Caught in a sudden storm, Michael Paul Williams is late.
As a concession to the pandemic, we’ve agreed to meet outside on the patio of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the third-floor overhang offers just enough cover to shield us from the rain. Williams, 63, arrives just as the weather begins to morph from downpour to swelter as the sun comes out, blinds us and begins to make us sweat through our clothes. He apologizes for being late and buys a couple Miller Lites to help us cool down.
Sporting a gray T-shirt, glasses and close-cropped gray hair, Williams appears relaxed. In June, the longtime Richmond Times-Dispatch journalist won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for his columns about the city’s Confederate monuments.
Last spring and summer, after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, protesters took to the streets of Richmond demanding change, leading to the removal of most of the city’s Confederate monuments and the promise of law enforcement reforms. It was a storm of events that Williams had been forecasting since 1992.
Asked how it feels to win a Pulitzer, Williams is humble.
“Life is so hectic, and this has added to it, that I don’t know if I’ve really had a chance to process it,” he says between sips of beer. “Obviously it’s a tremendous honor, almost an unimaginable honor.”
It’s an honor made all the more special for the year in which he achieved it. Williams’ work beat out other entries regarding the pandemic, Floyd’s murder and the ensuing protests, as well as the contentious 2020 election that saw incumbent President Donald J. Trump claiming a false victory.
It’s also extraordinary given the history of the Richmond Times-Dispatch and the role it and its former sister afternoon paper, the Richmond News Leader, played in promoting segregation and Massive Resistance, a term for the broad Southern opposition to the civil rights movement. The News Leader’s most famous editor, Douglas Southall Freeman, saluted Richmond’s Robert E. Lee monument on his way to work every day and won Pulitzers for his biographies of Lee and George Washington. Williams was the first Black columnist for either paper.
After nearly three decades of columns — numbering roughly 2,700 — the Richmond native continues to weigh in on contentious issues, like the rebuilding of Richmond’s George Wythe High School and how the installation of automatic license plate readers in communities of color flies in the face of the Richmond Police Department’s supposed reforms.
In a season of strife, Williams remains a vital voice charting and guiding Richmond’s trajectory as it continues to forge its post-Confederate identity.
Michael Paul Williams works at his desk in the Richmond Times-Dispatch newsroom, which is quiet these days as many people work from home due to the pandemic. Williams has worked for the newspaper since 1981 and became a columnist in 1992. (Photo by Zaid Hamid)
‘Conscience of the Community’
From his first column onward, Williams has challenged the cult of the Lost Cause that mythologizes the Confederacy as heroic and just.
Published on June 1, 1992, his first column took issue with the fact that students at Hanover County’s Stonewall Jackson Middle School were allowed to wear clothing in support of the Confederacy, but not of Malcolm X.
Under the headline “Can we come to terms with our history?” Williams wrote: “As a native of the former Confederate capital, I’ve watched the often-stated pride in the lost rebel cause with ambivalence, confusion and frustration. I still don’t get it.”
Since then, Williams has continued to speak his truth on the issues of the day. Whether he’s holding politicians accountable for their actions or encouraging society as a whole to be better, Williams has gained a reputation for being fearless.
“I would definitely call him the conscience of the community,” says U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, who was first elected to Richmond City Council in 1994 and served as the city’s mayor from 1998 to 2001. “Since ’92, Michael has played the role of a prophetic voice of conscience as well as anyone in the Richmond metro area.”
In person, Williams comes off as introverted and private, though social, and he approaches topics with intelligence and an intense moral and ethical rigor. If you ask him the right question, he’ll answer in perfect paragraphs that could easily serve as one of his columns.
Raised in a Black neighborhood near Byrd Park that was referred to as the West End by its residents, Williams grew up attending parochial schools. Around age 10, he and his father, mother and older half-brother moved to Glen Allen as they got word that the city was about to construct the Downtown Expressway, cleaving their neighborhood in two.
“In hindsight, the Downtown Expressway was a very Richmond way of disrupting a Black neighborhood,” Williams says, adding that the city was “very segregated” back then.
If anything, the racism he encountered in Henrico County — which was much less diverse at the time — was more hostile. One day circa 1970, Williams and his friends were walking home after playing pickup basketball at Brookland Middle School when they took a shortcut through a white neighborhood.
“We were shot at with buckshot,” Williams recalls. “That will send you a pronounced message of where you stand.”
Williams describes himself as a “pretty shy” child but recalls lots of friends with whom he enjoyed playing sports.
Attending Hermitage High School, he played junior varsity basketball and ran track. The triple jump was his forte, and he took home district championships in 1974 and 1976. He majored in English and took journalism courses at Virginia Union University, initially thinking he would become a lawyer. Instead, he went to Northwestern for a one-year journalism master’s program. At first, he wanted to pursue a career as a sportswriter, but when he started writing hard news, he was hooked.
Returning to Richmond in September 1981 during a recession, Williams began unsuccessfully applying for newspaper jobs all over the country. He instead accepted an internship at the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Nine months later, he was a staffer, initially assigned to cover Hampton Roads and the Middle Peninsula from the RTD’s Williamsburg bureau.
Williams in a photo from the mid-1990s that accompanied his column (Photo courtesy Michael Paul Williams/Richmond Times-Dispatch)
After stints covering the Chesterfield County School Board, Richmond City Council and Richmond School Board, Williams became a columnist in 1992 when Media General merged the Richmond News Leader into the RTD.
As each paper previously had its own reporter for each beat, practically everyone had to reapply
for their job. It was then that Williams approached the paper’s leadership and asked for a column, arguing that they covered a majority-Black city but didn’t have any commentators of color.
“It was a far easier sell than I would have ever imagined,” he says. “I knew I could do the job and thought I deserved a shot at it. But if they didn’t let me do it, then they needed to find somebody who could and would. And they bit.”
Becoming either paper’s first Black columnist was no small feat. The News Leader had been where James J. Kilpatrick became one of the nation’s leading proponents of segregation as its editorial page editor, devising “states’ rights” and other rationales to advocate for Massive Resistance.
The RTD also supported Massive Resistance in editorials penned by Alan S. Donnahoe, who would later become president of Richmond Newspapers Inc., the owner of both papers. Under the pseudonym Ross Valentine, K.V. Hoffman also wrote in support of Massive Resistance. In 2009, the RTD issued an apology for its support of Massive Resistance.
Decades later, Williams didn’t get the pushback from editors he expected: “They were astute enough to recognize, OK, this was a Black dude with a column. To try to make him sound like a white dude with a column wouldn’t be to anyone’s benefit.”
Tackling Tough Topics
Twice a week, Williams speaks his truth through columns in the RTD.
Interviews with nearly a dozen current and former RTD reporters and editors reveal similar insights about Williams. That he’s a nice, humble guy. That he would do anything for you. That he’s an avid listener who won’t look at his phone when you meet him for coffee. That he has a booming laugh that fills the newsroom, and that he has a tendency to shout expletives at his computer when he’s trying to make deadline. That he gives interns and new hires his own personal tour of Richmond to explain how we got here.
When News Editor K. “Katy” Burnell Evans was pregnant with twins, he would get on her case about her diet, sometimes bringing her lunch and goading her to eat better by sending her photos of his breakfast smoothies. Since education reporter Kenya Hunter’s mother died, Williams has stepped up, often texting her just to check in.
“He’s kind, he’s generous with his time, he’s insightful, he’s humble,” says Paige Mudd, the RTD’s executive editor and vice president of news. “He’s an unbelievably gifted writer. He challenges people and their ideas about why things are the way they are, and he’s a force of nature.”
The RTD is also where Williams met his wife, Robin Farmer. In 1988, Farmer was working for Connecticut’s Hartford Courant when the RTD attempted to recruit her. As one of the few Black reporters on staff, Williams was asked to speak to her.
“Obviously, I did a good job of recruiting her,” Williams says. A national award-winning journalist in her own right, Farmer left the RTD in 2009. “Malcolm and Me,” her debut YA novel, was hot listed by BuzzFeed last year, and she currently serves as the director of the Virginia Screenwriters Forum.
“He’s an unbelievably gifted writer. He challenges people and their ideas about why things are the way they are, and he’s a force of nature.” —Paige Mudd, Richmond Times-Dispatch executive editor and vice president of news
It hasn’t always been easy being Michael Paul Williams. As you might expect, being a Black man weighing in publicly on issues of race and politics in the former capital of the Confederacy can be dangerous.
Bonnie Winston, managing editor of the Richmond Free Press and Williams’ former editor at the RTD, recalls him receiving death threats on his work voicemail while he was on his honeymoon in 1999.
Put off by the cost of a wedding, Williams and Farmer had decided to get married by a justice of the peace without telling their families, followed by a honeymoon in Paris. It was while he was in France that Williams received two death threats via voicemail. The threats couldn’t be traced.
“It was a horrible racial epithet, death threat, and I took it very seriously. So did Mike,” says Winston, who was hired as the RTD’s first Black full-time staff reporter in 1979. “It was very scary, and I think that was one of the first or early death threats that he had gotten.”
Williams still receives angry messages but says there are fewer threats of bodily harm than there used to be.
“It’s the invariable result if you’re writing about things that matter and writing about tough topics,” he says. “And I wrote a lot about race. ... It’s not always been great; I’ll put it that way. Some people crossed the line.”
Richmond General District Judge David Hicks, a former city prosecutor who served as a top aide in the administration of former Mayor Dwight C. Jones, attests to Williams’ fearlessness.
“Make no mistakes, man. He caught a lot of heat,” Hicks says. “You will find a consistent course of folks calling him race baiting and every damn thing else.”
Hicks says that Williams has never hesitated to hold public officials’ feet to the fire to ensure they were doing the right thing: “I don’t know anyone that Michael has not spoken truth about, or at least his perspective.”
Williams also hasn’t shied away from challenging people who consider him a friend. In June 2017, the administration of Mayor Levar Stoney announced it was forming a commission to study what to do with the city’s Confederate monuments. Christy Coleman, then the CEO of Richmond’s American Civil War Museum, found herself opposite Williams at a press conference where it was learned that removal of the monuments wouldn’t be considered as an option.
“Michael immediately jumps on that as the question,” Coleman recalls, adding that Williams kept repeatedly asking her why removal was off the table. Coleman confronted him later.
“He’s like, ‘Hey, I was doing my job, and you were doing yours, too. God dang it, when you’ve got your CEO mask on, you’re tough to crack.’ And I said, ‘You are tough to get by,’ ” says Coleman, who’s now the executive director of the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation.
Omari Al-Qadaffi, a community activist for food justice and housing equity, admires the bold stances that Williams has championed over the years.
“He’s been writing lots of powerful pieces about other issues that have even more impact on the day-to-day lives of Richmonders than the Confederate monuments,” says Al-Qadaffi, who was heavily involved in last year’s protests. “That’s what the Pulitzer people want to recognize him for. The brother’s been doing work, impactful work, for a long time now.”
Williams with then-reporter Pamela Stallsmith in the RTD newsroom in the 1990s. Stallsmith later became the editor of the RTD Opinions page. (Photo courtesy Michael Paul Williams/Richmond Times-Dispatch)
Williams has also played a role in reshaping the RTD’s newsroom to be more reflective of the communities it covers. As with most daily papers, the RTD is vital to the local media ecosystem, as stories it reports are often reworked and re-reported by other media outlets. In addition to being the city’s paper of record, it frames the news events of the day. And like most newsrooms, the RTD has a track record of being predominantly white.
In early 1995, of the 199 editors and reporters on the RTD’s staff, 17 were Black. Though rounds of layoffs over the years have reduced the newsroom staff to 62, 14 of those are people of color; a number of recent hires have been people of color under the age of 35.
“Michael Paul is someone who really set the foundation for that to happen,” says COVID and communities reporter Sabrina Moreno, who is Latina and started writing for the paper in January 2020. “He arrived in this newsroom in a time when there were even less Black reporters in the industry than there are now, and he paved such a pathway and a road for people like me who came after to feel like they could make it. There are so many times where I’ve asked him, ‘How did you stay?’ ”
Hunter, who is Black and was hired in April 2020, agrees, noting that enslaved people were once literally sold in the pages of the newspaper.
“We’ve had a lot of conversations about what was our role in perpetuating Massive Resistance and other types of segregation, and [if] can we even make up for it,” Hunter says. “For him to be able to [win the Pulitzer] in Richmond at the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the paper that endorsed Massive Resistance and did profit off of slavery, that’s amazing.”
Frank Green, a longtime reporter at the RTD, says the newsroom once believed that the paper’s past would haunt it forever.
“Back in the ’80s and ’90s, we used to talk about how the Times-Dispatch was never going to win a Pulitzer because of its original sin, because of Massive Resistance and all that,” he says. “I’d long figured if anybody was going to do it, it was going to be Mike, and if anybody deserved it, it was Mike.”
Still, over the years, Williams has encountered internal opposition, including columns that were killed by editors.
“That’s an awful feeling for any opinion writer,” Williams says. “Black people and white people see the world in many different ways, and that can be hard to process and hard for our readers to swallow. There were moments when there were issues, [but] right now I feel very supported, and I feel encouraged to be my most authentic self.”
Like anyone else, Williams still has to deal with life’s setbacks. In 2015, his house caught fire after it was struck by lightning. No one was hurt, but reconstruction took about a year. Williams declines to discuss it.
“They lost quite a bit. It was a disaster,” says Lionel Shaw, Williams’ half-brother. “It was a strain. I could see it on his face. He didn’t ask for help.”
A Monumental Change
Growing up, Williams stayed away from Monument Avenue, and he viewed the Confederate monuments as immovable.
“They just were. They just existed,” he explains. “The president’s going to be white and male, and you’re going to have Monument Avenue.”
Conditions started to change in the early 1990s, when an effort to erect a monument to African American humanitarian and tennis great Arthur Ashe gained steam. Though some argued that the monument should be located near Byrd Park’s tennis courts, Williams wrote that it should be placed on Monument Avenue.
“This was not unanimous in the Black community. There were people who felt like Arthur Ashe was too good for Monument Avenue, and he’d be the only true winner on the street,” Williams says. “He did end up on Monument Avenue, and there are people who argue that what happened last summer would not have happened and could not have happened had Arthur Ashe not gone up first, because it kind of chipped away at the narrative that Monument Avenue could not be transformed.”
After Dylann Roof massacred nine members of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in June 2015 — and photos circulated of Roof posing with Confederate iconography — discussion began taking place on how to make Monument Avenue a more representative street, including adding context to the Confederate monuments. The massacre inspired Williams to begin advocating for the removal of the monuments. “I always knew the connection, but that drove home the violent impulse of that connection,” Williams says. “This isn’t a difference over history. This is an ideology that still lives with us today and kills with us today, and we can’t endorse this. Richmond is no better than Dylann Roof, as far as I’m concerned, if it lionizes these folks and these monuments and this ideology.”
He wrote columns calling for the removal of Richmond’s monuments. They didn’t seem to move the needle: “Crickets were chirping. There wasn’t much of a reaction at all," he says.
“Change happens incrementally but all at once. The monuments came down in blinding speed in a way I never could have predicted, but in hindsight we were chipping away.” —Michael Paul Williams
Though the Stoney administration formed a commission to study what to do with the monuments, it announced that their removal would not be considered as an option (at the time, state law did not allow it). That began to change after Heather Heyer was killed in a domestic terrorist attack against counterprotesters at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. In April 2020, after Democrats had taken over the General Assembly, Gov. Ralph Northam signed a bill into law giving localities permission to remove their monuments.
Critical mass only came with the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. During Richmond’s most eventful year since 1865, Williams put fingers to keyboard, taking in the scope of history with his incisive commentary about the monuments and what their removal meant to the city.
“Change happens incrementally but all at once. The monuments came down in blinding speed in a way I never could have predicted, but in hindsight we were chipping away,” Williams says, noting that the monuments had been tagged in recent years with graffiti.
“You didn’t see [graffiti on the monuments] coming up when I was a kid. They were untouchable. It’s like you punched Superman and saw a trickle of blood. I think the graffiti might have been the people talking.”
Michael Paul Williams at his desk in the Richmond Times-Dispatch newsroom in 2005 (Photo by Steve Hedberg)
A Good Day for Richmond
On Friday, June 11, Williams was at home working on one of his columns when the phone rang. It was Mike Szvetitz, his managing editor.
“I thought, ‘This can’t be good,’ ” says Williams, admitting that his mind turned to the downsizings that have taken place at the RTD in recent years. Szvetitz told him he’d won a Pulitzer. Williams didn’t believe the news at first. “I’m like, ‘Get the bleep out of here.’ My immediate reaction was irritation, like, ‘Stop messing with me, I’m on deadline.’ ”
After processing the news, he burst into tears, then told Farmer. She screamed.
RTD staffers convened in the newsroom to celebrate with Champagne. As the newsroom team had taken to working remotely in the pandemic, it was the first time many of them had seen each other in about a year. That evening, the staff continued its celebration at Penny Lane Pub down the street.
On Wednesday, Sept. 8, Williams witnessed the coda to his Pulitzer-winning columns when Lee’s statue was taken off its pedestal on Monument Avenue. Standing on the street, looking at the dispersing crowd that had gathered to witness the removal, Williams says, “Every step we can take away from the embrace of this history, of this celebration of this legacy of oppression and subjugation and falsehood is a good day."
