|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Leonardo “Leo” Williams stood tall on the stage inside Fletcher Hall at the historic Carolina Theatre, preparing to give his first State of the City address as the newly elected mayor of Durham. The Sound Machine, North Carolina Central University’s marching band, filled the walkways and flanked the mayor as a large screen cycled through photos of Durham life.
Williams’s hour-long speech was teeming with spectacle, distinguishing his address from those his predecessors delivered inside city hall.
“I charge you all to be bold in your vision for this community and seek out opportunities to be involved in the work to make the American Dream Durham’s reality,” Williams implored the crowd during his April address.
Williams, 43, is one of the youngest mayors in the city’s history. As a former NCCU drum major and Southern High School band director, he knows how to put on a show. While his predecessor, retired judge Elaine O’Neal, mostly stayed out of the public eye, Williams, a towering 6’4”, is easily spotted bouncing between city hall meetings, the restaurants he manages with his wife, community events, and political rallies and, occasionally, shredding on a skateboard in the middle of CCB Plaza.
Last fall, Williams captured nearly two-thirds of the vote, running as a charismatic business leader ready to take on the urgent challenge of putting Durham back on course. His big-tent approach to coalition building earned him endorsements across the political spectrum, from the progressive People’s Alliance to the moderate Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People and Friends of Durham PACs.
But actions speak louder than words. Nine months into his tenure, Williams has a tangible record on housing, transit, infrastructure, and the economy. Now, his constituents are looking for delivery on his most ambitious promises: revitalizing downtown, improving public safety, and procuring more affordable housing.
With pressing issues and a need for detailed policy considerations on the table, can Williams’s enthusiasm and egalitarian approach to politics be enough to launch Durham’s next era?
An Education
Williams, like many who plant roots here, came to the Bull City for an education. He grew up with his mom and three younger siblings in rural Halifax County, where farming and other blue-collar industries still dominated the economy. College was one of the few tickets out.
Williams’s mother, Yolanda Bailey, inspired him to pursue a degree in teaching. She had served on the board of the North Carolina Teachers Association, the predecessor to what’s commonly thought of as the statewide teachers’ union, the North Carolina Association of Educators (NCAE). Bailey taught in Halifax and Nash County schools for 44 years, taking her son on work trips to witness community activism firsthand.
“She was a leader,” Williams recalls. “Everybody around her, they were educators. It was a village, and I was the baby of the conference. I remember it vividly, just being around them.”
Williams arrived at NCCU in 1999, where he majored in music education and education psychology and was recruited to join the marching band.
Williams met Zweli Moyo on campus during their freshman year. She had come from Zimbabwe to study hospitality and tourism, and the two became fast friends. They bonded over their love for food—Zweli cooked meals packed with spice and flavor that captivated Williams. She says his commitment to service kept him constantly busy.
“When I met him, his life revolved around social activities and being actively involved in whatever he was doing, like band or youth camp,” she says. “He took it so seriously and made it a top priority.”
But the two went their separate ways after college, her to various Triangle restaurants and Williams to public education, first as a high school classroom teacher and band director. Williams joined the Durham Association of Educators (DAE) and served the board from 2008 to 2010. While he describes himself as a committed Democrat, Williams says he registered as an independent during that time so that Republicans “would pick up my calls.”
In 2017, the Republican-led General Assembly proposed converting two Durham public schools, Glenn Elementary and Lakewood Elementary, into charters through what became known as the Innovative School District (ISD). Williams was working as an education consultant at the time, and his good friend Terrance Ruth, a professor of social work at NC State University and Raleigh mayoral candidate, recruited him to the ISD project.
Members of NCAE considered the plan a nonstarter, but, Williams says, someone in Governor Roy Cooper’s office told him that the cabinet was working with bipartisan members of the General Assembly to “pull out the good parts” and provide increased flexibility for public school principals. This excited Williams: “That was my whole criticism … Why is it that charter schools and private schools have all the flexibility, but our public school administrators don’t?”
But it soon became clear to Williams that Republicans were using the initiative to orchestrate a takeover of public schools. Williams says he sounded the alarm to the DAE.
“This is not what was advertised,” says Williams. “This is not some feel-good, try and support principals. This is a takeover.”
Williams’s own reputation as a champion of public schools was on the line. At a community meeting, Williams says NCAE leadership singled him out as the “architect of the charter school takeover.” While he eventually resigned from the project, his involvement burned bridges with some in the education space.
Williams says he’s managed to rebuild some of them in the years since.
“Leo learns from his mistakes,” says Michelle Burton, the president of DAE at the time. “I like that about him.”
Other developments were also pulling him away from education. A chance encounter with Zweli’s sister, Tiny, at the gym had brought them back together more than a decade after graduation. After Tiny reconnected them, Williams wasted little time courting Zweli.
“We connected that day for a five-minute conversation that turned into a seven-hour conversation,” Williams says. “I called everybody I was dating at the time and said, you know, it’s just not going to work. I just met my wife.”
The couple married in 2015, and Williams became stepfather to her son, Izaiah. Williams convinced his new wife to share her culinary gifts; three years later, they opened Zweli’s Kitchen, the country’s first Zimbabwean restaurant.
Zweli’s separated itself from other Durham restaurants with its unique cuisine and location in a strip mall out of downtown.
When momentum slowed with the COVID-19 pandemic, Williams and others formed the Durham Small Business Coalition to call on the city to do more for business owners in crisis.
“I’m like, ‘What are these politicians doing?’” Williams says. “I was pissed. I cannot see another business close, because I know what we went through to open ours. I was like, ‘Literally, dreams are dying right now, and there’s a way of doing it better.’”
Still, the Williamses found ways to make their business work during the COVID shutdown—which led to an invite from the Biden campaign to be special guests at the October 2020 presidential debate. Williams says meeting Biden that night made him a devout supporter. It also marked a convergence of his two worlds—business and politics.
A Newcomer to Politics
Williams came into local politics as a relative unknown.
Former mayor and INDY founder Steve Schewel convinced Williams to consider local government in 2020, when a seat on the city council opened up that spring after Vernetta Alston departed to join the General Assembly. Williams submitted his application, but the city council ultimately appointed Pierce Freelon, a musician and educator from a prominent Durham family, to fill Alston’s seat.
But the process gave Williams a taste for local governance. The next year, he ran for the Ward 3 city council seat as a voice for small businesses but says he only wanted to serve for a short time.
“I only ran for council because of what I was going through as a small business owner,” he says. “I always intended to serve one term, support small businesses, and get out of the way.”
The DAE endorsed his opponent, community organizer AJ Williams; Burton says some members still questioned whether he’d look out for public schools.
After conversations with Leo Williams, Burton says, she personally felt he had been doing what he ultimately thought was best for students at the time.
“People at their core really want children to have a great education, to grow up, to live to their fullest potential,” Burton says.
Williams’s city council run introduced him to Durham’s unique system of political PACs and alliances.
“Leo learns from his mistakes. I like that about him.”
Michelle Burton, former school board member
“I did not look at it as political. I looked at it as a service,” he says. “I had to be navigated through the political process.”
He ultimately won by fewer than 1,000 votes.
In his first term, Williams came across as a peacekeeper and go-between for the increasingly fractured council, particularly in the waning months of O’Neal’s tenure amid extortion allegations, a verbal and allegedly physical confrontation between council members, and a growing chasm on housing policy.
But the disarray within the council was eroding his patience.
“I wrote a handwritten resignation letter and one of the custodians actually ripped it up,” Williams says. “I was gonna submit my letter and just leave the council because there was so much fighting and arguing.”
When O’Neal announced she would not seek reelection in June 2023, signs pointed to Mark-Anthony Middleton, the mayor pro tem, as a natural successor.
“It was a really hard two years to sit through,” Williams says. “So I was constantly in Middleton’s ear, saying, ‘You need to run, you need to run.’”
Candidates started to enter the race, but when no sitting council member announced a run, people started looking to Williams.
“I started hearing, ‘Leo, you just need to run for mayor,’” Williams says. “I’m like, ‘No, absolutely not. Do you see how folks are acting on this council now? You see how people in the community are acting? Do you think I have time for that?’”
In July 2023, state senator Mike Woodard announced his plans to run for mayor. And in late July, council member DeDreana Freeman announced she would run. With the clock ticking on the filing deadline, Schewel invited Williams over and made a final appeal. Williams announced two days later.
In a crowded field, Williams separated himself by simply having less baggage than the other two candidates.
Freeman’s alleged altercation and recent votes had created a schism with some in the city’s progressive faction, and political rivals characterized her campaign as a continuation of a dysfunctional administration.
While Woodard had represented Durham in the state senate for 12 years and as a council member before that, his willingness to work with Republicans in an increasingly polarized political environment had soured enough folks to dampen his chances.
Still, Williams had his own limitations. Rural county residents and environmental advocates were displeased with his votes for development. And solid waste workers and some other city employees held Williams responsible for a 2023 budget that did not include requested raises.
Williams presented as cool, calm, and collected—a candidate who was open-minded and pragmatic. That earned him endorsements from a broad spectrum of political organizations, including from Durham’s most influential PACs, the People’s Alliance and the Committee on the Affairs of Black People, a feat that’s almost unheard of in Durham politics. He ended up winning with 63 percent of the vote.
Under the Big Tent
Two months into Williams’s term, a mass of protesters poured into city hall. Quay Weston, a Durham resident, delivered remarks connecting gentrification and displacement in Durham to displacement in Gaza that set off a 30-minute-long demonstration where protesters sang and left roses at the foot of the dais as police huddled in front of the city council.
“We are not only in a housing crisis but also in a crisis when it comes to our priorities,” Weston told the crowd. “As we witness increased housing insecurity and displacement of Durham residents, it must be connected to the displacement of Palestinian people through genocidal actions that are being funded by our tax dollars.”
On February 19, Williams was one of two council members to vote against adopting a ceasefire resolution, putting his relationship with Durham’s young progressive activists in question.
Weston says leaders like Williams “become this brand and this persona, but in their decisions, they are often opposed to the work that’s happening on the ground with grassroots organizations.”
The protests led to more stringent administration of the rules and procedures in city hall—limiting the time to speak at public hearings, restricting the number of attendees per the building fire code, and keeping remarks from residents and colleagues germane to the topic, all in an effort to cut down on bloated meeting times. Weston and others see this shift in policy as an ambition-driven show of strength on Williams’s part.
But restoring order to the city council was one of the keystones of Williams’s mayoral campaign.
“We had a work session that started at 1 p.m.,” Williams says one day in July. “We got out at 7:30 p.m. Monday night. We started at 7 p.m. [another night], we got out at 1:30 in the morning. No business owner in their right mind is going to want to be a part of that. I’m not in my right mind.”
Williams says meeting procedures are likely to get even stricter as the council returns after the summer recess. It’s just one of the ways Williams conducts “the people’s business,” as former mayor O’Neal often called it, in stark contrast to his predecessor.
Williams has been an outspoken proponent of growth, and his votes follow suit. Williams and some others on council say the housing shortage is too substantial for them to say no to new development.
But many residents aren’t sold. More than any other issue, they come to city hall to condemn approval of thousands of housing units, much of it in southeast Durham. The tension led to a member of the planning commission resigning in early June over what he described as being “dismissed, at times ignored, and even denigrated.”
Brett Stargell, a local political consultant, led a training to recruit and support candidates that Williams attended in 2020. Stargell says Williams’s votes on development make sense in the context of a growing city, even as state laws bind leaders when it comes to implementing progressive property taxes and regulating growth.
“We want to continue to pay our city workers at a level that keeps up with inflation, and continue to fund a lot of the programs designed to reduce violence, alleviate poverty,” Stargell says. “There’s already a lot of tension within our budget and questions about sustainability.”
Despite these differences, Williams says there is little ill will between him and his constituents.
“We don’t hate each other,” Williams says. “They may hate my votes, and it may be a little annoying that they always come and say the same thing. But I love those folks because I know we share a passion for this community.”
“My communication strategy is being accessible, honest, and transparent,” he says. “We should be able to talk about anything.”
Williams is certainly a Democrat of the more moderate variety, and his voting pattern doesn’t easily track along Durham’s more left-leaning politics.
In addition to the no-vote on the ceasefire resolution, Williams backed extending the city’s use of the ShotSpotter technology, votes that alienated Durham’s progressives, many of whom had campaigned for Williams and endorsed him. Former city council member Jillian Johnson says, to some degree, that’s not unexpected.
“I don’t think the majority of people vote based on a consistent political ideology or a coherent political strategy,” Johnson says. “Elections tend to be more about personality and familiarity. And so there’s this interesting paradox where the skills that are required to win an election are not the same skills that are required to be a good elected official.”
For Williams, the skills that propelled him to the mayor’s office are what make up his governing philosophy: everyone is invited into the tent. He used the ceasefire vote as an example, explaining that, while he is personally in favor of a ceasefire resolution, he voted against one because he wanted the record to reflect that the city’s residents were divided on the topic.
“My first priority is to lead the city,” Williams says. “I wanted to vote for the ceasefire, but I did not because I needed that vote to be broken, to represent the voice of this community, which was also broken. It was split … but what you cannot deny is everybody had a voice.”
While this “big-tent” style has lost Williams a few fans, it has also led to compromises and significant policy victories. In June, the council unanimously passed the 2024–25 budget without much blowback.
“I don’t think this budget reflects the budget that any individual up here would have created,” said city councilor Nate Baker, “but I do think that it does a phenomenal job of taking a lot of complicated views up here and creating one single document that reflects the values of all of us.”
Chief Marketing Officer
Durham is governed by a council-manager, or “weak” mayor system; the mayor has no more voting power than anyone else on council. But residents tend to think you’re either an expert in everything and can fix all their problems or you’re clueless and can’t be trusted. There’s almost no middle ground.
Balancing those expectations separates the job of mayor from that of their city council counterparts, says Schewel.
“Even though you’re the first among equals in terms of voting, you still have a lot of stuff that comes to you that not everyone gets, whether it be all the appointments that you’ve got to make, or just because you’re mayor and people know it,” he says. “My email traffic tripled when I was mayor. There’s just a lot of external demands.”
“They may hate my votes, and it may be a little annoying that they always come and say the same thing. But I love those folks because I know we share a passion for this community.”
Leo Williams, Durham mayor
In essence, the mayor serves as the city’s “chief marketing officer,” and Williams has grabbed that title by the horns. Every day he’s out and about, trying to get more residents to buy into his plans, which include big capital projects like a new convention center and “affordable living”—making housing, transportation, and other essential needs more accessible.
“He is showing up in a variety of different places and carrying [his] message,” says Nicole Thompson, president and CEO of the nonprofit advocacy group Downtown Durham, Inc. “He’s not just in one place … He’s going where the community is.”
Nor is Williams bound by the city limits. He is the first in line to welcome state and federal officials to the Triangle and rarely misses an opportunity to travel outside the state. In June, he rolled out the red carpet for President Biden when he landed at RDU after a disastrous debate, facilitating a spontaneous dance party on the tarmac in the early hours of the morning. The day Biden announced he was stepping down as the Democratic nominee, Williams was co-hosting an event with U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna at Ponysaurus.
This commitment isn’t only for the photo ops. It’s arguably paid off with additional funding for consequential projects in Durham, including millions of dollars for transit and infrastructure.
Still, what some might see as promoting Durham, others interpret as being self-interested or leveraging his position for his own gain. When gubernatorial candidate Josh Stein hosted an event at Zweli’s Kitchen in May, Williams made an appearance before leaving to preside over a council meeting. Even an innocuous fundraising initiative—selling “Durham is Dope” T-shirts to raise money for a youth mentoring program—rubbed some the wrong way.
While Williams has said he has no intention to seek higher office, his routine references to his “friends in Washington” give the impression that Durham might not be his final destination. But with running two restaurants and Izaiah starting his freshman year at Duke, Williams will continue to call the Bull City home as he has since the siren song of NCCU marching band first pulled him in two decades ago.
At his State of the City address, Williams said his leadership would focus on “fostering an environment inside city hall and the community at large that encourages innovation and out-of-the-box thinking.” Still, the challenges—revitalizing downtown post-pandemic, addressing the housing shortage, tackling the scourge of gun violence—remain, and there’s no easy way to solve them, in Durham or elsewhere. He will need to build alliances and partnerships if his grand vision is going to come to life.
For now, Williams is the sometimes-unruly city’s ringmaster. He knows how to put on a show, but there’s still the question of corralling people into his tent.
Correction: This story previously stated that Michelle Burton served on the Durham Public Schools Board of Education. She did not.
Justin Laidlaw is a staff reporter at INDY Week. You can follow him on X or reach him by email at jlaidlaw@indyweek.com.