Junius Williams Quotes

#1. Knocking on doors wasn't working. We had to try something else. Remember the kids whose natural curiosity brought them into our little office on the corner? We set up a Freedom School that was fashioned after the SNCC Freedom Schools in Mississippi and other places.

Junius Williams

#2. There was an aura about King that was unforgettable. I seem him now in my mind's eye: collected, peaceful, calm. He was in his element and totally in command of himself and the situation.

Junius Williams

#3. So on June 16, 1970, history was made in Newark. Ken Gibson became the first black mayor of a major Northeastern city.

Junius Williams

#4. Life was not always so peaceful and rewarding at NAPA (the office). Sometime during 1968, I cam back to the office and found the plate glass window shattered. I asked Ab what happened, and he strangely knew nothing.

Junius Williams

#5. The enemy was not the Klan but the inside-outside lock that racism and classism had on the minds of the people: It operated from the inside through self-hate and self-doubt, and from the outside through the police, carnivorous landlords, and the welfare system.

Junius Williams

#6. Black power showed up in different ways, depending on the goals of the group.

Junius Williams

#7. Later that year, the Voting Rights Act opened the door for thousands to register for the first time.

Junius Williams

#8. We learned how to envision a different neighborhood, fought for the resources to make it happen, and in March 1968, through the Medical School Agreements, had been given the green light to proceed. All we had to do was make it happen
and ascend to a new level of power in the community.

Junius Williams

#9. By the middle to the end of the 1970s, Black Power as we envisioned was a dream deferred. And I was no longer in a position to awaken the minds of the people about what was happening.

Junius Williams

#10. There are turning points in everyone's life when we have to fight, even if we have to do it by ourselves and in public.

Junius Williams

#11. I had never run a campaign, but I was an organizer. My job was to create momentum by mobilizing the constituency we had, which I was positioned to do.

Junius Williams

#12. But despite the scarcity of confrontation with whites in our neighborhood, race and racism permeated every aspect of our lives. Our parents taught us that in order to succeed, we 'had to be twice as good as white folks.' We were constantly being prepared to enter a world dominated by whites.

Junius Williams

#13. The youth were to be trained to be the vanguard of the next battlefront, whatever that was. I knew within my heart that the Gibson experiment in city hall would attract enemies, so I intended to teach these young people how to fight on this new battlefield.

Junius Williams

#14. I had no way of predicting that Selma to Montgomery was indeed to be the last great civil rights march of the era, and that everything afterward would indeed by 'post-civil rights.

Junius Williams