A Grandfather's Legacy Project

Here’s a little recap of my research trip to Birmingham last week! This is something I’ve wanted to do for years but the timing never worked out. I’m so excited to start sharing my research with you all!

Personal Update + Research in Birmingham (teaser) Welcome back, or welcome for the first time, to A Grandfather's Legacy Project. I created this website to serve as a home for my research and as a way to engage fellow historians, archivists, students, and activists with a history that represents and means so much. When the website went live, I was....

Happy Birthday to my grandfather, Ronald Williams. He was a Black Liberation leader, a husband, a father, a friend, and a poet. He was intelligent, funny, passionate, yet very troubled. He cared for his people, sometimes at the cost of his family. He died too young but his life has given mine meaning. 🤎

I recently completed another semester of grad school and finally felt motivated to process more old letters between my grandparents.

This particular letter, to me, feels so special. Ronnie’s recounting a day trip he took to Souris, Manitoba. He visited the Souris River and looked for petrified wood and shells on the riverbank. He watched kids swing and jump into the river and opted out of swimming himself because of the moss. He went back to a comrade’s sister’s house where he ate fried chicken, green peas, potatoes, corn, lots of milk, bananas, and beer. He went to bed to write this letter to his wife on his 27th birthday.

I just turned 27 🙂

For a second layer of context of his current circumstances, Ronnie was on the lam in Canada, escaping a 5 year prison sentence in Alabama.

I’ve been so busy with my masters program, I haven’t had much time to dedicate to my research. But I spoke with one of the founder of the ABLF’s sons this week and I just had to get back into it. I found this newspaper clipping in Birmingham Public Library’s digital collections. This article was published a week after Doc and Ronnie were arrested for Grand Larceny and held for a few days before being released. After speaking with Doc’s son, we figured this was the Jefferson County Sherrifs Office’s first attempt to get the leading members of the ABLF locked up but they weren’t successful likely due to a weak case. The shoot-in in Tarrant City took place later that summer.

“Heroism is a quality that has no immediate appeal to me, simply because to assume myself as such would cause a barrier between the people and myself. The people are the heroes, today and forever! Revolutionary conscience is not realized u til there has been subordination of personal needs and desires to the collective needs and desires of the people, so to avoid distortion let’s say that the will of the people is responsible for the actions of a Revolutionary soldier. Also, without the will of the people, my courage would be so infinite that it would avoid detection…” October 14, 1971

I’m currently going through the letters my grandfather wrote to my grandmother while he was in jail following his arrest. Getting to know my grandfather through his writings is one of the best things to come out of this project.

Hope to share more excerpts soon ✨

This project has sparked a lot of our family to think back on their time with Ronnie, which I think makes this day, his birthday, even more special than it has been in the past. I’ve spent the last couple months speaking to family and friends about him and I’m proud to celebrate him today. 🤎

Happy Father’s Day 🤎

I’ve come to the family farm in the Olympic Peninsula to get some work done. In the next few weeks, I’ll be working on outreach for the site, creating a detailed timeline of Ronnie’s life, recording/collecting oral histories, and going through family photo albums in search of photos I’ve never seen, like this one.