News

Apr 07, 2023

Legendary Virginia Democrats Lionell Spruill, Louise Lucas face off

CHESAPEAKE, Va. — He was one of 15 children raised in a house with no plumbing,

CHESAPEAKE, Va. — He was one of 15 children raised in a house with no plumbing, nearly deaf and beset by a profound speech impediment. She, a single mother by the age of 14.

State Sens. Lionell Spruill Sr. (D-Chesapeake) and L. Louise Lucas (D-Portsmouth) overcame the longest of odds in segregated southeastern Virginia to reach the state Capitol a generation ago. But on June 20, one of these veteran Black lawmakers will be ousted in a primary contest set up by a court-ordered Senate map that lumped them into a single district.

Neither near-octogenarian is going without a fight.

"Like ‘Thelma & Louise,’" House Minority Leader Don L. Scott Jr. (D-Portsmouth) says of the pair of regional power brokers who’ve wound up on a perilous adventure. Only this is no buddy movie. It’ll end with just one going over the cliff.

As billboards, mailers and scorched-earth TV ads flood this deep-blue corner of Tidewater, Virginia Democrats have all but gone into hiding. Just one sitting senator — Janet D. Howell of Fairfax County, who is retiring and endorsed Lucas last month — has publicly taken sides in a race that pits statewide political celebrity against grass-roots brawn, a salty firecracker with 90,000 Twitter followers against a Bible quoter with the stamina to shepherd statewide candidates through a dozen or more Black churches on any given Sunday.

Lucas, whose public profile as a flame-throwing champion of liberal values has only risen under Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R), has cast her victory as a coup for the Hampton Roads region — and a just reward for all the Black female voters whom she says her party sometimes takes for granted. Spruill, a more muted social conservative inclined to wheel and deal across the aisle, calls a win for him a validation of his more pragmatic brand of politics.

Neither has faced a serious challenge in years — decades in the case of Lucas, 79. And the rhetoric she and Spruill, 76, are lobbing against each other ranges from blunt to shocking. Spruill mailers accuse Lucas of an "unlawful business scheme" related to a failed convention center and hotel plan. Lucas, in a recent interview with The Washington Post, said Spruill has worked with Republicans and against Black Democrats, comparing him to "those individuals who sold their own people into slavery."

The contest has befuddled voters like Evelyn Cason, an 85-year-old retired elementary school teacher who is active in her local civic league. When Spruill knocked on Cason's door in Chesapeake last month to ask for her vote, she sat him down in her living room, on a chair with a throw pillow embroidered with the word "peace," so he could explain how in the world he wound up at war with another local legend.

"What's going to happen to the loser?" she asked.

"The loser," Spruill said, "goes home."

Richard Saslaw, Virginia's longest-serving state senator, will retire

***

Both senators came from "scratch," as Lucas puts it, growing up not far from each other in the newly configured 18th Senate District, which covers parts of Chesapeake and Portsmouth.

Lillie Louise Boone was the oldest of seven children born to a homemaker mother and a father who worked at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard. At a time when she said the shipyard "still had ‘Whites’ and ‘Colored’ water fountains," he drove a forklift; the better-paying trades were reserved for White workers.

That same shipyard later offered an economic ladder to Lucas, who’d dropped out of high school when she’d had her first child and was married with three children by the time she was 21. With help juggling the household from her husband, Otis Lucas, who drove a bus and owned a newsstand, she got her high school equivalency diploma, and in 1971 she became the first woman to graduate from Norfolk's shipfitter apprenticeship program.

"There were some guys down there who really did not want to see a woman on the waterfront," she said. "And so they did everything … they could to make me fail." Parts she needed to weld would go missing. "They thought it was being playful but it was harmful," she said. "I was being evaluated on my work."

Lionell Spruill was the 12th of 15 children born in what was then South Norfolk and later became Chesapeake, established as a separate city in the 1960s. The bathroom was an outhouse, and the family relied on a potbelly stove for heat. His mother's first husband was in prison for bootlegging and Spruill's father, while providing some financial support, was mostly out of the picture.

As Spruill was entering his teens, the family moved a short distance to a public housing development, Broadlawn Park. It was a brand-new duplex, with four bedrooms and two bathrooms.

"It was great for me," Spruill said as he stopped by the home one afternoon last month during an interview in the district. The place was just around the corner from what was then Carver High School, for Black students. Whenever the principal called home to say Spruill had misbehaved, his mother would march over, still in her apron, and "beat your hind parts with everybody watching," he recalled with a laugh.

Despite his limited hearing, Spruill played drums in Carver's band and muddled through classes by reading his teachers’ lips. After graduation, a job as a telephone lineman provided health insurance and his first access to care. Multiple operations and a hearing aid improved his hearing, while therapy helped his speech.

Lucas and Spruill got involved in local civic groups, and by the 1980s, both sat on their respective city councils. Yet they were never close. Fellow Democrats and elected leaders in side-by-side cities, they were in many ways worlds apart.

Lucas rose through a Black power structure in Portsmouth, which allowed her to operate in the partisan manner that she took with her to a closely divided Senate. Spruill charted a more moderate path as he navigated majority-White leadership in Chesapeake and later the House of Delegates, which was dominated by Republicans for much of his time there.

They cultivated different styles along the way — Lucas, a flamboyant figure who owns a cannabis store and brought a casino to Portsmouth, Spruill, reserved and religious.

Where Lucas prides herself on never repeating an outfit during legislative sessions — which can stretch up to 60 days — Spruill's only accessory is a string of wooden beads that he counts as a speech therapy tool.

His occasional flash points typically involve his conservative streak, as when he sought in 2008 to ban a car accessory that looks like testicles. She puts the "mouth" in her native Portsmouth, once memorably ridiculing the Republican Senate leader, Thomas K. Norment Jr. of James City County, for his slight stature and penchant for pairing three-piece suits with pink ties.

"You keep your … little J.C. Penney-little-boys’-department-wearing-suits out of my f---ing face," Lucas said in a private argument that she disclosed in 2016, while venting frustrations with her own party's leadership.

J.C. Penney becomes laugh line in Virginia Senate

All the while, Lucas has been working toward achieving something no other Black woman has: assuming command of the Senate's powerful money committee — a post that would position her to greatly influence how state dollars get spent.

Lucas, who joined the Senate in 1992, will be its most senior member and in line to lead the committee if she is reelected and Democrats retain control of the chamber. But that's only if Democrats follow tradition when picking a chairman; they could select someone else.

The prospect of her chairmanship has exacerbated tensions related to regional power and the party's sometimes-bitter internal racial politics.

Lucas is already claiming next year's chairmanship on her Twitter bio and is making the position central to her campaign. She has publicly accused her colleagues from Northern Virginia of quietly trying to undermine her so they can hang on to the purse strings.

"The time has come for me to speak out about an uncomfortable truth with some Democrats in Virginia," Lucas wrote in April, launching a series of blistering tweets following the disclosure that a few Northern Virginia Democrats were scheduled to headline a fundraiser for Spruill. "There are people working to shut Black leaders out of key positions and hiding behind regional arguments."

She went on in the thread: "They have steamrolled a lot of people in the years past and in my earlier years I was one of them. But they have messed with the wrong woman this time."

The Democrats who had been lined up for Spruill's fundraiser claimed there had been a misunderstanding, that they weren't endorsing him, and that they were equally willing to show up for a Lucas event. In an interview in the district last month, Lucas said she wasn't buying it.

"Whoever sits in that chair is always able to do better for their particular district," she said while riding in a rented luxury SUV (hers was in the shop) to Portsmouth City Hall to cast her early-voting ballot alongside her daughter, Vice Mayor Lisa Lucas-Burke. "… Northern Virginia wants to keep that power in Northern Virginia."

Spruill has far less seniority in the Senate, having spent 22 years in the House before moving to the upper chamber in 2016. But he says the area would benefit from his less confrontational style toward Democrats and Republicans, including Youngkin, whom Lucas regularly skewers on Twitter.

Youngkin to meet with Democrats on felon voting rights restoration

Spruill recently met with Youngkin to press him to automatically restore voting rights to nonviolent felons upon completion of their sentences, a policy that the governor canceled without notice last year. Nothing has come of the meeting, but Spruill holds out hope.

"At least he listened to me because I didn't go in and hit him on the head," Spruill said over a $2.69 chili dog at Poppy's Top Dog in Chesapeake. "I just appealed to his heart."

***

Dozens of state lawmakers who found themselves doubled- and tripled-up in districts redrawn in late 2021 opted to retire or move rather than go up against their colleagues. Lucas and Spruill refused.

After one conversation in which each failed to persuade the other to pack their bags for the adjacent, red-leaning 17th District, they got to work building war chests that hover around $1 million apiece — far eclipsing past cycles.

Spruill was up on TV first, launching a biographical spot in late April that stresses his humble roots and support for "equal pay for women, for voting rights, for the right to choose." It also casts him as a Youngkin foe.

"Lionell already beat the odds," says the narrator, one of his seven sisters. "He's sure as heck going to keep taking on Glenn Youngkin."

Lucas's first TV spot shows her in the ring, decked out in a satin boxer's robe and matching dress, boxing gloves and pearls.

"MAGA bullies want to take our rights away," she says. "Not on my watch! … I am beating back the Republicans and I won't stop fighting."

Soon they were slugging each other.

Spruill went negative first, with an ad featuring a Humvee like the one that's long rolled Lucas into Richmond.

"There goes Louise Lucas, making sure you know she's got a Hummer. But here's what Senator Lucas doesn't want you to know," it begins, to the sound of screeching tires.

Spruill takes aim at Lucas's business interests in the ad and with a mailer raising a controversy that erupted in 2007, when she asked the Portsmouth City Council for $13.5 million to help finance a conference center and hotel on land just off Interstate 264.

She pitched it as a minority empowerment plan, in which hundreds of Black individuals would own shares. Lucas would have owned an 84 percent stake in the project, which collapsed after a State Corporation Commission settlement required her to offer the $2 million she’d raised back to investors, with interest, the Virginian-Pilot reported at the time.

Lucas still stands by the plan. "It was not just my project," she told The Post. "It was a project for the Black community to own a hotel and conference center. … The city council didn't want me to have it. They made it more about me."

She has countered Spruill's attacks with an ad highlighting his opposition to two gun-control measures.

"Senator Lionell Spruill claims he's for gun safety but when we needed him, Spruill voted with Republicans against stopping domestic abusers from buying a gun," her ad begins.

Spruill's campaign notes that this year, he voted for a measure to add to the factors a judge can consider in red-flag cases.

Lucas also suggests that she's the only "real Democrat" in the race, noting Spruill's refusal in 2010 to campaign for a Democratic congressional candidate who's an atheist and his habit of walking off the floor to avoid voting on LGBTQ+ rights measures.

Spruill says he bears no ill will toward LGBTQ+ individuals.

"I have people in my family that way," he said. "That's their choice."

Amid the bruising back-and-forth, it's the rare Democrat who's dared weigh in. Scott, the House minority leader from Portsmouth, has come out for Lucas, calling her a mentor and voice for people who’ve been marginalized.

"Spruill is a hustler," said former delegate Jerrauld C. "Jay" Jones, a Norfolk Democrat who has endorsed him. "No one's going to outwork him."

But as Spruill left the Chesapeake home of Cason, the voter who’d invited him in to explain the matchup, she remained vexed.

"The people out here are feeling just like I was feeling ’cause we didn't know why this was happening," she said, taking Spruill's cellphone number down so her daughter could call with questions.

"My daughter lives in Portsmouth," she said. "And, you know, she's just as confused as I am."