Sherman Lea says he’s proud of his career, one in which he was promoted often and constantly undertaking new challenges. He just completed his final term as Roanoke’s mayor and retired. Joe Cobb was elected mayor in November’s election.
“I always had my feet in the fire for something,” he said in a recent interview at his son’s counseling office, New Hope Support Services. “I just wasn’t sitting around and watching.”
He served 20 years on the Roanoke City Council — eight as mayor — and five on the Roanoke City School Board.
In the mid-1970s, he said, he was hired as a probation officer in Richmond before moving back to his hometown, Danville, and becoming the first Black chief probation and parole officer in the state in 1984. He was promoted and moved to Roanoke and from there, worked on the parole board before getting involved with the city council and school board. He was chairman of the Total Action for Progress board of directors and brought together both the Domestic Violence Task Force and the Gun Violence Prevention Commission in Roanoke. He formed the Roanoke Financial Empowerment Center and championed numerous development projects around the city. And under Lea’s watch, Roanoke extended its run as an All-America City to eight times.
He formed the Lea Outdoor Youth Basketball League in 2015, which combined two of his lifelong passions: law enforcement and sports.
Lea talked recently about how he went from being an athlete considered for the Dallas Cowboys football draft, to becoming mayor of Roanoke, and how athletics remained an important part throughout his career. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: You said you’re going to be helping your son, working at New Hope Support Services a couple of times each week. What else will you do in your free time? Do you have any hobbies that people might not know about? What is your family life like?
A: My wife passed in 2021, but I have twin granddaughters who are juniors at Radford [University]. I always like to brag that they’re honors students, by the way, and they are both on the track team. They have indoor track and outdoor track in the spring and summer. And I’ll follow them more now. My grandson, he’s a senior and a football player at William Byrd [High School], and he’s getting scholarship offers now, so I’m following there. So, but that’s it, to devote more time to my family. I know that sounds like a cliche for politicians that leave office, but you know, I’m 72. I’ve served 20 years on council, five years on the school board, one year as chairman, and it’s time. I just want to keep staying a little active, and read and follow sports.
Q: What sports teams do you follow?
A: The team that I follow now is the LA Lakers basketball. I stay up late at night watching those games, and the Dallas Cowboys. You know, I thought I had a chance to play with the Cowboys back when I finished college football, and so I followed the Cowboys. Tough year for us, but that’s what I do.
Q: You said you thought you had a chance. What happened?
A: They let you know that you are being considered to be drafted. But there’s a line on there that says, “We’ll call you. You don’t call us.” And so on days of the draft, you wait for the call, you don’t get the call. And so it never materialized. So I went and tried out with the World Football League with Philadelphia, and they waived me. At the time, I didn’t know what waive meant. It’s “cut.” That’s all I would ever deal with. But it’s football. And then I was an official in basketball, a football official in college level, in high school for a number of years here.
Athletics has been an integral part of what I do. I use that to help kids and especially young people, because athletics can bring communities together more than anything else, especially if you’re winning, and everybody gets focused on that. I’ve seen that happen.
It’s a way that I think that we can help, and that’s what I try to do, is use my expertise and experience I have and contacts that I have in the sports world to help to see what we can do in this area. That’s a part of my youth athletic program, the Lea Youth Outdoor Basketball Program, that we had for about seven years. I worked on that with the police department, to have police officers work with youth in troubled areas — those are areas where the kids only get a chance to see who the police are when they come to arrest somebody in the neighborhood or they’re covering up a dead body.
It was great. The focus was not just basketball. What we would do was have a person in the community to come out and talk each day. We had a period that we called “15 minutes of introspect” — 15 minutes that we would talk about life. And I emphasized to the kids, ages 11 through 18, that character still counts. Character is important. And it worked, because we didn’t have any kids to drop out. There were some tough kids who came. There were rules like no cursing, not talking back to the coaches. Their coaches were police officers. And, you know, by the end of the summer, they were calling police officers by their first name, Rick, Joe and all of that.
And then they got bigger. We had to bring bleachers out to put on our Melrose Park to have people come and sit, and we’d have the Salvation Army come and serve drinks. [Feeding Southwest Virginia] would come out and serve food. We made it a big day, and the sheriffs and the police chief would come out … and barbecue hamburgers, hot dogs, two times a week. We had that, and it went well. The focus was to have our kids interact with the police.
Q: What was the biggest impact of Roanoke’s kids getting to know the police force?
A: They understand that police officers are there to help them, not arrest them or not to do them harm. I mean, there are incidents that come up all over the place, but understand that police officers are people that care about them. Their job is to make sure that they’re safe, to get that understanding.
And when you do that and you develop a relationship, I think life is based so much on relationships, and we should have a better understanding of that, and that’s what happened. So we’d have the police chief talk to them for 15 minutes before we started the basketball game.
We’d have teachers come out and talk to them. We’d have players like Shannon Taylor, who’s a professional football player who grew up here, went to Patrick Henry. We had football players from Virginia Tech who were coming, and they’d come down and talk to the groups. Every Tuesday and Thursday, we would have an impactful person in the community come. I wanted carpenters. I wanted plumbers to come and say, Hey, how did you get to where you are today? And I’d always lead off with a question. I said, when you go home, ask your mom and dad or your guardian, how much does it cost for them to get a plumber or somebody to come by and work on pipes and refrigerators and all those things? To get them thinking about that and just getting this opportunity in life that you can do and you have to work your way up.
Q: Where did your passion for sports start? How young were you when you started?
A: All my life, little league sports. My dad used to coach our baseball team, and we just played in elementary school through middle school or junior high, and high school and college.
Q: How did you decide to combine those two passions of law enforcement and local government?
A: I felt that there were a lot of issues at the time. Back in the mid-’80s, Roanoke had a high dropout problem. Kids were dropping out of school. At one point, we were second in the state in terms of dropout rates. I thought that would be an urban area, a bigger urban area, but no, we were very high in dropout rates.
[Total Action for Progress] had some programs where you could go to school at night, or you could go to school and get your GED. But they were running out of money. What I decided to do — and then this is where athletics came into play — I contacted my college coach at Virginia Union University, and I said, “Would you all be willing to move one of your home football games to Roanoke to help us in a dropout retrieval program?” We didn’t explain to the coach and the president of the university what we were doing, why I wanted to go to the game, to have a game here. And they agreed to do it.
Some of the funds went to the school, but a lot of funds from the game went to TAP to establish that program to get kids back in school. And it worked. We brought [hundreds of] kids back to school who had dropped out, and it was the fact that some of them had problems because of poverty. They had to work, and they said, Listen, I got to work for my family. I can’t go to school. I can’t go during the day, because all the jobs need people to work during the day. And so how about if we can get you in school at night and go to TAP? The State Board of Education approved that program to where the city school system wouldn’t lose its funding for those students, if we can show that they’re back in school and they’re taking courses to help them get the GED and at some point a diploma. We did one game a year in Roanoke. It was a win-win.
Q: How would you describe the last few years of your tenure as mayor?
A: Economic development has increased, we’re doing some things there that I think people are moving into the city. We got Amazon that’s going to be here pretty soon. One of the things I’m most proud of is our partnership with Virginia Tech, and how that’s made a difference in our community. Tech has been a great partner, and with that, they have established a medical school. And I thank Heywood Fralin, because he was a real pusher for that.
I’m proud of the work that we’ve done in diversity and equality. We wanted to empower citizens, and I made this statement: We will look at everything we do: Is it diverse? Is it inclusive? Does it deal with equality, all those things? Those things are important for us. I think that was what really got us the eight-time All-America City award.
I was pleased that we, during my administration, always had a vision to do more, to get out. But it was tough at times because everybody doesn’t have the vision. Some people want it now. Certain things you have to wait and go after from that standpoint. We’re well-rounded, and we try to do those things that affect people’s lives. Roanoke is on the map. It’s on the map now.
Q: What do you hope for in Roanoke’s future?
A: Continued growth of population, and for schools to continue to do well. When I was on the school board the graduation rate was about 50%. And now, [it’s in] the high 80s and 90s, and that came during my time on council. I mean, 20 years, you see a lot of things happen, but it’s happened for the positive. So what I want to see is Roanoke continue to grow in this educational program, continue to reach out, continue to strengthen our partnership with schools.
I want Roanoke to continue a program called the Roanoke Financial Empowerment Center that teaches people how to pay their bills and those kinds of things. I hope that continues and eventually people won’t need that, but that’s a good thing that we do.
We have to have that vision to keep working, and that’s what I hope happens to Roanoke. We keep doing that, and do it with a passion. Now you’re going to get criticized, but that’s part of leadership. You have to make some decisions. You have to make some zoning practices that all of a sudden people are asking why we’re doing this. But you need to do that because we were back in, I’d say, the Stone Ages — we got single-family homes. We were built that way. But things have changed. Now we want to keep our population. You’ve got to be able to have people to come in and have multifamily housing, and that’s what this zoning piece is all about.
That’s why you’ve got to have that vision. You give it your best shot, you make sure you can do all you can. We are all going to have disagreements. Ideology may be different, but there’s still some things we have in common that can make a difference in the community, and that’s why we have to stay on that.
That’s what I’m hoping this new council will do, that they don’t lose that passion to go to make that happen. There may be some bumps in the road at first, but that’s part of governing. You have to deal with bumps, and you have to convince people that you’re going to have bumps, but you have to stay the course. If you stay the course, good things happen.
Q: Do you have anything else that you wanted to talk about or anything else that you’d want people reading this to know about you?
A: I care about our city and that most of my work has been to help our city grow and to help the citizens and to make Roanoke the Star City of the South. In a way, I regret not running [for office again], but I’m just tired, you know, I’m just tired. And the school board, parole board, TAP, then city council — and things have been tough for me, to a degree, personally, with my wife passing. You just get tired. You just don’t have the energy. And I always said, if I don’t have the energy, it’s time to move on. I think I’ve given all that I can, and I’m encouraged — I’m encouraged about what we’re going to do and where we’re going. I think the people we have in place now, especially those that I worked with closely, we’ll try to continue that. So I’m encouraged with what the future looks like.
