WILLIAMS, Robin M., Jr. 1914-2006
(Robin Murphy Williams, Jr.)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born October 11, 1914, in Hillsboro, NC; died of complications from bowel surgery, June 3, 2006, in Irvine, CA. Sociologist, educator, and author. Williams was a respected researcher who presented groundbreaking theories about racism and the motivations of soldiers during war. His formal education included a B.S. in 1933 from what is now North Carolina State University at Raleigh, a master's degree from the University of North Carolina in 1935, another master's from Harvard in 1939, and a doctorate from that institution in 1943. In the three years before America entered World War II, Williams was an instructor at the University of Kentucky. For the duration, he was a research analyst and statistician for the War Department, and it was here that he interviewed soldiers, sometimes at the front, to understand what made them fight. Williams learned that their main motivation was simply to keep their friends from dying or being wounded; feelings of nationalism or animosity toward the enemy were not nearly as important. After the military was informed, his work influenced the way that troops were trained for action. He also cowrote the study The American Soldier (1949) based on his findings. After the war, Williams joined the faculty at Cornell University, where he would teach until 1990. While there, one of his research projects was the study of racial relations between whites and African Americans, and he coauthored the timely Strangers Next Door: Ethnic Relations in American Communities (1964). He would later write Mutual Accommodation: Ethnic Conflict and Cooperation (1977) and coedited A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society (1989). Williams's research on racial relationships was notably used by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall when he was presiding over the Brown vs. Board of Education case. Also interested in the dynamics of American students, Williams was coeditor of Schools in Transition (1956) and the coauthor of What College Students Think (1960). He continued to teach and write until illness forced him to rest. A former president of the American Sociological Association who was also active in the American Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, he spent his final teaching years at the University of California at Irvine; his last book was The Wars Within: Peoples and States in Conflict (2003).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Los Angeles Times, June 9, 2006, p. B8. New York Times, June 10, 2006, p. A28.