IMAGE

Kale Williams has had an active career in human rights advocacy, most of it in Chicago. A veteran of service in the U. S. Navy in World War II and a graduate of the University of Chicago, he became a pacifist and began a career with the American Friends Service Committee, organizing volunteer work projects in Chicago’s Black ghettos, assistance to Native Americans in the southwest, famine relief in the Nigeria-Biafra civil war, and opposition to the Vietnam war.

The Chicago AFSC staff was fully engaged in the Chicago Freedom Movement; Williams was a member of the Agenda Committee, headed by Martin King and Al Raby. Later he was the executive director of the Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities, the fair housing organization that was a direct outgrowth of that Movement. After 20 years of service there, he was invited to Loyola University Chicago as Visiting Professor of Applied Ethics, and later was appointed Senior Scholar in Loyola’s Center for Urban Research and Learning, a position he still holds.

–KW