-= NMSU PANORAMA - Summer 2005 =- A Passion for Education

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A Passion for Education

By Karl Hill

English building dedicated to NMSU's first black graduate

Education was like oxygen to Clara Belle Williams.

"She understood the transformative power of education - indeed, its magic," Dr. James B. Williams II, a grandson, said at a ceremony in her honor in February. "She never thought she had enough education."

She was in her early 50s, and well into a long career as a teacher in the segregated schools that prevailed at that time, when she earned her bachelor's degree in English from New Mexico State University in 1937. She was the first black student to graduate from the university, known then as New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts.

Family members of Clara Belle Williams gather at the newly named Clara Belle Williams Hall in February.

On Feb. 13, the NMSU English building was dedicated as Clara Belle Williams Hall to honor "a person who was unquestionably a pioneer," in the words of NMSU President Michael Martin. A pictorial retrospective of her life opened in the Corbett Center Gallery the same day, and Mayor Bill Mattiace proclaimed it Clara Belle Williams Day in Las Cruces.

Williams instilled her passion for education in her children, her grandchildren and their children, many of whom gathered at NMSU for the ceremony.

Her three sons - Jasper, Charles and James - all attended NMSU and went on to become medical doctors. Together they built and operated the Williams Clinic on Chicago's South Side. James Williams served as physician to Martin Luther King Jr. when the civil rights leader's business took him to Chicago.

Four of Clara Belle's grandsons also became physicians; a grandson and granddaughter earned master's degrees in journalism; and another granddaughter earned a master's degree in education.

This remarkable family is the legacy of a woman who lived to the age of 108 (108 years and nine months, her descendants will point out), teaching and influencing those around her long after she retired from the classroom.

"It was almost impossible to have a conversation with her without her saying something that would stay with you," James Williams II, an Albuquerque surgeon, recalls.

A Thirst for Knowledge

A 1907 photo shows Clara Belle Williams when she was teaching in Austin, Texas.

Clara Belle Drisdale was born on a farm in Plum, Texas, on Oct. 29, 1885, and from a young age she showed a thirst for knowledge that would carry through her entire life.

In 1901 she received a four-year scholarship to the Prairie View Normal and Industrial College in Prairie View, Texas, now Prairie View A&M University. She graduated in 1905 as valedictorian of her class.

She was teaching in the segregated schools of Cameron, Texas, when she met Jasper B. Williams, another teacher. They married in 1917 and moved to El Paso, where they ran a drugstore. The family moved to Las Cruces in 1924 after the drugstore burned down, and Clara Belle taught in the Las Cruces schools for the next 27 years.

"Mother taught the primary grades at Booker T. Washington School," recalls her son, Dr. James Williams, now retired and living in Las Cruces with his wife, Willeen. "She was always very progressive, and during the summers she took classes at the college."

She also took her sons to pick cotton, so they would know hard labor.

Washington School had outhouses at that time, Williams remembers. There was one high school teacher.

"In my class there were three graduates, and all three went to college," he says.

By that time, his mother already had quietly made history at New Mexico A&M College, taking classes until she had the credits for a second bachelor's degree.

College 'Quietly' Integrates

Accounts of her treatment as a student - mostly unwritten - vary. Some say she had to sit in the hallway during lectures, and that her graduation was boycotted by other students.

James Williams says if that's the case, his mother didn't talk about it with her children. "She finished in the summer," he notes. "I don't think they had a graduation ceremony then."

Perhaps the late Simon F. Kropp, in his book That All May Learn, a history of NMSU from its founding in 1888 through 1964, got it about right in this short summary: "Significantly, Mrs. Clara Belle Williams, a Negro teacher in a segregated public school in Las Cruces, received a bachelor's degree at the end of the (1937) summer session. Apparently the college had been quietly 'integrating' by admitting Mrs. Williams to the summer sessions since 1934."

James' brother Charles, now retired and living in Honolulu, became the second black student to graduate from the university, in 1943. Charles went on to medical school at Howard University and specialized in internal medicine.

Older brother Jasper earned a business degree at Tuskegee College, saw combat with a field artillery unit in World War II, and got his pre-medical education at New Mexico A&M after the war. He went to Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, for his medical degree, becoming an obstetrician/gynecologist.

Jasper Williams died in a plane crash in 1985, along with his youngest son and his son's girlfriend. He was piloting his own airplane.

'Mutiny at Freeman Field'

James' own college career also was interrupted by WWII. His unit, a part of the famed Tuskegee Airmen, did not see combat, but it played a role in an incident that may have accelerated the integration of the U.S. armed forces, and resulted in the Army Air Corps becoming the Air Force.

Williams' unit, the 477th Bombardment Group, was sent to Freeman Air Field in Indiana for training in 1945. At that point, Williams had already undergone extensive training, including aviation cadet training at Boca Raton and at Yale University, and he held the rank of 1st lieutenant.

But at Freeman Field, all the black officers were classified as trainees, regardless of their rank or experience, and all the white officers were classified as instructors. The two groups were assigned to separate clubs. After some of the black officers entered the white officers' club in a protest, they were arrested, and all the black officers were ordered to sign a base regulation endorsing the separate clubs.

"We refused to sign and we were accused under the 64th article of war," Williams says. This article pertains to willful disobedience of an order during a time of war, for which the maximum punishment is death.

'Bombarding Jim Crow'

Williams and 100 other black officers were flown to Godman Field in Kentucky and placed under house arrest. Major black newspapers, like the Pittsburgh Courier and the Kansas City Call, covered the story. The Courier carried a picture of the black officers waiting on the tarmac at Freeman Field. The headline shouted: "These 477th Bombardment Officers Bombard Jim Crow."

The 101 officers were brought before a panel of Army Air Corps officers investigating the incident. Most had attorneys, but Williams went without one.

Ten days after they were brought to Godman Field, the officers were freed from arrest. Each had a two-page letter of reprimand placed in his official military file. Fifty years later, in 1995, the reprimands were removed from their files by the Air Force, and the event was described by an assistant secretary of the Air Force as a "bellwether for change with respect to integrating the U.S. military."

The event also was responsible for the Air Corps separating from the Army and becoming the Air Force, Williams adds, "and the Air Force was the first branch of the armed forces to desegregate, in 1949."

By then Williams had returned to New Mexico A&M to complete his bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1947. He got his medical degree and later a master's degree in surgery at Creighton University, and it was there that he met his future wife, Willeen. They married in 1951, when he finished medical school, and they settled in Chicago.

Martin Luther King's Physician

The Williams brothers - an internist, a general surgeon and an OB/GYN specialist - built the Williams Clinic in Chicago in 1961 and added on to it in 1969. At its peak there were as many as 28 doctors practicing at the clinic, Willeen Williams says. The Williams Clinic continued until it was sold in 1995.

When Martin Luther King Jr. needed a doctor while he was in Chicago, it was James Williams who treated him.

"Our attorney was his attorney; that's how we got together," Williams says. "I treated him medically on three occasions."

When King was in Chicago, Williams says, "I know my phone was tapped. FBI agents were following him. J. Edgar Hoover really had it in for him."

The day King was assassinated, "they called me and asked me to come to Memphis," Williams recalls. "By the time we made the phone connection he was already dead, so I didn't go. But I regretted not going to the autopsy."

'No Alternative to Optimism'

A 1966 photo shows Williams (back row) receiving the Outstanding Mother and Businesswoman Award from the Fine Arts Guild in Chicago.

Clara Belle Williams worked at the Williams Clinic in those days. She had retired from teaching in 1951, but she remained a teacher to those around her, and she never lost her love of learning.

In 1980, at the age of 94, she was recognized for her lifetime of accomplishments with an honorary doctorate from NMSU. Also at age 94, "she enrolled in a Spanish course to bone up on her Spanish," says grandson James Williams II.

She passed away in Chicago on July 3, 1994, about three months shy of age 109.

"To survive that long you really have to be adaptable, and she was very adaptable all her life," says Brenda Payton Jones, a columnist for the Oakland Tribune and daughter of James and Willeen Williams. "I think that's the biggest lesson we learned from her."

Clara Belle Williams' obituary put it this way:

"You couldn't know Grandma without hearing a priceless jewel that would help you live your life constructively. 'There is no alternative to optimism,' she said. 'The only choice we have is to prepare ourselves so we can go as far as possible. Otherwise, we will have betrayed the precious breath the Lord has given us.'"

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