Williams served on the Militant’s staff for nine years, beginning in 1994. He shouldered a broad range of writing responsibilities -- from covering the Palestinian national liberation movement and the fight for self-determination in Chechnya, to the struggle to defend affirmative action and expose the attacks by the U.S. rulers on the social wage and on workers’ rights at home. At the same time he was also the paper’s business manager for half a decade and the director of many campaigns to win new readers. Recently, he was in charge of the paper’s Prisoners Fund, which makes it possible to send subscriptions to inmates at reduced rates.

Williams, 46, joined the communist movement in 1981 in Atlanta. He was part of Black nationalist groups in the two preceding years. While in Atlanta, he ran as the Socialist Workers candidate for U.S. Congress and took part in an internationalist solidarity brigade to pick cotton in Leon, Nicaragua. A workers and farmers government ruled that country at the time, having come to power as a result of the 1979 popular revolution that overthrew the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza. As a member of the National Black Independent Political Party (NBIPP) he also visited Grenada in 1982, as part of an NBIPP tour of that country. The revolutionary government of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop was in power at the time in that Caribbean nation.

Immediately prior to joining the Militant staff, Williams was a member of the United Food and Commercial Workers and worked at the Monfort (now Swift) meatpacking plant in Marshalltown, Iowa. Earlier, he was a member of the Steelworkers union while working at the LTV steel mill in Cleveland, Ohio.

He is now on his way to Chicago to help build the socialist movement there.  
 
 
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