THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 12, 1994 TAG: 9406120080
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY SHERRELL EVANS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: 940612 LENGTH: VIRGINIA BEACH
Life for Louisa Sapp Strayhorn took a different path, from the working-class Boston suburb of Dorchester to a seat on the Virginia Beach School Board, and now the Virginia Beach City Council. She's also the odds-on favorite to become the new vice mayor, but it's a job Strayhorn isn't so sure she wants.
{REST} The 11-member City Council is notorious for its bitter infighting, with members openly feuding during meetings and privately accusing each other of back-stabbing and other mayhem. So vice mayor or not, Strayhorn will need the peacekeeping skills.
Many believe this 45-year-old woman also has exactly what the city needs to make the difficult transition to the 21st century. She's energetic. Warm. Personable. Dynamic. Stubborn. Outspoken. Intelligent.
Everyone, fan or not, uses the same words to describe Strayhorn.
``She is very strong in her opinions,'' said outgoing School Board chairman Samuel W. Meekins Jr. ``She will take on administrators when she feels they are not responding to her questions. . . . I don't think Louisa intends to develop acrimony at all, but she's a strong woman and she says what she thinks.''
What Strayhorn won't say - despite hundreds of telephone calls from an inquiring public - is where she stands on some of the most controversial issues of the day. She is one of three new council members taking office in July, but her opinion will carry more weight than most because she is in the enviable position of being the key swing voter on a council split between pro-business and pro-civic league factions.
Where she stands on an issue, therefore, may very well determine the stance the city takes.
Yet Strayhorn tells everyone to wait.
Wait until she's on the council (she'll be sworn in on July 1). Wait until she's studied an issue. Wait until she's had time to debate it. Then, and only then, she promises, will anyone know what she thinks and what type of council member she will be.
But if there are any clues to unlocking the mystery surrounding Strayhorn, they lie in dissecting her personality and background. She likes to laugh, loudly. She's an avid scuba diver, and loves any water sport. She likes to read, and early on got stacks of documents on the most important council issues of the past year. On the School Board, she got a reputation for doing her homework before meetings.
Nearly everything about her is a study in contrasts.
She is the second African-American elected to the Virginia Beach City Council, and she has been chairman of the Urban League of Hampton Roads for two and a half years. Her campaign, though, focused on her professional achievements as a management consultant for Sentara Health System, and she insisted the color of her skin was irrelevant.
It may have helped her fare significantly better among voters than Charles M. Reynolds Jr., the other African-American candidate for the City Council this year and the only one to focus on diversity.
``It's not my race that gives me the edge,'' Strayhorn said before the election. ``It is what I am that gives the edge. It's the experience level I have, it's the education I have.''
Reynolds, meanwhile, had a campaign kickoff attended by mostly African-Americans and Filipino-Americans. He announced then and many times later that had he been on the council last summer, his expansive viewpoint might have prevented the Civil War-themed Dixie Stampede entertainment attraction from becoming controversial.
Strayhorn went another route. ``For me, I want to live the ideal. And my ideal is, race doesn't matter. I find that when I look at the world that way, more people will look at me that way.
``Does that mean I'm naive and think that everybody thinks that way? No.''
Strayhorn and Reynolds come from very different backgrounds: She is from the Boston area; he is from Atlanta. She grew up with people of all races in the mostly Jewish suburb of Dorchester. Everybody was a minority: Brahmans, Irish, Italians and blacks. Reynolds, his father, and his grandfather were all friends with Martin Luther King Jr., Maynard Jackson and the most prominent civil rights leaders of the era.
Reynolds placed fourth in the at-large seat race. Strayhorn unseated incumbent Robert W. Clyburn by an almost 2-to-1 margin. Clyburn and Virginia Beach Planning Commission member Daniel J. Arris, another of the five candidates in the Kempsville borough seat race, had been the early front-runners.
Despite a campaign that steered clear of racial issues, Strayhorn will retain her chairmanship of the Urban League while serving on the council. A combination of the two positions could give minorities in this city an unprecedented degree of power, and she has pledged to be an open ear to concerns. It's one reason Mayor Meyera E. Oberndorf gives for touting Strayhorn as her pick for vice mayor, a position chosen by the vote of the council.
Strayhorn, in the mayor's eyes, is a better candidate for vice mayor than current Vice Mayor William D. Sessoms Jr. He won a solid majority in the polls this May in a bid for re-election to an at-large seat and is popular with the city's business communities.
Sessoms, though, is considering a run for mayor in 1996, which would place him in direct competition with Oberndorf.
Oberndorf and her council allies have enough votes to get Strayhorn elected vice mayor, since elections brought them a total of five seats on the 11-member council. So all Strayhorn would have to do is vote for herself - vote No. 6 - and the job of vice mayor is hers.
If she decides to take the job - and it's a definite if, Strayhorn insists - her campaign pledges of vowing to stay above the council bickering could be compromised.
The dilemma is just another of her conflicts.
Her adored 81-year-old father, Renzy Sapp, describes himself as leery of politicians. He was shocked to hear his only child, whom he reared with strict discipline, was entering the fray.
``Politics is a dirty word,'' said Sapp, a retired tailor. ``Don't promise nothing that you can't do because they will hold you accountable.''
Dorchester back then, when Strayhorn was growing up, was full of working-class families like the Sapps, people who owned their own homes and looked out for one another. The crime and decay now present hadn't yet arrived. Strayhorn always thought she could have the same dreams as everyone else.
She got her undergraduate degree at nearby Northeastern University. Around the same time, she married Earl Strayhorn, a Harvard-trained vascular surgeon. They have traveled the world: Africa, nearly every island in the Caribbean, Europe - including a year in England - Australia, Monte Carlo, Mexico, Ireland.
Their two sons, ages 22 and 17, attended Virginia Beach public schools. Strayhorn was appointed to the School Board three years ago, and it was her dissatisfaction with the School Board's lack of fiscal autonomy that prompted her to run for the council.
The city's school system has an annual budget of more than $300 million, but the School Board can't spend a penny of it until the council gives its OK.
Her idea for a remedy is granting the School Board separate taxing authority. Then both the School Board and the City Council could decide whether to raise taxes. Supporters like Strayhorn maintain it would free the School Board from the whim of the City Council and ensure that school needs are funded. But critics charge it could lead to spiraling tax increases as school demands go unchecked.
``I can't imagine that everybody's going to agree with everything I do,'' Strayhorn said. ``But I'm ready for that too. As long as I vote my conscience, I'm OK with that.''
{KEYWORDS} PROFILE
by CNB