Single mom challenged system; she’s not done yet
Latasha Holloway helped get Virginia Beach’s voting laws declared illegal
VIRGINIA BEACH — For about a year, Latasha Holloway noticed her children, who used to love school, no longer wanted to go.
Her first-grade son would cry when he saw a school bus. Then one morning during the last week of school in 2017, he begged to stay home.
“Mommy, I don’t want to stay in the locked room all day,” he told her. “They leave me in there for a long, long time.”
Holloway stiffened. She could feel the hair stand on her body.
She said children in her neighborhood reported the same allegation — that the school staff locked students in a small closet-like room as a tactic to punish them. The school district would not comment on the allegations because it’s a legal matter.
Holloway’s struggle in resolving that situation led the 42-year-old single mother of four to — without an attorney and despite suffering from dyslexia — file a lawsuit against the city and take aim at the
Virginia Beach’s voting system, which she viewed as discriminatory.
“I realized nobody was going to fight for my children,” she said. “So I then in that moment, decided I was going to have to be the change that I wanted to see in my city.”
And Holloway pulled it off. Though others eventually joined in the lawsuit, Holloway, who has no background in law, is the driv
ing force behind the effort that’s changing how city leaders are elected.
Holloway filed the federal lawsuit in November 2017. And in a historic March ruling, a judge sided with her and struck down Virginia Beach’s current voting system.
U.S. District Judge Raymond A. Jackson declared the citywide voting system illegal and discriminatory. The judge said it diluted the votes of Black, Hispanic and Asian residents.
The voting system required candidates to live in the district, but voters across the entire city could vote in every council race, which makes it difficult for minority candidates to win elections in a city that’s more than 60% white.
“This win is not just for me,” Holloway said. “This win is for all the people of color who have been run out of the city, who have not been able to live equitable lives because of discriminatory tactics that are imposed by the city.”
Holloway, who grew up in Virginia Beach and Williamsburg, said the city took land owned by her family in the 1970s and 1980s through eminent domain and without fair compensation, leading them into poverty.
The city doesn’t have a record of how much it paid for the land — some of which was used to expand Independence Boulevard.
“We never recovered from the loss of our ancestral land,” Holloway said. “They took the land from all of our neighbors and cousins who live on Holland Road and they steered those people of color totally out of the city of Virginia Beach or to small pockets where the powers that be deemed people of color would be out of sight.”
Holloway was raised by her grandparents, part of the time on the property, near Mount Trashmore, that was taken by the city. She attended Kellam High School before graduating at the age 16 from Lafayette High School in Williamsburg.
She loved to learn and took summer school to graduate ahead of schedule. She said Williamsburg had better programs to help with dyslexia. Learning disabilities run in her family; her mother had autism and her late father had an intellectual disability. He died without knowing how to read or write. She remembered reading to her father and helping him sign his name while she was a child.
Holloway said she’s the only one of her six siblings to earn a four-year college degree. She obtained a degree in psychology from Norfolk State University in 2001. She later earned a master’s in business administration from American Intercontinental University.
Holloway worked as a case manager who helped people with mental health struggles before she had her children. Since then, she said she has been a stayat-home mom.
She has two biological children and is raising two of her sister’s children. In a house near Virginia Wesleyan University, she’s been homeschooling three of them throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
Holloway said she used a 1989 lawsuit from Norfolk as a model for her lawsuit, arguing that Virginia Beach’s voting system violated the Civil Rights Act. She also said she sought guidance from the plaintiffs involved in that lawsuit and got free legal advice through a Legal Aid program.
Holloway didn’t have legal counsel until 10 months later, when she sought out the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit that advocates for unrestricted access to voting.
Georgia Allen, a former Virginia Beach NAACP president who had unsuccessfully run for a council seat, also was added as a plaintiff in the case. Holloway said Allen gave the case more validity because she had run for office before.
Allen, a well-known civil rights advocate in the city, said she knows first hand how difficult it is for a Black woman to win a council seat. In 2008, she received about 70% of all minority votes, and 86% of Black voters backed her. She only received 20% of the white vote and lost to incumbent Rosemary Wilson, who is white.
Allen said she and others were deprived of the opportunity to represent their communities. She said she signed onto the lawsuit because she wants to see the next generation of Black leaders have an opportunity to be elected.
“As someone who has been in civil rights for 30 years, we know the scales of justice are slow,” she said. “I wanted to open the doors for those (who) come behind us.”
The judge still must decide how to make the city’s voting system more equitable.
Holloway, meanwhile, isn’t done fighting.
The city appealed the lawsuit last week. Holloway also sued the school system — again by herself — over the situation with her children.
In that lawsuit, she contended that the staff at Rosemont Elementary School made a practice out of isolating two of her special needs children in the small room for prolonged periods. She also said the staff was too rough physically with her son — and even uncovered a school surveillance video of a teacher dragging him down a hallway.
“They were being put in confinement chambers, and deprived of light, deprived of human interaction, you know, treated as common criminals for nothing more than just being different,” Holloway said. “So, you know, I can speak to exactly what it looks like to live in a city, where you have not anyone in positions of power that are looking out for the interest of your family.”
Holloway isn’t alone on this lawsuit anymore, either. A federal judge appointed the law firm Vandeventer Black to represent her in March. And if Holloway’s first lawsuit is any indication, the school district should know she’s not going to back down.