Program Pairs Black Students, Mentors

Johnny L. Williams says people helped him on the way up the education ladder. Now, he says, it’s his pleasure to reach out and help those on the lower rungs.

Williams, 53, is a vice principal and counselor at Valley High School in Santa Ana. He is also the school’s coordinator for a project sponsored by the Orange County Urban League.

The “Mentoring/Higher Education Project” matches black high school students with local business and professional people who try to inspire the students to complete high school and college.

“This is a brand-new program, and Valley High is a pilot school for it,” said Williams.

“The mentors are people in the corporate world, people such as bank presidents. We pair the students with people like that, and it gives them a role model to motivate them to succeed and try to stay in school.”

Williams noted that black students in Orange County are a tiny minority because of the small size of the black community in the county.

“These students can benefit from positive mentors working with them,” Williams said. “There is so much negative in society for these (black) students to face. I think we recently saw it when David Duke (a former Ku Klux Klansman) ran for governor in Louisiana.”

Williams is a native of Shreveport, La., and he grew up at a time when racial segregation was rigidly enforced and blacks had few opportunities. But he said higher education broke the chains that otherwise might have kept him in poverty.

“When you look at my own background, you see the value of education,” Williams said. “I came from a large family, a low-income family. But I was able to work my way through Grambling State University in Louisiana, and I became the first member of my family to get a college degree. I tell students that the best way to make it in society is through education.”

Williams said that when he was a student at Booker T. Washington High in Shreveport, his history teacher, Ernest Webb, encouraged him to go on to college, telling him, “You can make it; give it a hard try.” Williams said following the advice changed the course of his life.

Williams received his bachelor’s degree from Grambling State in 1963 and earned his master’s degree in school administration from Cal State Fullerton in 1974. He has been at Valley High since 1969.

Williams praised the Urban League, which is a United Way charity, for its work in the mentor program at Valley High.

“This program gets the students involved in the corporate world and motivates them to set their goals a little higher up,” he said. “By being exposed to these mentors and corporations, the students can have a better outlook on life.”

In addition to assisting with the Urban League mentor program, Williams is active in church work and is on the national alumni board of Grambling State University.

Reaching out and helping young students is personally “very rewarding,” he said. “I try to be a role model to all my students, to let them know there is a better way of life.”