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By DAPHNE HITCHINSON Rappahannock Staff k rilcr
John Williams’ search for knowledge has carried him from Hampton Institute in Tidewater Virginia to Lord Fairfax College in the Blue Ridge foothills where he recently culminated an educational career that bridges more than half a century. A few weeks ago. Williams received his diploma in general business, earning the distinction of being one of the oldest graduates in the history of the Middletown community college. John Williams may be 72 years old but he’s still a school boy at heart. Williams was born and reared in Rappahannock, the fourth of seven children of J. L. and Louemma Williams whose home place is in Tiger Valley near Washington. When he began school in the county, the seprate-but-equal doctrine, much less integration, was still decades into the future. For black children, formal education at the secondary level was nonexistent.
‘‘In 1924, I went to Hampton Institute. a boarding school. There was no high school for blacks." Williams recalled. Interested in building trades, he mastered the art of bricklaying and in 1928, left Hampton for a construction job with a Front Royal manufacturing plant. But the depression interrupted and his job. along with millions of others throughout the United States, dissolved into the unemployment lines.
“1 realized I just had to get more education in order to get somewhere,” Williams said. With the backing of his family and $5 in his pocket, he entered Virginia State College in 1931 but after two years, his carefully planned future again dissolved, this time with the death of his father.
"As the oldest boy. I had to come back to take charge of the farm,", he said. Serving as caretaker for the family property, he also worked as a bricklayer, struggling in the throes of the depression to keep his people together.
Back To School
With the onset of World War II, defense jobs opened up and Williams was able to gain work as a welder in Philadelphia. Close to so many institutions of higher learning in the City of Brotherly Love, Williams was again snagged by the lure of education. He enrolled in Temple University and finished there in 1948,
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