Everybody loved William. He was a man of great loving kindness, integrity, and generosity of heart. His life was dedicated to being a loving support for all those he encountered, not only in his family but every human being. He was the most successful man any of us ever knew. A light has gone out for us all.
William K. Williams was born in Childress, Texas on July 30, 1925, and came to live with his mother’s family in Hypoluxo, Florida, in 1930. He worked charter boats out of the Boynton inlet, and at seventeen was in Germany, liberating prisoners from concentration camps, mines and chicken coops. His feet were frozen in the snow, which affected the rest of his life. He came back determined to contribute to a world where such things could never happen again.
He earned a Bachelor’s degree from Drew Theological Seminary, and a Master’s from the University of Miami, and became a Methodist minister. He was the first head of the Florida Council on Human Relations under Leroy Collins, who called him in as a mediator when there were lynchings and cross-burnings in Florida towns, and he circuit-rode the state building an organization that would bring better understanding between the races.
He later became Asst. Director of the Illinois Council on Human Relations, headquartered in Chicago and being sent in to exploding communities from Chicago to Cairo, training State Police in humane riot control, mediating in race relations and enforcing human rights laws. The Governor of Illinois sent him to investigate complaints by students against the University of Illinois, and the President of the University of Illinois asked him to come on his staff to implement the suggestions he made. Through the ‘60s he was the University’s expert on race relations and student activism, responsible for the Urbana campus, the Chicago Circle, and the Medical School campus.
When he and his wife decided to move back to Florida to build a boat and he tried to resign, Black student protestors submitted a demand to the University that “William K. Williams be retained in a high executive capacity to deal primarily with Black people.” The faculty senate also voted to ask him to stay. Mr. and Mrs. Williams decided to stay and build the boat there on a Midwest farm, and the University created the office of Ombudsman for him.
Five years later, with a navigable hull completed and quieter campuses, Mr. and Mrs. Williams and their children went down the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers to the Gulf, and eventually built a coastal trading business around the west coast of Florida and the Bahama out islands, taking goods to families with a lot of children and no money, trading for handmade and natural goods that the Williams sold at docks around the Florida coast, including Bradenton. They were shipwrecked and wiped out in 1984, and after a year back in the Keys to start over they came and settled in Bradenton.
