity, they missed an opportunity to know a great gentleman. He was a treasure to the General Assembly.”
