ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, October 24, 1996 TAG: 9610240044
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAN CASEY STAFF WRITER
CITY LEADERS suggested negotiations between TAP and residents over the Henry Street Music Center.
The debate over the fate of the Henry Street Music Center will continue.
After more than an hour of emotional remarks in which some black residents accused the city of destroying their history and ignoring them, City Council members on Wednesday called for negotiations between the residents and Total Action Against Poverty on access to the music center and the possibility of changing its name back to the Hotel Dumas.
The action followed three days of picketing by some black residents outside City Hall. They were infuriated by council's Oct. 7 decision to forgive a $212,000 loan the city made to TAP in 1990 for asbestos removal at the building. A previous City Council made that loan knowing that TAP couldn't pay the money back.
The residents who spoke Wednesday wanted council to ask TAP to turn the building over to the city in exchange for writing the loan off - one of three alternatives outlined in a written report by City Manager Bob Herbert.
Then the city could sell the building to its last owners - Darthula and Wilton Lash - for the $24,700 the housing authority paid for it under threat of condemnation in 1987. The Lashes would then turn it into a community-owned cultural center that would operate at no profit.
Nine residents on Wednesday spoke in favor of council reconsidering its earlier vote. Many of them cited the $3.6 million in taxpayer money council has sunk into turning the former Jefferson High School - alma mater of some of Roanoke's most prominent white citizens - into a community center on the south side of town.
"Is it permissible to spend almost $4 million on one building on the south side of town, yet impermissible to spend $1 million on a building on the north side of town?" Gainsboro activist Helen David asked council. "Our black community has been and is being betrayed by motions and votes from council members."
"There are some old wounds that need to be healed," said Bishop Spencer Manns, a local evangelist who lives in Southwest. "There have been some actions by the powers that be that have done harm. ... We cannot whiten-out history. We have to remember history."
But council refused to reconsider its earlier vote to forgive TAP's loan.
Vice Mayor Linda Wyatt said it would be futile, because the loan was unsecured and TAP has invested another $600,000 in renovations at the music center.
"As far as renaming that building, making it available to the community, I would say that would be easy," Councilman William White said. "But forget about this $212,000."
At the suggestion of Mayor David Bowers, the matter was referred to the Henry Street Revival Committee, which Bowers now chairs. Its next meeting is Monday night at the Roanoke Civic Center Exhibition Hall.
Bowers said he hopes the committee can mediate negotiations between the black community and TAP.
After the action, the speakers sounded cautiously optimistic.
"We don't have to have total ownership," said Vernice Law, Wilton Lash's mother. "If [the black community] could have one-third, TAP could have one-third, and the city could have one-third, that could give us ownership in preserving our history."
Decades ago in the days of segregation, the Hotel Dumas was a cultural center on a thriving Henry Street that including black-owned small businesses such as nightclubs, hair salons, drug stores and laundries.
Through the 1970s, after desegregation, the hotel and the businesses gradually closed.
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