Eugene Williams, who put his two daughters on the front lines of Charlottesville’s civil rights struggle and later reshaped the city’s urban landscape with a daring experiment in affordable housing, died Saturday morning at the age of 97.
"He was a trailblazer," Charlottesville Mayor Juandiego Wade told The Daily Progress. "Eugene Williams changed the trajectory of this city."
For nearly a century, Williams seemed to operate on the principle that equality wasn’t something to be granted, but built — lawsuit by lawsuit, and later, lease by lease. His work touched schools, courtrooms, lunch counters and living rooms across Charlottesville, often starting with his own, prominently located on Ridge Street.
If his wife, the late Lorraine Williams, a public school teacher, represented the moral heart of Charlottesville’s struggle for integration, Eugene Williams was its strategist. Together, the two sued the Charlottesville School Board in 1955 to enforce the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling.
The price was steep, as state officials had shut down public schools in a campaign of "Massive Resistance," and many White families fled to segregation academies. But the Williamses stood firm. Their daughters, Scheryl and Karol, would become among the first Black children to attend Johnson Elementary and Lane High schools when Charlottesville finally relented.
At the time, Eugene Williams was president of the Charlottesville NAACP, a position he held while working as a district manager for the Black-owned Richmond Beneficial Insurance Company. He often said that his job security there allowed him to take the needed legal risks of suing the school board and taking a daughter to the then all-White Woolworth’s lunch counter.
"If that was all he had done," said Wade, "he’d still be at the pinnacle of civil rights leadership in Charlottesville."
But Williams was not finished.
When the city turned its bulldozers on Vinegar Hill in the 1960s, razing the Black neighborhood in the name of "urban renewal," Williams warned that government-backed housing projects risked creating new ghettos. Instead of merely protesting, he founded a company.
In 1980, with his wife and relatives, he launched Dogwood Housing Limited Partnership, purchasing and renovating more than 60 apartments scattered through Charlottesville. While he called it "decentralized affordable housing," others, such as City Councilor Michael Payne, called it visionary.
"At that time, a lot of affordable housing was in very poor condition and operated by slumlords," Payne told The Daily Progress in an interview last year. "Eugene’s vision was to provide high-quality affordable housing and give people a sense of ownership and pride."
Eugene Williams published a newsletter for his tenants called Informed People Are Better People, which offered self-help, neighborhood news and reminders that civic engagement starts at home. His goal, as he put it, was simple: "Out of decent housing come decent people, and that’s what makes a community better."
Even after selling Dogwood Housing in 2007, Eugene Williams’ influence endured. In 2023, the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority purchased the same portfolio — 74 units for 171 residents — to "continue the work of the legendary civil rights leader Eugene Williams," its then-Executive Director John Sales said.
Williams’ life began modestly. Born Nov. 6, 1927, to Septemia and Eugene Williams in Charlottesville, he grew up in the segregated South, where early injustices burned into his consciousness. When he was 10, his father was struck and killed by a University of Virginia student motorist who went unpunished. Later, while serving in the U.S. Air Force at Fort Eustis in Newport News, he found himself forced to the back of buses.
"It was hard to accept," he told The Daily Progress two years ago. "And I did not accept it."
He married Doris Lorraine Payne of Ivy in 1949. She was teaching at what was then the all-Black Jackson P. Burley High School when their family took its stand for integration. Their marriage lasted 75 years until her death in 2024 at age 98. When The Daily Progress contacted Eugene Williams the prior year to tell him that he had been named among The Daily Progress’ Distinguished Dozen, an annual honor bestowed upon Central Virginia’s movers, shakers and history-makers, he insisted that the honor must include her.
"I’m really speechless," he said at the time. "We really appreciate it."
For decades, the Williamses remained living testaments to the principle that citizenship requires action. They welcomed public school students into desegregated classrooms, offered low-cost rentals across color and income lines, and pressed the city to confront its past.
In his final years, Eugene Williams championed an effort to memorialize Charlottesville’s role in the antebellum slave trade — that for more than a century men, women and children were bought and sold in the shadow of the Albemarle County Courthouse. In March, despite his advanced age, he was present to celebrate the installation of a state marker commemorating that sordid history.
"It’s a good feeling when you’re part of a change," told The Daily Progress at the marker’s unveiling.
Less than a month before his death, at the Omni Charlottesville Hotel, Eugene Williams was an honoree at a Charlottesville NAACP dinner.
"He spoke clearly and loudly," daughter Scheryl Williams Glanton told The Daily Progress, "about continuing to be present and doing what needed to be done."
The man with the bowtie and the briefcase full of ideas never stopped believing in the potential for decency and civic improvement, according to this daughter.
"I said, ‘Dad, things are turning bad,’ and he said, ‘Well, things may be bad, but they’ve been bad before,’" she recalled.
She said her father’s intellect remained so sharp that he was still greeting visitors on his beloved front porch days before his death. However, pain, particularly in his legs, sapped his energy. So the Philadelphia-based Williams Glanton and her Washington, D.C.-based sister Karol Williams Biglow came back to Charlottesville.
"As sad as it is, we were so grateful that he was able to stay at home, and we were so grateful that we were able to be with him," she said. "He pretty much left the way he wanted to leave."
Wade counts himself as a mentee grateful for getting "schooled" at the Williams’ Ridge Street residence.
"He’d tell me what to look out for, how to lead, how to think long term," said Wade. "He was wise, but also kind. He wanted you to do better."
A celebration of Williams’ life has been planned for 2 to 4 p.m Nov. 1 at the Boar’s Head Resort just west of Charlottesville.
Source: www.dailyprogress.com
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