RACIAL solidarity--"our ability to market ethnically"--is an important selling point for Williams and a clue to the success of his black business. "It would be very difficult for us at this time to have a white store manager, while we are still establishing our credibility within the community," Williams explained.
Williams hopes the enterprise eventually can be "color blind, with real integration rather than token." Currently, the employees of Freedom Industries are preponderantly black. Williams gave no statistics; "We never count," he said.
Looking to the future with optimism, Williams envisions black people leading the way for all in developing more human-oriented business, and demonstrating that local problems should be solved by the local community.
"I generally think the American white is insane," Williams said--the smothering susceptibility to conformity in white society makes the white American blind to others' needs and values.
Williams favors a large degree of local political and economic autonomy because local needs relate to ethnic, cultural, and ecological factors. Only the people living in an area really understand their own needs.
THE BLACK community has had to learn to recognize the worth and individuality of each of its members, Williams said. "On one ghetto block, you have a welfare mother, a doctor, a pimp, a lawyer--all jammed together." Conformity is impossible; understanding becomes a necessity.
The white will learn from the black. "We'll have a product needed in the white community when we're further on down the road," Williams said--and freedom from conformity is that product.
Black economic power is not the only, nor the final, solution in unraveling the overlapping cause-and-effect ghetto problems of poverty and discrimination. But the relatively untried approach seems to be meeting with a large degree of success in the enthusiastically diverse activities of Freedom Industries.
"I'd like someday to be able to print up a pamphlet saying what a wonderful thing it is to live in our community," Williams said. The possibility today seems remote, but the beginning is now.