Wilhelmina Williams

Wilhelmina Williams

My name is Wilhelmina Williams. I was born July 21, 1943. I was born in Memphis, Tennessee. I was…let’s see…I’m the oldest girl and the only girl. I have five brothers, three living, two died. I have…I was raised by my grandmother and I completed school until 11th grade. Then after 11th grade, I got my GED, that’s a high school diploma.

I have four sons. My oldest son is Steven. My second son is Ted. My third son is James. And my fourth son is Marcel. I have…I got four daughter-in-laws. I have 23 grandchildren. I have two great-grandchildren. I got one goddaughter. My husband’s name is Ricky Williams. I have one cousin, which is Frances and we’re like sisters.
I lived in Tennessee most of my life. Most of the time, when I was growing up, we was taught years ago about which way we had to live our lives. In times I came up, it was a different. There was a black side and a white side. The black side stayed in the black neighborhoods, the white side stayed in the white neighborhood.

You couldn’t mingle, you couldn’t mix, you couldn’t talk. We went to all-black schools. We was taught not to…I think I missed one. We was taught when we was coming up, what not to do and what to do. Because if you went into the white neighborhood, you would be arrested. So we knew not to go.

So we stayed away. And as we was growing up, the older I got, the more interested I was into what was happening to us we could see the difference in that. You know, when you’re a kid, you don’t pay much attention. But the older you got, you see stuff that you didn’t like, like they would kill black kids, put guns in their hand. You couldn’t drink outta the white water fountains. You couldn’t go in the restaurants; you had to go in the back door.

So we grew up with this. And so when I got older, my kids’ dad, he um…was teaching me about Martin Luther King, which I didn’t understand because I was like, was taught not to mingle with the white. So I started listening to him, I started understanding a lot of things about what the world was all about. And I was older then, I was grown.

I had got two kids. But it was still nerve-wracking, what was going on. So when I was 24 years old—this is me at 24—I was 24 years old, I decided to march in Martin Luther King’s march on Memphis.
We had um…it was a garbage fight. Trash people, you know, like they had trash people come and pick up your trash? Well the city of Memphis had trash companies come out and pick up trash, but they didn’t wanna pay the workers. So the people, the black, we would work all day and didn’t make any money.

When I started working at 18 years old, I was making less than a dollar an hour. We work from seven in the morning until whenever he said was time to leave. We had one day off, which was Sunday. We worked hard, made no money.

So, these workers was complaining. They wanted to make more money picking up the trash. So they decided to strike. So Martin Luther King came to Memphis for the strike. So we decided to—I decided to get into the march with him. So we started marching.
Before the march, we met at the church and everybody decided what to do. They gave us um…boards with…plaques with We Want Freedom, you know. And we just Martin. The you get in line and you start marching.

We march from the church off of Dill Street in Memphis, Tennessee all the way down to Main Street. Then when we got to Main Street, we turned the corner and the police was blocked the whole like…here is the corner…police was all like this. We was in the back, they was in the front on both sides of us.

We was like…they were telling us, Stay in line. We couldn’t get out of line, we just had to walk straight, not moving to the side, not move. Somebody did move and a fight broke out. The police called somebody the N-word and then a fight started.

I was in the middle of the march, Martin Luther King was in the front, and other people was in the back. It was in the back, the militants, ah, these radicals, they was back there and they decided to step out of line.

When they stepped out of line, the police called them names, the fight was on. They moved Martin Luther King. We all started running. We ran back to the church. They ran up in the church and they tear-gassed us.

Everybody was like scared then. After they tear-gassed us, I figured a way to get out. I got out and went home. So then Martin Luther King came back. He came back to the church. When he came back, he was gonna march again.

So he had a speech he said. The last speech he made before he died. It was on April 3rd , 1968. He said, And then I got to Memphis and the some began to say, the threats of talk about the threats that was out.

"What would happen to me from some of our sick, white brothers? Well, I don’t know what would happen now! We got some difficult days ahead, but it doesn’t matter to me now because I’ve been to the mountaintop. I don’t mind, like anybody, I would like to live a long life, longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And he allowed me to go up to the mountaintop and I looked over and I have seen the Promised Land. I might not get there with you, but you want to know, tonight, that we, the people, we will get to the Promised Land. So I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I am not fearing any man. My eyes have seen the glory in the coming of the Lord."

But when he said this speech, everybody was like, it was dramatic! Everybody was just sittin’ there, you know, the speech was important, but what we wasn’t getting’ is why he was talking the way he was talking.

We were trying to figure it out. But you know, it was a speech and we was all excited and we went home. The next day, about six o’clock in the evening, he was dead.

He went out on the balcony at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis and he was shot and killed. The person, the truth about who killed Martin Luther King, was the man in Memphis. He had him killed. We all know it, couldn’t do nothing about it. But it was told that it was James Earl Ray, which was not true.

Because the day when he was shot—before he was shot, there was a fire station right across from the Lorraine Hotel. It was black firemans in there and white firemans in there. What they did, they moved all the black firemans out and sent ‘em all off somewhere else and there weren’t nothing over there but white firemens.

They say he got killed from a boarding house or rooming house. He got shot from the fire station across the street from the Lorraine Hotel. Everybody in Memphis knew, but we couldn’t do nothing about it.

So then they called in the National Guard because they locked us down. We couldn’t go nowhere from…we had to be at home at six o’clock. Couldn’t go nowhere, couldn’t do nothing or you’d be arrested.

They went out and burned down the mayor’s house, but he happened to be in the helicopter, riding around, to keep from being hurt because people was mad. We was really mad about this.

What changed my life today, I’m sitting here and looking at what’s going on in the world today with the presidents and the stuff they talk and all the stuff they talking about: taking people’s rights, gonna stop people from voting.

People worked hard to vote. We fought to vote. We fought to have freedom. And they wanna take it all back and wants white. It’s not gonna happen and I’m working on a campaign to stop it.

So this world is…you hear them talking about taking away the ID to vote, a right to work. The right to work is where you have no authority over your job. You don’t have no unions. You don’t have anything. You just have somebody to tell you to come to work and how long you gonna work and how long you gonna be there.

So right now, I’m working with the DFL and trying to get people to understand what is going on in this world. ‘Cause the stuff you see happening now happened years ago, the same thing. It’s just Jim Crow, the new Jim Crow, with the women rights and everything that’s going on. It happened years ago. We thought we was over it, but we’re not.

So I feel like we have to keep fighting. Nobody have no freedom, especially they talk about the poor, they talk about they don’t want nobody have…they wanna tax everything, take everything from the poor people, they want the rich people to survive. They don’t care about the rest of the world.

That’s bothering me. So I got involved so…that’s what my life is about.