Avon Williams

Avon N. Williams, Jr. (1921 – 1993) was a Tennessee State Senator from 1972 to 1992.

Avon Nyanza Williams, Jr. was born in Knoxville, Tennessee. He was a 1940 graduate of Johnson C. Smith University, an historically black university located in Charlotte, North Carolina. He subsequently studied law at the Boston University School of Law and was admitted to the Tennessee and Massachusetts bars in 1948. He practiced law in Knoxville from 1949 to 1953, then he moved to Nashville. In 1956, he married Joan Bontemps, the daughter of Fisk University Librarian and author, Arna Bontemps The couple had two children, Avon Williams III and Wendy Janette Williams.

Williams’ first cousin, Thurgood Marshall, was the chief lawyer for the Legal Defense and Educational Fund of the NAACP. In Nashville, Williams was an active member of the NAACP, long serving on its executive board, and active as a civil rights attorney and a key figure in the Nashville-area Civil Rights Movement. Through these efforts he met Z. Alexander Looby, a fellow African American lawyer focused on civil rights. He joined Looby’s practice and together they helped defend African Americans participating in the movement.

Additionally, he was an active alumnus of the Omega Psi Phi fraternity and served as a Reserve lieutenant colonel in the United States Army Judge Advocate General's Corps. He also was an instructor in "dental jurisprudence" in the dental department of Nashville's Meharry Medical College, one of the few historically black medical schools. Williams was extremely active in school desegregation, long serving as a plaintiff's counsel in Nashville's long-running (40 year plus) school desegregation lawsuit which resulted in forced busing, making him extremely unpopular with elements of Nashville's white community and even the subject of death threats by white supremacists.

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