writermag.com • The Writer | 29“That poem captures the reality of
black life in the inner city in the 1940s,”
Williams says. “It’s a story of hope, and
a story of sorrow and tragedy and great
pain and resilience.”
Williams himself was a child of the
1960s and ’70s, observing firsthand thestruggles and triumphs of the Civil
Rights Movement and the activities of
the Black Panther Party founded in
Oakland to address police brutality
against African Americans. “There was
temporary upheaval in America,” he
says of that time. “People wore afros
and dashikis, and they liberated them-
selves from mental slavery in the way
they put words together.”
One of his favorite writers while he
was attending college in New Jersey was
soul and jazz poet Gil Scott-Heron,
whom he describes as “unparalleled;
one of my greatest inspirations.” He also
revered the work of The Last Poets –
groups of poets and musicians born out
of the Black nationalist movement.
“Their poems were about people I could
relate to and people I knew,” he says.
“They were revolutionaries.”
During Williams’ undergraduate
years, a friend who had been incarcer-
ated moved to a halfway house, and
Williams witnessed the power of litera-
ture to affirm the experiences of young
people struggling to survive in inner
cities. “I would go and see him when I
didn’t have class, and I took him a bookthe way that he could take words and
make you feel and taste things,” he
says of Bontemps’ poetry. “He was a
traveler through the English language,
through feeling and emotion, like a
pianist who could touch keys and
make you feel certain things through
the colors of his composition.”
He recalls Hughes’ poem “Mother
to Son” as equally awe-inspiring – a
poem that begins:OG Rev (left) serves food to unhoused people at an Oakland homeless encampment with community activist Manny Davis (right).Photo by Calvin Walker
Well, son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
It’s had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor –
Bare.