Unlike her first bid for mayor, Michelle Mosby says she’s now running to win

Michelle Mosby says she wasn’t in Richmond’s 2016 mayoral race to win it. She was there mostly to keep someone else from winning.

In that campaign, she blasted former General Assembly member Joe Morrissey over his romantic relationship with his teenage secretary who later became his wife. Mosby finished fourth, but Morrissey lost his mayoral bid too.

“What I knew was we had to have a mayor that the city and the people could be proud of,” Mosby said in an interview. With a daughter of her own, Mosby said her role eight years ago was being “the mommy” in the race.

This year is different.

A 55-year-old hair salon owner and nonprofit leader who in 2015 became the first Black woman to serve as president of the Richmond City Council, Mosby is now seen as a top mayoral contender. 

In a five-person race where she will presumably face less competition for votes in majority-Black areas like the 9th District she used to represent, Mosby has built a long list of endorsements from the city’s Black civic leaders. On the campaign trail, Mosby has talked up the historic potential of Richmond possibly electing a Black woman as mayor for the first time on a night when Vice President Kamala Harris could be the first woman of any race elected president.

To stand out in a race where she and her competitors are all prioritizing affordable housing, public safety, a more responsive City Hall and better-funded schools, Mosby is heavily emphasizing her longer track record in Richmond politics and background on the City Council.

“I'm the most qualified we have,” she said. “We have three people who have never, never been in local government.”

In a race where all candidates are stressing the need to shake up City Hall and change the way government operates, Mosby has had the challenge of trying to pitch herself as a fresh start while also emphasizing her experience and endorsements from past city leaders like former Mayor Dwight Jones and former chief administrative officer Selena Cuffee-Glenn. Though she has at times acknowledged she may lack the polish and smoothness of a typical politician, she has pitched herself as someone who, above all, knows Richmond and knows how to make things happen.

To her supporters, Mosby stands apart for having deeper local roots than many of her opponents who moved to Richmond later in life.

Born at Richmond Memorial Hospital, Mosby grew up in and around the city. Her father was a machine operator at Phillip Morris. Her mother managed a cafeteria.

Her family moved to Chesterfield County in the mid-1970s when she was about to start elementary school. As one of just a few Black families in their new neighborhood, she said, it wasn’t a great experience.

“It was a rough moment in time,” she said. “My dad’s car would get egged a lot. People would throw things at our house.”

As the only Black student in her elementary class, Mosby said things got bad enough that her parents sent her to North Carolina for a while so she could attend a different school. She returned for her middle school years and eventually graduated from Monacan High School.

After that she did stints at Norfolk State University and Virginia Union University, but didn’t get a degree after interrupting her studies for a marriage and the birth of her daughter, Mesha. Mosby said she was considering returning to school to finish a degree, but that plan changed when she started pursuing the idea of running for City Council.

In her professional life, Mosby had worked in customer service for Verizon, opened International Hair Salon in South Richmond and gotten a real estate license. In 2008, she launched the Help Me Help You Foundation, a nonprofit focused on helping formerly incarcerated people get their lives back on track as they re-entered society.

As she tried to get her nonprofit established and working in tandem with other city initiatives focused on similar goals, Mosby said she grew frustrated by what she saw as a lack of responsiveness from former 9th District City Councilor Douglas G. Conner Jr.

Politics didn’t come naturally to her, but she ran against him and won despite having far less money.

“It was very unknown to me, but here we are,” Mosby said. “We had to step in. Somebody had to do something.”

Mosby’s nonprofit receives city funding. On her mandatory conflict of interest disclosure form she had to file to run for mayor, Mosby added a section declaring that, if she wins, she’ll hand control of the nonprofit to her daughter. 

“We have a lot of conversations about accountability, transparency,” Mosby said. “And so for me, it was, let's start there. So that everybody's clear on my thoughts with Help Me Help You.”

If she becomes mayor, she said, she wouldn’t expect the organization to receive the same types of city funding it’s gotten in the past.

After she took her council seat in 2013, one of her first initiatives was passing an ordinance to get rid of a box on initial city employment applications asking about felony convictions, a step she said would prevent qualified workers from being denied job opportunities on stigma alone.

Mosby said the experience of being a newcomer to the City Council is partly what convinced her City Hall can’t afford to have a political novice as mayor.

“They have never brought a policy or an initiative before council and had to get consensus,” she said of most of her opponents with the exception of 1st District City Councilor Andreas Addison.

The next mayor, she said, should walk in the door with an understanding of how to work with City Council and how to write a city budget. In an apparent reference to Dr. Danny Avula, she stressed that the city budgets and state agency budgets are two different things.

“This is hard, and these are 230,000 plus lives that require you to know what you're doing,” she said. “In all honesty, it should be a no brainer.”

When asked how she feels about the importance of maintaining Black leadership at the top levels of City Hall, Mosby said it’s “paramount.” She pointed to a recent mayoral event with Richmond Public Schools students at Armstrong High School, where she said young people that “look like me” told her they were energized and excited by her confidence.

“What we need is leadership today that has and can continue to work for this entire city,” Mosby said. “But can still be that person that our young people can look up to.”