When then-high school senior William Jones had the chance to interview for an internship with San Diego City Councilmember Leon Williams in 1972, he wasn’t immediately sold on the idea.
He’d already applied to college and just wanted to play sports and enjoy the rest of his senior year at Morse High School. But his parents weren’t having it.
Leon Williams “is too important of a man,” Jones recalls his mother telling him from the kitchen as she made dinner. Jones looked to his father for some help, but the answer was clear: He would be interviewing for that internship.
It turned out to be a life-changing decision for the future deputy mayor and City Council member. Jones got the gig, first going into Williams’ office three days a week. But he soon found himself there every day, drawn in by the council member’s kindness, intelligence and dedication to San Diego.
“He had dreams for the city, and for the areas that I grew up in,” he said. “I didn’t quite know how to express it, but I felt inspired by him.”
Williams inspired countless others during his time in San Diego, where he was a civic leader and a pioneer for the Black community for more than five decades. He died Saturday evening at Scripps Mercy Hospital due to cardiac arrest. He was 102.
He is survived by his sister Leona Robbins and three brothers, Cecil, Buddy and Johnny Williams, as well as 10 children and a host of grandchildren, great-grandchildren, nieces and nephews. He was predeceased by his wife, Margaret Jackson Williams, who died in 2016.
To those who knew him, Williams was determined yet gentle and humble, despite the long list of accolades and accomplishments he racked up over the 84 years he lived here.
In 1969, he became the first Black person elected to the San Diego City Council. Thirteen years later, he became the first elected to the county Board of Supervisors, too.
During his time as a city leader, Williams played a significant role in transforming downtown and southeastern San Diego neighborhoods — particularly by helping to start the Southeastern Economic Development Corporation and the Centre City Development Corp.
He was president of the California State Association of Counties. He started the local Hate Crimes Registry. He founded the county’s first human relations commission; a revived one is named in his honor. In 2016, he was named “Mr. San Diego” by the San Diego Rotary Club.
He also helped advance the city’s public transit system, including bringing the trolley service to San Diego State University in 2005. Six years later, the SDSU Trolley Station was dedicated to him.
“If someone could pick a person to be the first elected anything — particularly in a community that may have apprehensions — he would be the person to do it,” California Secretary of State Shirley Weber told The San Diego Union-Tribune. Williams, she said, opened the doors with “dignity and purpose” and brought others along with him.
By those closest to him, Williams is beloved not only for his work but for all the elements that made him who he was.
He was a spiffy dresser, rarely spotted without his signature fedora. He enjoyed bicycling around his neighborhood and maintained a healthy lifestyle, including trying martial arts and eating a mostly vegetarian diet — though he especially enjoyed seafood, like the crab cakes at Humphreys SoCal Dining and Music on Shelter Island.
He was also a valuable, caring friend, and provided a listening ear to his companions, including longtime friend Leon Kelley, a retired pediatrician, who would come to Williams with challenges he faced.
And community leader Michael Brunker, the former executive director of the Jackie Robinson Family YMCA, says Williams ended every phone call by telling Brunker that he loved him.
Above all, Williams is described as a person who deeply wanted to improve the world around him.
In 2022, while accepting the county’s Lifetime Achievement Award at the age of 100, he told the crowd that he sometimes struggled to sleep at night, thinking instead about “how we could create a better society, a more respectful and appreciative society.”
Williams was born on July 21, 1922, on an Oklahoma farm, the oldest of 15 children. Still a teenager, in 1941 he moved to San Diego to work for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
But he was met with hostility and open racism upon arriving. When he tried to check into a hotel, he was told, “We don’t serve your kind,” Williams told the Union-Tribune in a 2020 interview.
Six years later, Williams became the first Black homeowner in his Golden Hill neighborhood, at a time when it was restricted to White residents only. That block of E Street was renamed “Leon Williams Drive” in 2017 in his honor.
He faced discrimination even during his time on the City Council, where he served for more than a decade. Once, while he was reviewing a council agenda near Balboa Park, a police officer approached him, drawing his gun, and questioned what Williams was doing in the area.
“It was an example for us to look to and know how to govern, even in times where he experienced a lot of racism, division and hate,” said county Supervisor Monica Montgomery Steppe, who became only the second Black person after Williams to be elected supervisor. “But he still remained so dignified in all of those things, and on top of that, managed to accomplish so much.”
Much of Williams’ life is chronicled in his memoir, “Together We Can Do More: The Leon Williams Story,” written with Lynne Carrier and published in 2015.
Carrier met Williams when she was a reporter for what was then the San Diego Tribune newspaper. She remembers how he would work to bring people to his side of an argument with reason, empathy and respect.
During one community meeting she covered, Carrier says some residents voiced concerns about the noise that could come with the expansion of the trolley system in Mission Valley. But when Williams explained that the train would reduce car traffic and noise, the residents came around to understanding.
“The thing that I remember most that he told me was, ‘If I can bring someone to the table of reason, I can win,’” Carrier said.
She says Williams wanted the memoir they wrote together to serve partly as a manual for how to handle confrontations in political situations, to serve as a guide for the next generation interested in public service. While the book mostly chronicles his life, it contains a section dedicated to how to win arguments.
Williams’ care for younger generations was palpable.
“Leon became the second most important man in my life, second to my father,” said Jones, who interned for Williams. “He taught me by example about integrity, and about how to live out your values in a way that’s true to yourself.”
After Jones completed his internship with Williams in 1972, he decided to stay in San Diego to work with Williams, at Williams’ request — even forgoing a full scholarship to UCLA. He later became Williams’ chief of staff before succeeding him on the City Council in 1982.
For Jones, Williams’ mentorship helped shape his life. But he says Williams’ larger legacy and impact on the greater San Diego region cannot be understated.
“He is, I believe, the most beloved elected official in the history of San Diego,” Jones said.
Just scan the San Diego horizon, its parks, colleges, high-rises and bays, he added — “the one person that has influenced that the most in the last 40 or 50 years was Leon Williams.”
