“Chuck Williams jumped straight into AIM organizing with both feet! He was key to building the organized people power to win first on the community center campaign, and then on other issues. He has always been clear about what we need to do to succeed—from organizing house by house in Scotland community to engaging in politics with elected officials. Every time he leads a meeting he does so with energy, humor and political acumen. It has been such a privilege to work with him.”
—Cynthia Marshall

Reflection from Chuck:

"I’m a member of Scotland AME Zion church, in the Scotland historic African American community. I’ve worked with AIM for the past 18 years, and we’ve had great success with AIM.

I first learned about AIM in 2007. We had some things that we needed to get done in our community. One of our members, the late Bette Thompson, was raising many of these priorities. Bette invited me to an AIM rally, and to support her, I agreed to go. The rally reminded me of the IAF organization I had worked with in New Jersey, and I was interested to get more involved in AIM.

Bette Thompson wanted our community center in the Scotland neighborhood to be spruced up, so the kids would have someplace where they could go to entertain and occupy themselves. Bette shared this priority with Judy Walser, and AIM decided to take on that campaign. All 30 member congregations voted and decided, ‘yes, we’re going to support this.’’

I was very impressed with the way that AIM ran the campaign. Together with AIM, we organized and won a new community center in Scotland as well as 3 other historic African-American neighborhoods. After this campaign, I decided to keep participating in AIM.

We also went on to successfully organize for a police reform bill at the state level. The People’s Community Baptist Church in Silver Spring had a men's ministry which came forward with a proposal that they wanted to end police brutality in Montgomery County. They had a series of priorities and the AIM members voted for it, and we decided we would support that. 

Together with all of the Maryland organizations, the ones that are now in the Maryland Just Power Alliance, we lobbied state legislators and managed to get a bill for police reform introduced in the state. But the governor at the time vetoed it.

To our surprise, within days after the governor’s veto, the state legislature overrode his veto, and we got a police reform bill. I was happy with that. One of the components of the police reform bill was that every county and the city of Baltimore had to have a civilian police accountability board. I volunteered to be on the accountability board, and I was appointed. To this day, I am on the board, and I owe all that to AIM.

Those were two times when the goal we were trying to reach exceeded our expectations. To have the county council override the county executive's no, and to have the state legislature override the governor’s veto, it went way past what our expectations were. It just goes to show you the power of the people.

AIM just shows that things can be done. Now with what's going on at the national scale, I believe in the power of people and the power of organizing, and I believe that we will be able to have some success.

I look at AIM as, when you use the expression ‘You can't fight City Hall,’ I respond with, ‘And then there's AIM.’ I learned this from my father, but AIM reinforces it: We may not necessarily win every battle, but we're not giving up on the war. There may be setbacks, but as long as we have faith that there's light at the end of the tunnel, we will prevail.”