Avon Williams

Avon N. Williams, Jr. (1921 – 1993) was a Tennessee State Senator from 1972 to 1992.

Biography

Avon Nyanza Williams, Jr. was born in Knoxville, Tennessee. He was a 1940 graduate of Johnson C. Smith University, an historically black university located in Charlotte, North Carolina. He subsequently studied law at the Boston University School of Law and was admitted to the Tennessee and Massachusetts bars in 1948. He practiced law in Knoxville from 1949 to 1953, then he moved to Nashville.

Williams’ first cousin, Thurgood Marshall, was the chief lawyer for the Legal Defense and Educational Fund of the NAACP. In Nashville, Williams was an active member of the NAACP, long serving on its executive board, and active as a civil rights attorney and a key figure in the Nashville-area Civil Rights Movement. Through these efforts he met Z. Alexander Looby, a fellow African American lawyer focused on civil rights. He joined Looby’s practice and together they helped defend African Americans participating in the movement.