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Headmaster Willy MacMullen thanks reunion volunteers Kevit Cook, Rocky Fawcett, and Steve Blakeslee ’54 for their dedication this year. 1933 classmates Dick Davidson, Rib Hall, and Henry Becton returned for their annual reunion luncheon with their original class banner.
Williams honored with alumni citation of merit The Citation of Merit Committee this year bestowed the school’s highest honor on Wesley Samuel Williams Jr. ’59, a lawyer, businessman, philanthropist, and pioneer who “never shied from hard work…and always deflected personal glory.” “Fluent in eight languages,” Charlie Yonkers read from the citation, “you are well versed in the legal rhetoric of your profession, you communicate the universal truths and humanitarian values steeped in spiritual allegiance to your church, through which your devotion to civic responsibility is manifest.” Williams, among his many community activities, is a member of the executive committee of the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and a former president and longtime board member of Family and Child Services, receiving their Stoddard Award for “sustained exemplary community service.” Williams is chairman of the Executive Committee and the Committee of the Whole, Board of Regents, of the Smithsonian Institution, and a cancer survivor who chairs the National Prostate Cancer Coalition. “There are far too many men whom I have known personally,” he said, “who have experienced needless pain and suffering—and even premature death—from prostate cancer.” He said it was also out of gratitude for his own full recovery that he took the position. A magna cum laude graduate of 38
Taft Bulletin Summer 2004
Harvard College, he received degrees from Columbia, the Fletcher School of Diplomacy, and Harvard Law. Williams is the first African-American to serve both as legal counsel to a U.S. Senate Committee and as head of the Harvard Law School Association and of the Harvard Law School Fund. Paving the way for others, he has made a point of giving back. As a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers, he headed the oversight committee for Harvard Divinity School for five years and later the oversight committee for Harvard’s Memorial Church. Dedicated to his faith, Williams is also a licensed lay catechist, lay reader, and lay preacher with the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, D.C., and a church-school teacher for both adults and teens. In 2002, by command of Queen Elizabeth II, Williams was invested as a Knight of the Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem. When Virginia Union University presented him with an honorary doctor of laws degree that same year, they remarked that he “exemplified the committed life, characterized by excellence at every turn, resulting in high, often historic distinction in a broad range of fields.” On April 1, Williams became sole president and chief operating officer— while continuing as co-chairman and co-chief executive officer—of the 120-yearold Lockhart Companies, including all 22
Wesley Williams ’59, the recipient of the school’s highest honor, the Citation of Merit, talks about how his passion for learning was materially enhanced at Taft.
companies in Lockhart’s three divisions (real estate, insurance, and consumer finance), prompting his early retirement later this year from the Washington-based international law firm of Covington and Burling, where he has been a partner for more than 30 years. He remains active as chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, as well as chairman of the National Conference that is comprised of all 24 chairmen and deputy chairmen of the 12 Federal Reserve Banks across the country. On June 16, Williams was elected to the board of directors of the Bear Stearns Companies. Together with Karen Hastie Williams whom he married in 1968, Williams has three grown children: Amanda Williams Calhoun, Wesley Hastie Williams, and Bailey Lockhart Williams, and one grandson, William Ernest Calhoun.