He’s got a mark on him, they would say.
“That boy is going to be somebody,” his grandfather would say.
Bill Lee didn’t know quite what that meant.
“I would look in the mirror looking for the mark,” he said.
Growing up in Nuttsville on the Northern Neck, near where the Rappahannock River mingles with the Chesapeake Bay, he was a serious boy, older than his years. He came to understand his grandfather meant that big things were expected of him.
And from being the first in his family to graduate from college through Duke University Divinity School to a lifetime in the pulpit, he didn’t disappoint.
The somebody he turned out to be is the only preacher Roanoke’s Loudon Avenue Christian Church has known for the past 39 years. A forceful voice for civil rights, he learned to set aside his anger over racism and matured into a respected leader who transcended the segregated ways of his adopted city.
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On Sunday, Lee’s 65th birthday, he will preach his last sermon at Loudon Avenue.
The church has grown in membership and space since he arrived in 1977. As one of his last acts, Lee will baptize three new members, bringing the number to two dozen for the year, the most he’s done, maybe ever.
Church elders say Loudon Avenue is what Lee long hoped it could be – not just a black church, but a welcoming hub for all kinds of people working for the betterment of their city.
People ask him, “You’re so excited about church, why are you retiring?”
That he’s excited is precisely why he’s retiring. He wants to go out while all is well.
‘I had to succeed’
Lee’s parents raised him, but it was his grandfather who shaped him.
“Papa Ernest” Webster was a respected church deacon in Nuttsville. Compassionate, giving, patient in Lee’s estimation.
“If there’s anybody I thought represented God, it was him,” Lee said. “I used to hear him pray. I believed he talked to God, that God was in the room. It was almost mystical.”
One day when Lee was 13, his mother told him to lay out his suit to air out. It was a weekday, and that order usually only came on Saturday before church.
He’d need it for a funeral, he learned. Papa Ernest had died.
The body remained in the old man’s home, where Lee himself had been born, until Lee could come and see him.
“That was the first time I touched a dead person,” Lee recalled tearfully, more than 50 years later.
But by then, the idea that Lee was destined for a life beyond Nuttsville was planted.
Lee’s father was a laborer on a menhaden fishing boat during the warm months, while his mother picked crabs. The rest of the year, the two shucked oysters together.
His father completed second grade, and couldn’t read. His mother finished 11th grade. Their hope for their three children was that they complete high school.
Lee had bigger plans.
“He was always very serious,” said high school classmate John Tiggle, now an elder at Loudon Avenue. “You could tell there was something different about him.”
“I had to succeed,” Lee said. “If I was one of the brightest and the best, and I don’t make it,” he said, how could others expect to?
His parents fretted about his ambitions, knowing they couldn’t pay for college.
But Lee was a standout pitcher who got the attention of the coach at Virginia State College. Baseball would help pay his way.
With a cardboard suitcase in one hand, and his two suits in a plastic sheath over his shoulder, he left for Petersburg leaving Nuttsville far behind, at least for a time.
Looking for a sign
Lee was 26 when he was called to Loudon Avenue in 1977. He didn’t really want to answer.
Since leaving home, he had finished his degree at Virginia State and met his wife, the former Dana Barnes, a Roanoker who grew up not far from Loudon Avenue along the way.
She was a year ahead of him at Virginia State, and found the assistant to the school chaplain nicknamed “Rev” as serious and different as others did.
“He was there to study and get his work done,” she said. “It was a while before I even got a first kiss.”
Lee nearly landed in Roanoke working for Appalachian Power Co., but decided to pass on the job when he arrived for an interview and it was obvious no one expected him to be black.
Ultimately it was a job teaching remedial English at Stonewall Jackson Junior High School that brought the couple to the city.
A year later, they were off again for Lee to attend Duke Divinity School.
Lee said he loved Durham, North Carolina, where the school is located, and wanted to stay there.
But the pastor at Loudon Avenue, where Lee and his wife were members and Lee had served as youth minister, had taken his leave. The congregation wanted him back as their senior pastor.
“If this is where I’m supposed to be,” Lee prayed, “you’ve got to show me because I don’t want to be here.”
He soon had a dream in which he saw his name on the sign outside Loudon Avenue: William L. Lee, Pastor.
And that’s the way his name has been on the sign ever since.
‘I cannot sit around the office’
Lee was a Baptist, but found he was more comfortable with the Disciples of Christ way of doing things at Loudon. It’s more democratic, and less about the minister, built around the idea that each member is a minister, a concept called the “priesthood of all believers.”
But the church was an odd fit at first. The congregation was decidedly older and a mostly “silk stocking” kind of crowed, said Eva Hughes, a Loudon board member.
She and church elder Tiggle laugh at how Lee tried to fit in.
He at first took on the affect of an older minister — wingtip shoes, suit, overcoat.
“I called him the oldest young preacher I’ve ever seen,” Tiggle said.
It didn’t help in winning over the congregation to some of his ideas at first. Lee wanted Loudon to be more open and welcoming, and he wanted to improve the church building itself.
Church leaders raised during the Depression were tight-fisted and didn’t believe in borrowing money. And having seen two young pastors leave quickly before Lee, they feared he would leave and stick them with debt, Lee said.
Lee said he wanted to be a different kind of preacher.
He had come to Roanoke, he said, as angry as anyone about racism.
“There was nobody who understood racism better than me and nobody who hated white people more than me when I got here,” he said.
But he also realized a church satisfied as being only a black church wasn’t at its best.
“I wanted a congregation that was not stuck to a quadrant,” he said, referring to Roanoke’s tendency to use quadrants as shorthand for neighborhood stereotypes, particularly northwest to represent blacks.
A student of Martin Luther King Jr., Lee has sought to be a part of the tradition of black ministers who lead in civil rights.
He told church elders, “I cannot sit around the office.”
He began to visit groups across the city, from near the church to tony Avenham Avenue in South Roanoke.
“I would go places my wife had never been,” he said.
He joined nonprofit boards and established relationships with other churches, including what’s now a nearly two-decades-old connection with the largely white Second Presbyterian Church.
But Second Presbyterian’s pastor, George Anderson, said the relationship isn’t merely a connection across races. The two preach in each other’s churches from time to time.
“Our love affair with him goes to who he is as a minister and a person,” he said.
Beyond the theological, Lee has been a voice on not just civil rights issues, but the AIDS epidemic and public health generally. He’s the founder of New Horizons Health Care, a medical and dental facility on Melrose Avenue.
‘The oyster shucker in you’
Over time, Lee gave up his old man clothes and adopted a dapper style with the help of a haberdasher, Hughes said.
And he became comfortable leading his congregation, which grew, grew more youthful and embraced his lead.
Lee said he’s learned to drive with one foot on the gas pedal and one foot on the brake, pushing ahead for progress while not going too fast for people less ready for change.
Lee acknowledges having lost his real self for a while, including his roots.
A fellow minister and friend, Paul Steinke, once told him, “You need to get in touch with the oyster shucker in you.”
Since then, Lee has been mindful of his upbringing and his past.
His sermons are personal, and hang on stories from his own life.
“He doesn’t’ become a different person in the pulpit,” said Anderson, “he’s just amplified.”
“He can take the scriptures and make it apply to your everyday life,” Tiggle said. “He can make you see that there’s hope.”
‘The old familiar territory’
Nearly 40 years later, Lee remains frustrated by Roanoke’s racial divides.
Too often, he said, he’s one of a handful of black men and women called to serve on organizational boards or deliver speeches.
“They don’t know anybody else, and don’t try to get to know anybody else,” he said.
He’s invited to meetings all the time, but only after the location, agenda and the lunch menu have been selected. He’s taken to saying no when that’s the case.
“It’s always on their terms,” he said, “and when you say that, you’re a racial person.”
“To be fair, we can do better in the black community” at getting involved across the city, he was quick to add.
But inside Loudon Avenue Christian Church, he’s seeing his dream realized.
“I think we’re really doing it now,” he said.
The church is a hub for organizations that include all races, from an integrated Boy Scout troop with a Hispanic leader to the “Downtown Diners Club” of the League of Older Americans.
“Our church believes in the word of God and they believe that everybody is welcome,” Dana Lee said. “They are hugged, they are loved, and it’s genuine.”
“It’s all because of his personality, his changing, and his being on fire for the church,” said Hughes.
But Lee is ready to leave it all to the congregation and its next pastor.
The individual programs in the church can stay or go, he said. What he hopes survives is the culture of the church he’s worked to foster.
“I hope I have taught people to think for themselves,” he said. “They don’t have to defend me or hold on to any relic of me.”
On Monday, his name must come down off that sign in front of the church, he’s told the church board.
Lee said he will steer clear of the church for a while to make space for both the interim pastor and whoever the church calls as his permanent successor.
“They don’t have to fear interference from me. I’ve had my day,” he said. “I have a tremendous future I need to be about.”
Lee plans to study what other churches are doing well so that he can share those best practices with up-and-coming ministers to help them on their way.
“I haven’t sat in a pew in a long time,” he said.
Ever the scholar, he plans to read often, and enjoy the luxury of writing something that isn’t there on Sunday morning and gone that afternoon.
He and his wife plan to travel. They also want to spend time with their adult daughter in Roanoke and son in Northern Virginia without having to leave on Saturday night because he has to preach the next day.
But as much as he looks to his future, Lee also wants to look to his past, from way before he ever set foot in Loudon Avenue Christian Church.
He also wants to go home to Nuttsville, literally and spiritually.
“I want the old familiar territory,” Lee said, “I want to sit by the river and relax.” He wants to reconnect with old friends, some of whom seem to think they can’t be friends like they used to be because he’s a preacher and they’re accustomed to the space between the pulpit and the pew.
“I want to get lost in my childhood,” he said. “Or get some of it back.”