Elwood Williams: Have happened in my life, happened to me about two months ago in Seattle, Washington. We had our national conference there. And this particular day, I walked out to this little mall, and these guys were on the street, they were singing and people [indistinct 00:00:24] cup. So one of them kept watching me. So he would look at me. Then, I would look at him. I said, "Well, I don't know what the guy will do," so I felt I better move on. 

Elwood Williams: So I walked on to try to get lost in the crowd. I thought I had lost him. And this guy came, he grabbed me from behind and called my name and he called me Ren. That's what they used the call me in Elizabeth City because my middle name is Lorenzo. 

Kisha Turner: Okay. 

Elwood Williams: And so it was one of those 22 kids and they could sing and all of them had a great musical talent. And he was singing Sam Cooke songs in the street. And he told me he just goes from city to city singing as a street person. And he just said, he's never been able to piece a life together. 

Elwood Williams: So then I started asking about the rest of his family. Some of his brothers are dead. Some of them are sitting in prison. Some of the sisters are dead and they're just a family that never pieced it together. And out of all those 22 children, they have one lawyer out of the family, a very prominent lawyer in Suffolk, a guy name Harold Bonds that's doing doing very well. And just to see somebody 35 years from the past and he recognized me but I would have never recognized him. 

Kisha Turner: Sorry, I just saw someone. 

Elwood Williams: Do you remember his name? 

Kisha Turner: I don't remember his name. I really don't. 

Elwood Williams: It might have been Levi. 

Kisha Turner: He wore like a top hat? 

Elwood Williams: No, this guy didn't— 

Kisha Turner: He wore like a [indistinct 00:01:50] well, he didn't [indistinct 00:01:51]. He had like a [indistinct 00:01:52]. He was just singing. I can't remember his name, though, but he told me he was from North Carolina and he had been in Philly and all over just singing. 

Elwood Williams: It might have been Levi. Real dark skinned? 

Kisha Turner: Uh-huh. 

Elwood Williams: It could have been Levi, but he said he goes from city to city. 

Kisha Turner: Yeah. Anyway. Okay. How about any other Black businesses that you remember in Elizabeth City— 

Elwood Williams: Well— 

Kisha Turner: — or Black business people? 

Elwood Williams: Well, the barbers, the barber shop and the beauty parlors and the funeral homes were most of the Black owned businesses during that time. And my brother that's in Delaware, he had one of the few places. He owned this business, it was— Do you remember Happy Days, with Fonzie, where you know that little thing they used to go to, Arnold's? Well, my brother owned a little thing just like Arnold's, it was a shoeshine parlor and it was a place where all the kids came after school. And he was kind of like a leader. 

Elwood Williams: And so he owned that. He always dreamed of owning businesses, but after that, he just got his education and he never got back to it. But the taxis, you have taxis, the barbershops, the funeral homes, the beauty parlors, those were mainly the only businesses, and you found a few independent carpenters and bricklayers and things, but as far as owning companies, there weren't too many of those around. 

Kisha Turner: And finally, I just wanted to ask you one thing. You said your father was a minister. 

Elwood Williams: [indistinct 00:03:29]. 

Kisha Turner: Could you show me a little more about church and what church you grew up in? 

Elwood Williams: I grew up in St. James Baptist Church in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, and it's located right in front of where the poorhouse is. 

Kisha Turner: Were your parents very active in the church? 

Elwood Williams: My parents were very active in church. In fact, I go around the country doing motivational speeches. 

Kisha Turner: Really? 

Elwood Williams: And most of my sermons— not sermons, but most of my speeches are about church type stuff. And I just take different Bible stories that I learned in church [indistinct 00:04:05] my father preached and tie them together to bring them to today's problems. 

Elwood Williams: One of my favorite thing's the prodigal son. And we used to think that that's the only sermon my father could preach was the prodigal son. But then when you look back [indistinct 00:04:24] prodigal son [indistinct 00:04:26] the value system. And then, when the son left home, I think the moral of the story was that to bring him back and [indistinct 00:04:35] he survived in the values that he learned at home, the work ethic, being honest, never be ashamed to do a job as long as it's honest. 

Elwood Williams: The kids today have the same mentality as the prodigal son, they're greedy, they want it all right now, but the only difference, they don't leave home. But those who leave home, they don't come back as the prodigal son did. They come back in body bags and stuff like that. 

Elwood Williams: And so that's how I kind of tie it together, and just listen to the prayer meetings. So those things are— I think the church played a bigger part in our lives than we even thought because you had those exposures and although you might not have been serious when you were going, but some of the messages kind of sunk in. And as you grow up, you started leading on some of the things that you learned. 

Elwood Williams: I know we've been through some tough times here as a Black Boys Club but this is one of the first Boys Clubs in the country that was founded for Blacks by Blacks. And then one time, Blacks couldn't even go to the Boys Club. 

Elwood Williams: So about two weeks ago, we had an article in the paper [indistinct 00:05:55] and then we had an $80,000 budget deficit. And that was demoralizing news. But one of the things that used to happen in our home was, no matter how tough a situation was, my mother would always say, "The Lord will make a way somehow." [indistinct 00:06:20]. 

Elwood Williams: And so that's what I believe. I said, "Well, the Lord will make a way somehow as long as you work hard and [indistinct 00:06:26] what you do, good things will happen." So as a result of the story going into paper and us trying to help ourselves, in three weeks, we had taken in $61,000 just through the mail and the money was still coming in. 

Elwood Williams: But if we didn't have a track record and a good work ethic for helping ourselves, we would have lost all of that. And those are the kind of values that you learn in church. In church, when people used to testify about the hard times they had and we used to laugh at them sometimes, but they could tell it and then you kind of focus in on the struggles and the place that we're helping to overcome, the church is the meeting place. They came for spiritual healing, but it was also a good group therapy because people were facing the same problems. 

Elwood Williams: And you could really call church, back then, religious anonymous, just like they have Alcoholics Anonymous for the alcoholics. But this where the people came and vented their frustration. And if you thought your boss bad, just listened to this man testify about his boss. And we used to tell, "ain't no White folks going to treat us like that." 

Elwood Williams: But you never wanted to attack the people because, on the other hand, your parents were telling you that the only way to defeat people, is just you got to be prepared. You got to be educated. You got to have something that people want. And so then that was the weapon of how we used to fight back. 

Elwood Williams: And the scariest thing to me now with the young people today is that they don't have that courage or the desire to fight back. And I think that the White man knows this and this is why he's snatched this Affirmative Action Act because when you looked at the '60s, most of the things that happened in the '60s that brought the attention of the world to Black problems, it happened with young people, college students, high school students standing up and marching and making sacrifices. 

Elwood Williams: And now, these kids won't do it. They think because we have integration, everything is all right. But once they started getting stepped in the face or these things happen with welfare reform and all these things that we fought for so hard, have been taken away. And so then you look at the initiative across this country to build more prisons and jails. 

Elwood Williams: They know they are coming because if you're uneducated, undereducated, don't have any skills, welfare been cut, Affirmative Action been cut, what's the most lucrative business in this country for Blacks? You can't go to the Army anymore because Blacks used to go. You can't go to the military because they're cutting back and the athlete requirements are so high, you can't get in. 

Elwood Williams: So they know the only place that these Black men are going to go, they going to end up in these prisons and jails. And so now, if they don't stand up and fight, Black America can almost wipe itself off the map. Y'all finished? 

Kisha Turner: Mm-hmm. Thank you. 

Elwood Williams: Yeah, I mean, you look kind of—