Aubrey Willis Williams was an American social and civil rights activist who headed the National Youth Administration during the New Deal.
Background
Aubrey Willis Williams was born on August 23, 1890 in Springville, Alabama, the son of Charles Evans Williams and Eva Taylor, who came from slaveholding families that had been impoverished by the Civil War. Shortly after Williams' birth, the family moved to Birmingham, where his father ran a blacksmith shop. Work and religion shaped Williams' early life.
Education
Regularly employed from the age of nine, by the time he was twenty-one he had had only one full year of formal education.
In 1911, Williams entered Maryville College in Tennessee with the intention of becoming a Presbyterian minister. He remained at Maryville for five years and developed an increasing interest in the social sciences. In 1916 he transferred to the University of Cincinnati, but left school the following year to go to Paris as a student representative of the Young Men's Christian Association. He returned to the United States in 1919 and resumed his studies at Cincinnati, finally earning the B. A. in 1920.
Career
In Birmingham he saw the post-Civil War South's industrial poverty, and demonstrated an early interest in bettering the lives of the city's laborers, both white and black. Influenced by a preacher who emphasized the Social Gospel, Williams spent Sundays reading the Bible and playing baseball with industrial workers and their families.
Williams was soon caught up in the excitement of World War I and joined the French Foreign Legion, serving until the arrival of American troops led to his reassignment to an American unit. He was wounded in action. Williams remained in France after the armistice to attend the University of Bordeaux.
After spending two years as a church pastor and city recreation director, Williams left Cincinnati to become executive director of the Wisconsin Conference on Social Work in Madison. The conference, which promoted social welfare legislation, drafted laws that made Wisconsin a laboratory in such areas as industrial regulation, workmen's compensation, and unemployment insurance. Williams spent ten years in Madison, gaining a national reputation as an effective proponent of rationally administered public assistance programs.
In 1932, Williams became a field representative for the American Public Welfare Association. His job was to make sure that relief loans from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation actually reached those in need. He proved adept at dealing with local politicians who saw federal relief as a threat. During one foray into Mississippi, he organized what in effect became the country's first statewide work relief program.
In May 1933, Harry Hopkins, the director of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), put Williams in charge of FERA's southwestern district. Williams' background, education, temperament, and experience in public welfare made him a fervent New Dealer. Together he and Hopkins began planning for the Civil Works Administration (CWA), the first federally run work relief program. Williams became a highly visible public advocate of New Deal social welfare policies. As deputy administrator of the CWA and, beginning in 1935, of its successor, the Works Progress Administration, he oversaw the spending of billions of dollars and helped put large numbers of people to work.
To friends and foes, Williams seemed the archetype of the kind of public servant Roosevelt had brought to Washington. Williams' outspoken liberalism made his career stormy. In 1935 his support of striking cotton pickers aroused the ire of Senator Joseph Robinson of Arkansas and almost cost him his job. Williams infuriated conservatives by blaming social injustice on "arrogant aggregates of concentrated economic power. " His most controversial action occurred in 1938 when, speaking to a meeting of relief workers, he urged them "to keep our friends in power. " This precipitated charges from Republicans that the New Deal sought to buy the votes of the beneficiaries of its relief programs. Republican Congressman Hamilton Fish of New York called Williams "the most dangerous man in the government. " When, in 1935, an executive order created the National Youth Administration (NYA), Williams became its head. His work for the NYA, which aided young people in completing their education by offering them part-time employment, drew him into the orbit of Eleanor Roosevelt, who made the agency one of her pet projects. She and Williams formed a close working relationship and came to admire each other personally. With her support Williams was able to make the NYA particularly responsive to black youths. He made the black educator Mary McLeod Bethune one of his top assistants; under their leadership the NYA won a well-deserved reputation as the most racially enlightened federal agency. Williams repeatedly issued directives to his white state administrators (one of whom was a young Texan named Lyndon Baines Johnson) to find jobs for young blacks. Williams remained head of the NYA until 1943, when Congress refused to renew its appropriations. By this time Williams was one of America's most prominent liberals.
He became an organizing director for the National Farmers Union and worked with the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW), a group organized in 1938 to bring New Deal reforms to the South. In January 1945, President Roosevelt named Williams to head the Rural Electrification Administration, but his appointment came under heavy attack from private utility companies and the American Farm Bureau Federation. The Senate undertook a lengthy investigation of Williams' background and career, during which several senators denounced him for his alleged "Communistic" and "race-mixing" sympathies.
Despite the effort of liberals to defend Williams, the Senate voted against his confirmation. Following the Senate's rejection, Williams returned to the South. He purchased a farm just outside Montgomery, Ala. , and bought a monthly publication, Southern Farmer. The magazine, the title of which was later changed to Southern Farm and Home, proved profitable. But Williams did not abandon the causes closest to his heart. He stood out as one of the most vigorous white southern spokesman for civil rights and in 1947 became president of the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF), an offshoot of SCHW. Under the leadership of Williams and James Dombrowski, SCEF was a small but militantly antisegregationist civil rights organization. It strongly endorsed the 1947 report of President Harry Truman's Committee on Civil Rights, criticized the Dixiecrats, and called for a strong civil rights plank in the 1948 Democratic party platform. In November 1948, Williams personally led an interracial group of about 200 persons on a pilgrimage to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's Virginia home, and from there demanded the passage of civil rights legislation. Such activities put Williams very much out of step with the white South's determination to preserve segregation. Not only was he ostracized by Montgomery's white community, but he became the object of political persecution and personal harassment. In March 1954 he and three other white SCEF members were called to testify before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, which held hearings in New Orleans that were chaired by Senator James Eastland of Mississippi. Once again Williams was smeared for his alleged Communist leanings.
The investigation also led to the decline of his farm journal, which lost advertisers and subscribers after the American Legion conducted a campaign against what it regarded as "Communism in agriculture. " The vituperations heaped upon Williams stiffened his resolve to campaign against segregation and violations of civil liberties. In 1955 he supported the Montgomery bus boycott led by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. , using his influence to obtain legal aid for the boycotters. Five years later Williams became chairman of the National Committee to Abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee. In 1963, after selling his publishing enterprises, he returned to Washington, D. C. , where he died.
Achievements
Politics
He was among the minority of New Dealers who believed that the federal government's responsibility for the well-being of all Americans extended beyond the economic crisis caused by the Great Depression. He was, in short, a passionate liberal whose greatest concern was for the one-third of a nation, as President Franklin D. Roosevelt once put it, that was "ill nourished, ill clad, ill housed. "
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
The Memphis Commercial Appeal, an anti-Roosevelt newspaper, described him as "a do-gooder among do-gooders in the galaxy of bleeding hearts produced by the Rexford Guy Tugwell School of screwball social planners and uplifters. "
Connections
On December 18, 1920, he married Anita Schreck; they had four children.