For black people’
business owners.
“On campus is a different world than the town of Stillwater,” he said. “To be recruited by a big college like that is great. The campus is beautiful, they treat you like a king. The town of Stillwater is what I’m concerned about.”
He says he sees in his daily job the different ways the races are treated. He stays because his family set down roots here.
“I love this town. This is where my grandfather was, this is where my dad was, I was born here,” he said. “
“There are so many things wrong in this town, for the Rev. Jesse Jackson to come to this town is great” for Williams, Manuel said. “But what about the rest of us?”
Needed Williams
Tyrone Bullock, Williams’ Dunbar basketball coach, said Williams felt he fit in Stillwater. He felt it from the first time he drove 12 hours to see the campus, crammed in the back of Bullock’s compact car.
The basketball team needed the skills Williams honed at Dunbar; the university committed to educate him. He wanted his shot at the NBA but also the family’s first college degree.
So he studied business. After being suspended February from playing basketball, he earned a 4.0 GPA, said his aunt, Mildred Williams. He has two classes to go, and is set to graduate in December.
Williams came to Stillwater after his older brother was shot in 2009 while visiting their grandmother in the Back of the Yards. After that, he received his mother’s blessing to dodge the violence in Chicago.
But the prized member of the Cowboys basketball team, a head taller than most of the students walking around the campus and one of its relatively few African Americans, suffered a different sort of misfor- tune.
According to Payne County, Williams is a rapist. He’s a 22-year-old felon. The jury that convicted him in July of two counts of rape by instrumentation for sticking his uninvited hands down the pants of two white women at a college house party recommended a two-year prison sentence for him.
He insists he’s innocent, begging prosecutors to believe he was misidentified at the party.
The decision on whether he will spend the next few years of his life behind bars in Oklahoma is now set for September.
The new evidence in the case — now under a judge’s seal — is linked to a witness in the case. It surfaced late Thursday, causing the judge to delay Friday’s planned sentencing.
He could proceed with sentencing or he could throw out the guilty verdicts and order a new trial.
Williams’ family is drained from the travel and the uncertainty. But they’ll be coming back to Stillwater .
o will Jesse Jackson. “We’ll be back,” he said. “We will be back.”