Aubrey Willis Williams

• Aubrey Willis Williams
• Born: August 23, 1890
• Died: March 3, 1965

Social worker, publisher, civil-rights advocate, and head of the National Youth Administration, was born in Springfield, Alabama, to Charles Evans Williams, a blacksmith and wagon builder, and Eva (Taylor) Williams. They moved to Birmingham when Aubrey Williams was an infant. Once well-to-do, the family had become impoverished when Williams’s paternal grandfather freed over a thousand slaves prior to the Civil War and subsequently lost all his possessions. Aubrey Williams left school at the age of ten to go to work full-time; as a teenager he worked as a stock boy in a department store and in a coal mine while attending night school. In 1911 he obtained a scholarship to Maryville College in Tennessee, where he began studying for the ministry.

When World War I broke out, Williams went to France to work for the Young Men’s Christian Association, but quickly became impatient with his noncombatant role and joined the French Foreign Legion. Once the United States entered the war, he transferred to an American artillery unit and was wounded in battle. After the armistice he remained in France for a time to attend the University of Bordeaux. On his return home, he served briefly as pastor of an Evangelical Lutheran church near Cincinnati, then completed his education at the University of Cincinnati, which awarded him a B.A. in 1920. That same year he married Anita Schreck, daughter of a Cincinnati druggist; they had four sons, Winston Tyndall, Morrison Bohling, Aubrey Willis Jr., and Jere Taylor. From 1922 to 1932 Williams worked as executive director of the Wisconsin Conference on Social Work, introducing the first complete state children’s code.

A gaunt, wavy-haired idealist who called himself “the Southern Rebel” and who particularly appealed to Eleanor Roosevelt, Williams got in on the ground floor of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal as a field representative of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). He had observed the need for relief among southern blacks in the last years of the Hoover administration, and when appointed a deputy of Harry L. Hopkins, director of FERA, he issued directives ordering that they get their fair share of regional FERA educational funds.

Williams worked his way up to become assistant administrator in the Civil Works Administration (1933–35), then assistant administrator of the Works Progress Administration (1936–38), and finally, in 1938, director of the National Youth Administration (NYA). Created to aid needy jobless youth—both in and out of school—between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four, the NYA in a typical year employed about half a million individuals at a minimal cost to the government. In spite of Williams’s liberalism, the program was noted for its lack of political overtones. It was decentralized and administered by states and local communities. (Lyndon B. Johnson began his political career as NYA administrator in Texas, and Williams vainly tried to dissuade him from running for Congress to keep him in that post. Later, as president, Johnson established as part of his Great Society program the Job Corps, modeled on the NYA.)

Williams brought the black educator Mary McLeod Bethune to Washington to head the NYA’s Division of Negro Affairs, and when defense contractors proved reluctant to hire young blacks who had been trained by his agency, he asked Eleanor Roosevelt for assistance. Attacked in 1940 by the conservative Republican representative Hamilton Fish of New York as “the most dangerous man in the government,” Williams survived the political conflicts of the late 1930s and remained at the helm of the NYA until it was dissolved in 1943, rendered obsolete by the war effort.

Williams brought criticism on himself by occasionally making reckless statements—in 1938 he told the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, “I am not sure that class warfare is not all right”—and by vigorously championing the rights of black Americans. He served as a liaison between the White House and leaders of the black community. Walter White of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and labor leader A. Philip Randolph took their concerns to him, and he and Eleanor Roosevelt attempted to mediate with the president in their behalf. In the early 1930s, with the backing of the merchant and philanthropist Marshall Field, he bought the Southern Farmer, a decrepit Montgomery, Alabama, weekly, and revitalized it to such an extent that its circulation passed the million mark during the New Deal. Because Williams refused to compromise his principles on integration and job opportunities for blacks to suit the opinions of his readers; his newspaper began to decline in the 1950s and ceased publication in 1960. Williams was often accused of being a communist because of his liberal opinions, but no evidence of such a connection was ever brought forward.

In 1946 his nomination to head the Rural Electrification Administration was rejected by a coalition of southern Democrats and Republicans, who cited his past efforts in behalf of blacks as proof that he was a dangerous radical. His defenders claimed that the power companies engineered his defeat because they were afraid he would be too effective at creating electrical cooperatives. Williams subsequently became president of the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF), an organization that was attempting to end segregation in the South by challenging white supremacist voting systems, sponsoring an investigation into discrimination in the field of medicine, and holding interracial conferences on the implementation of federal integrationist rulings. In 1954 Senator James O. Eastland of Mississippi, acting in the name of the Internal Security Subcommittee, investigated SCEF and Williams for subversion. SCEF survived and in the early 1960s made a grant to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to back a speaker who traveled through the South attempting to explain the civil-rights movement to white students. Much of SCEF’s support came from courageous individuals in the southern religious establishment, including a handful of Protestant bishops.

In 1963 Williams sold his publishing interests and moved to Washington, D.C. He died of cancer at his home there at the age of seventy-four.

Williams was one of an often neglected breed, the southern liberal. He exercised power effectively on the national level during the Roosevelt years, smoothly using the channels of authority to implement his humane impulses. Motivated by a religious spirit, he exhibited the extraordinary courage of the few white southerners who dared to challenge the mores of the South in the South, laying the foundations for the more successful civil-rights movement yet to come.

Aubrey Williams’s papers are at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, New York; they contain an unfinished autobiography entitled “A Southern Rebel.” Williams’s role in the New Deal is briefly treated in the traditional literature on the period—see, for example, A. M. Schlesinger Jr., The Age of Roosevelt, vol. 2: The Coming of the New Deal (1958) and W. E. Leuchtenberg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (1963)—and more fully in J. P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin (1971). See also The Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 7 (1981); Current Biography, May 1940; The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, The New York Times, March 20, 1954, September 13, 1955, October 11, 1955, and March 5, 1965; and the Daily Worker, March 16, 1954. Additional information for this sketch was provided by Robert Zellner, formerly of the Southern Conference Education Fund.