Walter L. Williams retired in 2010, after a 36 year career as a professor of history, anthropology, and gender studies, at five universities. 

EARLY LIFE  

     Walter Williams was born in 1948 and spent his early childhood in North Carolina.  As a boy he enjoyed reading, rock collecting, hiking, swimming, hunting and fishing with his grandfather, and gardening with his grandmother on their farm.  

     When he was ten years old his family relocated to Atlanta, where he grew up in the city.  He was an honor graduate of Cross Keys High School, where he was president of the history club, and captain of the debate team.  He enjoyed public speaking, and won the state speaking contest sponsored by the Sons of the American Revolution.  His school faculty chose him to be the student speaker at his high school graduation ceremony.  Given his early success, he decided to follow his mother’s profession as a history teacher. 

     In 1965, while still in high school, he got involved in Atlanta’s civil rights movement and participated in a number of civil rights protest demonstrations, meeting Martin Luther King, Coretta Scott King, Julian Bond, Maynard Jackson, Jesse Jackson, and other leading activists.

 HIGHER EDUCATION 

      From 1966 to 1970 Walter Williams was a student at Georgia State University, majoring in history and anthropology.  He participated in three archaeological excavations and worked in museum development for the Georgia Historical Commission.  In 1970 he won a prestigious Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to attend graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, majoring in history and anthropology.  After serving as a Military Intelligence officer in the U.S. Army from fall 1972 through spring 1973, he spent a year doing ethnographic fieldwork living in a traditionalist community on the Eastern Cherokee Indian Reservation.  While writing his dissertation, on Black American Attitudes toward Africa, he taught American History at UNC Chapel Hill.

 UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI  AND  UCLA 

     In late 1974, when he received his Ph.D., Walter Williams was hired as an assistant professor of history at the University of Cincinnati.  He taught classes on American history, American Indian History, and the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction.  In 1978 he won a Ford Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Newberry Library in Chicago.  Two years later he received early tenure and promotion to associate professor.  In 1981 and again in 1984 he was a visiting professor teaching Native American history in the American Indian Studies Center of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).  

     With a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies, he spent 1982 traveling across the Plains, living on the Omaha, Rosebud Sioux, Pine Ridge Sioux, Crow, and Northern Cheyenne Indian reservations, as well as on the Navajo Nation in Arizona.  In 1983 he continued this field research, living in isolated Maya villages in Yucatan, Mexico.  In 1986 he published all this research as his fourth book,  The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture. Without a doubt this book became the most controversial publication of his career, but it also is the book for which Walter Williams is most noted.  It won national book awards presented at the American Anthropological Association, and the American Library Association, as well as the international award for the most outstanding scholarly book published in 1985 and 1986, presented by the World Congress for Sexology. 

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA  AND  GADJAH MADA UNIVERSITY 

     Based on this pathbreaking ethnographic research, in 1984 Walter Williams was hired as associate professor of anthropology, history, and gender studies at the University of Southern California.  At USC, while he continued to teach a large lecture class on Native American ethnohistory, he also originated a popular course on multi-cultural gender studies, as well as one of the first graduate seminars to be taught in the new emerging field of LGBTQ Studies. 

     Then, in an important turning point of his life, Professor Williams won a Fulbright Scholar Award, to teach research methodologies to advanced graduate students at Gadjah Mada University, in Indonesia.  In 1987 and 1998 he conducted extensive life-history interviews with elderly people in Java, marking a new specialization in Southeast Asian Studies.

     Based on his innovative teaching, and his international reputation as a leading anthropologist in LGBTQ Studies, USC promoted Dr. Williams to the top rank of full professor.  Next he originated a new course at USC in response to the 1990s racial unrest in Los Angeles, titled “Overcoming Prejudice.”  With a focus on effective strategies to reduce racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, heterosexism, ableism, ageism, and other forms of prejudice, developing this class led him to be chosen as a visiting scholar at the East-West Center of the University of Hawai’i.  In 1996, Williams was approached by Dr. Connie Rogers, a prominent scholar who had published extensively on transgender issues.  Together, they designed a class on Transgender Studies, the first such subject to be taught in any major American university.  They co-taught this class for the next decade.  

     Walter Williams’ main focus during the 1990s was to establish ONE Institute International Gay and Lesbian Archives at USC.  He sponsored many visiting scholars coming to USC, including Dr. Igor Kon from the Russian Academy of Sciences and Dr. Wan Yan Hai from China.  They organized the First International Conference on Chinese Sexual Minorities, which was held at USC in 1997.   

     With Dr. Wan’s help, Professor Williams served as an expert witness in several U.S. Immigration Courts, persuading judges to grant asylum to many gay, lesbian, or transgender immigrants who had experienced beatings and other forms of persecution by police in China.  When officers of the China Psychiatric Association came to Los Angeles, they attended Williams’ seminars which helped to persuade them to remove homosexuality from China’s list of mental disorders.  When that change was formally announced by the China Psychiatric Association, in 2001, it made headlines in newspapers around the world.  Homosexuality was deleted from China’s criminal code, and police mistreatment was curtailed.  In November 2001 Dr. Williams was invited to China to give major lectures on homosexuality, both at Beijing University and at Shanghai Medical University.  He met with members of China’s parliament, and with many gay and lesbian activists.  Williams considered his work in China to be a major accomplishment of his life. 

      A year later, Williams presented a paper on sexual variance in world history, at the annual meeting of the World History Association, which was held at Seoul National University.  While in Korea Williams also presented “History of the Gay Rights Movement in the United States: Lessons Learned and Mistakes to Be Avoided in Other Nations,” as the inaugural lecture at the Korean Sexual Minority Rights Center.

     In summary, looking back on his career in the 1970s,Williams had concentrated on building a solid record of scholarship in American history, especially African American history, American Indian history, and Civil War history.  In the 1980s he became a pioneer scholar in the new field of LGBTQ Studies, while also branching out to do research in Indonesia.  In the 1990s Walter Williams’ reputation soared, when his main accomplishment, besides publishing more books and articles, was his work to establish ONE International LGBTQ Archives at the University of Southern California. 

 FURTHER RESEARCH IN ASIA AND LATIN AMERICA    

     The year 2001 marked a major turning point in Walter Williams’ life, beginning with his work to promote LGBTQ rights in China.  At the same time, as homophobic prejudice increased in Muslim Malaysia and Indonesia, he was increasingly called on to testify in United States Immigration Courts, as an expert witness on behalf of persecuted LGBTQ immigrants seeking asylum.  From 2003 to 2009, Dr. Williams spent most of his time doing ethnographic research in Thailand and Cambodia.  He also began doing volunteer teaching of English as a foreign language, in Buddhist monasteries there.  After his retirement from USC, he further developed his language teaching techniques in Cuba and Mexico, where he worked on a linguistic combination of English and Spanish.

     Most recently, Walter Williams has published many essays on numerous topics on the internet, as well as two historical novels set in the Civil War era.  Always seeking to expand his literary skills into different forms, he enjoys writing poetry and song lyrics.