COMMUNITY BUILDERS/sandy williams
Sandy Williams with her brother, Rick Williams.Sandy’s activism began when she wasn’t allowed due to her gender to take the same class as her older brother, who she admired. (Photo courtesy of Renika Williams) Sandy herself didn’t get to take the shop class, the paper led to policy change, and girls who came after her could take the course. “I learned something there: that you could actually change something, and so that was the beginning for me,” Sandy says. “Once you know that you have the power to change something, then you always know that.” That was a defining moment for Sandy, fifty-nine, a fierce, lifelong advocate. She wonders what she would be like had she not been confronted with the need to change the shop class. Six years ago, Sandy created Black Lens News, which covers stories for and about Spokane’s Black community, filling a gap in stories the mainstream media and most local papers have ignored for decades. Sandy recalls feeling a bit terrified sitting in her car, with a box in the backseat holding five hundred copies of the Black Lens News' first issue. After calling her daughter for moral support, she managed to hand them out. “It felt a little presumptuous of me to sort of assume that I could start a newspaper,” Sandy says. But the community response was overwhelmingly positive. There was a clear need for a paper that carried stories from the Black community, Sandy says. People had been talking about it for years. The catalyst to starting the paper really happened while Sandy sat beside her sick father, who was on bed rest. Because he wasn’t much of a talker, she sat quietly with her laptop on her lap, experimenting with layout templates out of curiosity. Sandy remembers seeing a 2014 newspaper report detailing that there was no racial bias found in the use of police force, which seemed unusual to her considering that had not been her experience at all. She investigated the findings and found that the use of force against Black people was disproportionately high. “I thought, if I don’t write that story, then it’s not going to get out there, and that was the first front-page story on the Black Lens News,” Sandy says. “There are certainly a whole host of stories that could be told that are not getting told, and the ones that are tend to be fairly 40
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narrow.” Sandy spent most of her childhood in Columbus, South Carolina. She was twelve years old when her family moved to Spokane after her father was stationed in Gonzaga University’s ROTC department. The family moved around on average every three years, Sandy’s brother Rick Williams says. The siblings depended upon each other every time they had to leave their friends behind. Despite the noticeable differences between Spokane’s and Columbia’s Black community, Sandy says that the move wasn’t tough because of the support she always had in her parents and older brother. “My parents were determined that their kids were going to be successful despite the messages that we get as Black people about not being successful,” she says. Besides feeling hyper-visible as one of the handful of Black students attending her high school, Sandy enjoyed growing up in Spokane. But she was ready to leave town as soon as she graduated and attended Washington State University, where her brother was enrolled. Sandy then spent a year living in Colorado during a tremendous snowstorm, which led her to find a warmer climate. She lived in Los Angeles for a bit before being called back to Spokane to spend some time with her parents, who were growing older. Sandy’s mother, Wilhelmenia Williams, says she always told her children to set their minds on what they want to achieve Sandy pictured with her family. (Photo courtesy of Renika Williams)