By Joe Holley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 2, 2006

Linda Faye Williams, 57, a political scientist at the University of Maryland and an expert on race and gender politics, died of a heart attack Oct. 16 at Montgomery General Hospital in Olney. She was a Rockville resident.

A former professor at Howard University, Dr. Williams also held positions with the Congressional Black Caucus and the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

"Of all the major organizations in the African American community, I can't think of one that her research doesn't touch," said Lorenzo Morris, a political scientist at Howard University.

She wrote numerous articles and books, including "Constraint of Race: Legacies of White Skin Privilege in America" (2004), which won three national book awards, including one from the American Political Science Association for the year's best book on race, ethnicity and politics.

"There can be little genuine progress in solving the so-called race problem or in creating the kind of citizenship all Americans deserve unless and until continuing white skin privilege is openly acknowledged and addressed," she wrote.

She also was co-editor with her husband, Howard University sociologist Ralph C. Gomes, of "From Exclusion to Inclusion: The Long Struggle for African American Political Power" (1995).

"She had this quiet, sweet lyrical kind of Southern presence," Morris said, "but she was a highly demanding researcher. If you strayed from the data, the demolition you'd receive would be devastating."

She was born in Lovelady, Tex., a tiny community in the East Texas Piney Woods, and grew up in an even smaller community, Smith's Grove ("a suburb of greater Lovelady," a friend called it).

Her college roommate, Linda Collins, recalled a story Dr. Williams told her about how, as a youngster, she yearned to be a yodeler. She practiced around the house day and night until her mother couldn't take it anymore.

"Imagine her frustration," Collins recalled, "when her mama took her aside and said, 'Honey, I don't want to disappoint you, but Negroes can't yodel.' "

She graduated in 1966 from the all-black Center Grove High School, where her mother taught music and typing and her father was the basketball coach, math teacher and principal.

She played flute and piccolo in the school marching band and despite taking only rudimentary math classes and never having a lab for science class, was a National Merit Scholar.

Mr. Williams wanted his daughter to go to Prairie View A&M University, the historically black school nearby, but she insisted on attending Rice University in Houston. In 1970, she and another student became the first African Americans to obtain undergraduate degrees from what had been an officially segregated institution until 1964.

Chandler Davidson, a retired Rice sociology professor, recalled a 1969 class he taught on political sociology, where "Linda sat in the back and was quiet as a little church mouse." Midway through the semester, she told Davidson she wanted to write her term paper about U.S. Sen. Ralph Yarborough, a Texas Democrat who supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Davidson urged her to assess Yarborough's support among white East Texans, who were often segregationists but also supported economic populists such as Yarborough.

"She turned in a 50-page paper," Davidson recalled. "I still have a copy of it; it's a wonderful paper -- well argued, well researched. I was just bowled over by her performance."

Davidson encouraged her to pursue a career in political science. She won a prestigious Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and received a master's degree in 1973 and doctorate in 1977, both in political science and from the University of Chicago.

Years later, she was still pondering some of the same issues she first explored in Davidson's class. "I think the civil rights era represented a moment of optimism that was very different from the entire rest of American history," she told the Baltimore Sun in 2002. "It was almost a moment of madness, when all was possible. Momentarily, people believed that now we could overcome the centrality of race in American politics."

She joined the Howard University faculty in 1977.

Ten years later, she quit her tenured position to become associate director of research at the Joint Center for Political Studies. From 1989 to 1991, she was a research fellow at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

She became an associate professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland in 1991, taking a leave of absence from 1993 to 1995 to serve as director of the Institute for Policy Research and Education at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. She became a full professor in 2004.

She took pride in serving as a mentor to African American students and was honored with a special mentoring award at the 2006 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. Some of her former graduate students, many now on university faculties, call themselves "Linda's academic children."

Survivors include her husband of 19 years, of Rockville; her father, Washington Columbus Williams, and her stepmother, Mittie Williams, both of Lovelady; a brother, Washington Columbus Williams Jr. of Owings Mills; two sisters, Susan Patterson of Charlotte, and Zandra Williams of New York; three stepchildren, R. Christopher Gomes of Monrovia, Liberia, Robert Alexander Gomes of Toronto and Jerusha Ann Gomes of Oxon Hill; and six grandchildren.