Williams’ Quiet, Political Artistry Builds Solid, Satisfied Constituency

Poised at the end of a long conference table in his third-floor county office suite, with sailboats cruising on San Diego Bay behind him, Supervisor Leon Williams brushes away the criticism that he is too laid back.

“Blacks believe in rhetoric; I don’t know if you know that,” Williams explains to a visitor. “Many, many blacks like rhetoric. They want you to tell people off, and they want you to ring the halls with rhyme.

“Well, first of all, I’m not good at that. Second, I believe that accomplishment is more important than rhetoric. And third, I know that the general majority people in this society do not like rhetoric. Rhetoric can scare people.”

Leon Williams doesn’t like to scare people.

Williams, the city’s first black councilman and the county’s first black supervisor, today sits at the edge of his second four-year term on the county board, a term he won without opposition. With 17 years in elected office, Williams is the city’s most experienced local government official.

If nothing else, Williams is a survivor. He joined the City Council in 1969, when Frank Curran was mayor and such people as Floyd Morrow, Jack Walsh and Helen Cobb were council members. He saw Pete Wilson come in, fresh from the state Assembly but green in city politics, and, 10 years later, move on to the U.S. Senate. He was there in 1971 when a 25-year-old named Maureen O’Connor shocked the city with her election to the council. Since Williams moved over to the county Board of Supervisors in 1982, Roger Hedgecock, Tom Hamilton, Paul Fordem and Paul Eckert have left the board or have been ushered out by the voters.

Yet Williams endures. He has endured by doing enough to please his mainly minority constituency while doing little to displease the mostly white San Diego business establishment that has supported him and, through that support, has discouraged credible opposition.

Some believe Williams has tried too hard to appease the white community at the expense of his own constituents. One former opponent described Williams as “sedentary.” Others say privately that Williams often seems to have a poor grasp of the issues, and they question his ability to articulate his views clearly enough to persuade his colleagues. Even his longtime friend, the Rev. George Walker Smith, is critical of Williams’ laid-back style.

“Out there in the vulnerable political world, you have to have some dog in you, some fight, some combativeness,” Smith said. “Leon is not that kind of person. He is the sweetest guy in the world, yet he doesn’t go out of his way to champion any causes. He just stays there and basically goes along with the status quo.

“The biggest criticism I ever heard of him from the black community is that he gives more credence in his participation in the majority community than the minority community. I think there’s some validity in that.”

But others say Williams, had he been more outspoken, would have been ineffective or, worse, even lost his seat.

“I believe he understood that unless he had a coalition, he could not do much good for his own constituents,” said City Councilman William Jones, who worked for Williams for nearly a decade and considers him a mentor. “If he was perceived as being unreasonable, non-responsive to any one of those groups, not just the business community, but also to any one of his individual constituencies, he would have had a very difficult time being an effective member of the council. He knew that.”

Former Councilman Fred Schnaubelt, though rarely an ally of Williams philosophically, said he believes that Williams’ goals would suffer if he were perceived as radical.

“I think he would have created a redneck backlash, and there would have been intransigence on the part of council members, and they would have refused to cave in, given the conservative nature of San Diego,” Schnaubelt said. “I think he took the right approach at the right time for this particular city.”

County Supervisor Brian Bilbray says Williams practices what Bilbray calls “political judo.”

“He takes momentum and doesn’t stop it but he turns it, often back on itself,” Bilbray said. “Leon has a way of getting you to do what you didn’t want to do and getting you to like it.”

Williams asserts that his longevity in politics is due more to his work for his constituents than his relationship with the city’s Establishment.

He says success is due to the grass that now covers the once-barren playing fields of Southeast San Diego’s parks. It is due to the asphalt over so many Logan Heights alleys that were dirt when he took office; to the sidewalks, once rare, that now line the streets of Encanto, Paradise Hills and Logan Heights. It is due to the redevelopment projects that he pushed to revitalize a dying downtown and the trolley line that runs through his former council district.

Williams and his supporters cite his role in creating a county Human Relations Commission, his early leadership in seeking research money and understanding in the fight against AIDS, his efforts to reform county government, and his consistent support of environmental causes.

But most of all, Williams and others say, his survival is due to the decency with which he treats people and the respect minorities can now expect in the halls of government in San Diego, largely because of his almost obsessive desire to bring people together rather than split them apart.

“Leon is a good person, period,” said the Rev. George Stevens, another longtime friend. “He is one of the most honest persons I’ve ever met. He is sincere, very sensitive to issues that affect the lives of people. He is not a very good politician. But with his sincerity and commitment, he represents his district well.”

“His style is unusual because he is not a public braggart, he does not grandstand just because the media are there or the chambers are filled with people,” added Rachel Ortiz, director of Barrio Station, a youth center in Barrio Logan. “He’s very serious about what he does. . . . He’s very quiet and to the point. His style is rare, but that’s Leon and that’s the way we love him.”

Throughout his political career, Williams said, his objective has been to include more minorities in government, not only as staffers but simply as participants in the everyday decisions that affect their lives.

“I wanted the confidence of citizens--black, Hispanic and otherwise--in the government,” Williams said. “Before, there was no significant confidence. They just assumed it was a government of somebody else, a government that didn’t respond to minorities. That was in large measure true. . . .

“My mission is to include people, to include everybody if possible, to include the homeless, to include the blacks, to include the Asians, to include the Mexicans, to include the gays, include everybody, include the right-winger, the left-winger, because we’re all human beings.”

Williams has vivid memories of the days when not everyone was included.

He remembers, for example, when he could not buy a home in many parts of San Diego because he was black. He remembers, as a college student at San Diego State University in the late 1940s, “sitting in” at the restaurant in the U.S. Grant Hotel, protesting the management’s refusal to serve blacks.

Williams recalls, even after he was elected to the City Council, being pulled over by San Diego police for no reason other than driving in the wrong part of town. And he remembers the way city officials reacted when, early in his first council term, a group of blacks and Latinos gathered to hear the City Council discuss cutting funds for a committee set up to resolve interracial conflict.

“It was a big hearing, a very peaceful hearing,” Williams said. “But to my surprise, I found out later that the whole chamber was surrounded by policemen. There was one (officer) who had the telephone behind the chamber off the hook, connected to police headquarters. That was the attitude then of the city toward minorities.

“For some reason, the chamber having people very peacefully discussing an issue of concern to them, the city management decided to surround all those people with policemen shoulder to shoulder around the council chamber. Can you imagine that kind of thing happening now?”

A native of Oklahoma, Leon Lawson Williams is the eldest of 14 children born to Lloyd and Elvira Williams. The family moved to Bakersfield in 1934, and Leon grew up there, attending Kern County Union High School. The family was poor, Williams said, but “middle-class oriented.”

“They had middle-class values, the work ethic, honesty and integrity and keep your nose clean and don’t mess over anybody and don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t steal and all that stuff,” Williams said.

Inspired by sports star Jackie Robinson, Williams thought about attending UCLA, but, after doing well on tests administered in high school, was offered a civilian job in aircraft repair at North Island Naval Air Station. There, Williams earned $1 an hour as a mechanic’s helper while attending classes at San Diego City College, where he met Frank Curran, who later, as mayor, would be his strongest backer for a position on the council.

Returning to San Diego after a stint in the Army Air Corps, Williams enrolled full time at San Diego State, where, 2 1/2 years later, he earned a degree in psychology. At school, Williams was active in several political groups, and he continued to dabble in politics, though moderately, after graduation. He worked for the county Welfare Department and later as an administrator in the Sheriff’s Department.

In the early 1960s, Williams was elected to the San Diego County Democratic Central Committee, and that role, along with a job as director of a youth job training program, gave him visibility in the community. In 1968, when Councilman Tom Hom was elected to the Assembly, a group of black and Latino leaders held a nominating convention to choose a candidate whose name would be put forward to the council for the appointment. That candidate was Williams.

“We were looking for someone who could win,” said Stevens, who helped coordinate the convention. “We had never won before. We put a lot of other things aside to do that.”

On Jan 3, 1969, the council, at first split between Williams and Jess Haro, chose Williams, thus making him the first black council member.

“Expectations were high,” Williams said of the days after his appointment. “I heard so many times from blacks, ‘You’re down there, man, you take care of this or that.’ They thought everything was going to be OK because I was on the City Council. They expected a lot from me. They got a lot.”

On the council, Williams worked steadily to improve the quality of life in minority communities, through zoning changes and the construction of public improvements, and he was an early supporter of downtown redevelopment. In several instances, Williams clashed openly with the leadership of the Police Department, pressing for more sensitivity toward blacks and Latinos in arguments that foreshadowed the department’s more recent problems with race relations. Though he won’t discuss it, Williams is said to have pushed for the ouster of former Police Chief Ray Hoobler in favor of Bill Kolender.

Elected to complete Hom’s term in 1969, Williams was reelected in 1971, 1975 and 1979. In 1982, he won a seat on the county Board of Supervisors. At 64, Williams is in good health. He doesn’t drink or smoke, and he eats no red meat, occasionally mixing fish or poultry in with a mainly vegetarian diet. The father of four children and two stepchildren through two marriages, Williams said he expects to run for at least one more term on the board before moving on.

Though he has dedicated his political life to achieving racial harmony, Williams is pessimistic, almost bitter, about the nature of race relations in San Diego and the nation today. Although he once considered running for mayor, Williams says now that he believes he would have little chance of winning in the 1980s--because he is black.

“In the mid-’70s we reached a peak of letting people be people and not judging them on the basis of ethnic origin,” Williams said. “I think we’re regressing now.

“I see it in the willingness and tolerance of people for, say, passage of the English-only amendment . . . in the curtailment of funding for child programs or food programs or the attack on welfare. I see it in the attacks on affirmative action, the assertion often heard that the ‘minority’ is the white male, and you’ve got to be black or Hispanic to get a job, when all of us know that’s ridiculous.

“The whole thing is cheat, get as much as you can for yourself, on the stock market, however you can make some money, just make some money and to hell with the country.

“That’s part of this thing. It gives people a license to be against somebody if they can read them as being in their way economically.”

But Williams does not see more stridency as the way to progress. Instead, he said, he will continue to urge blacks and other minorities to become involved in the system, not tear it apart.

Finally, Williams acknowledges that, while he is probably San Diego’s most liberal local government officials, he is at heart conservative.

“I’m a conservative in the sense that I believe in preserving something that is good,” he said. “I want to save the basic values of this country, and if that means letting increasing numbers of people participate in the system, then that to me is conservatism, conserving basic values by including people who would be outside that system and against it and making them part of it.”