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One of my first real interactions with Donny Williams was on his first day as chief of the Wilmington Police Department. He was standing in front of reporters – and, in a very real way, the nation – announcing his decision to fire three racist officers. They’d been caught on camera making comments so profoundly disturbing that some news outlets hesitated to print them.
I put the worst of it in the headline (although we did censor the n-word). I was the managing editor of Port City Daily at the time, and my colleague Michael Praats had broken the story. We agreed it shouldn’t be sanitized.
It was the summer of racial reckoning, just a month after the murder of George Floyd. A long-overdue examination of the racism in our lives and institutions swept across the country. People’s news feeds were jammed with stories of brutal and overt racism – lynchings, shooting of unarmed Black people – but also the endless parade of subtler insults – the offhand comments, the dress codes and hairstyle policies, the tokenizing representation in TV shows and movies. And, of course, the systemic racism that was baked into American life, in the systems of banking, criminal justice, and education.
Now, this was not news – not new news – to most Black people. But for a lot of people, especially affluent white folks, this conversation was drowning out everything else in the public square. We wanted this story to be heard over that din. Not to diminish those other stories, but to impress upon people how important this one was. The first Black police chief in a city with a racist history like no other. A crisis. An inflection point in history.
Well, it got heard. NPR, CNN, the New York Times, and the Guardian covered it. Someone emailed me from Anakara to say they’d seen it on Turkish TV.
I’m glad. I’m glad it wasn’t swept under the rug like so many other Wilmington stories. But it’s clear that for many people it inextricably bound Williams, and his tenure as chief, to the story of racism in Wilmington, and the United States.
Since then, but especially in the last year or two, I’ve heard frustrations from a number of Wilmington Police Department officers – many concerned about their pay and benefits lagging behind inflation, but some with more specific concerns about Williams’ management style.
In July, Wilmington City Councilman Luke Waddell – who had apparently had similar conversations with officers – raised the issue at a council meeting.
On social media, I saw plenty of comments suggesting that Waddell, who is white, was a racist and thus a natural ally for bigoted or even white supremacist officers on the force who disliked Williams simply because he was Black. Some recycled the false story that Waddell is a descendant of Alfred Moore Waddell, a leader of the 1898 coup and massacre. Waddell has denied all of this, and I’ve seen no evidence for any of these claims.
Milder criticisms, including from Councilman Kevin Spears, who is Black, suggested that Waddell’s public criticism of Williams was enough to draw out those officers.
Last month, I broke the story that the city had spent $75,000 on a third-party investigation of Williams, based on allegations of harassment, intimidation, and mismanagement. While the report was never released – not even to city council – it was a damning indictment of Williams’ leadership. And that was before the recently retired officer whose HR complaint had sparked the investigation, Captain Mike Fanta, confirmed to me and other news outlets that at least some of the allegations had been sustained.
I was called a white supremacist a few times after that report came out. It didn’t change my opinion on how I reported the story, but I understood where it was coming from. As I wrote last month, Williams grew up in Creekwood, he rose through the ranks to run the police department that had mistreated so many young Black men, and he fired three racist cops on his first day – promising reform in the days afterward. If that doesn’t inspire some loyalty, what would?
Over the next month, other news outlets picked up the story and ran with it. Further details of Capt. Fanta’s complaint came out. He told WECT a story he’d related to me as well, that Williams kept a “bowl of badges” from terminated officers on his desk, that he likened to “scalps” – designed to intimidate potential dissenters. Fanta sharpened his criticism of both Williams and the city for keeping him on as chief. He claimed if Williams “was a white male, I don’t think he would be here right now” – an allegation I’ve heard from other officers, as well.
“No one wants to be remembered as the one who fired the first Black police chief of Wilmington,” one officer told me.
City Manager Tony Caudle has declined to comment, and he hasn’t budged on the investigation report, which has remained sealed, even from council (Caudle also announced his resignation, slated for May of next year).
In the absence of evidence, the conversation has only become increasingly racialized.
On social media, some posts were less and less about whether allegations against Williams had merit – and more about what kind of person would attack the city’s first Black police chief in the first place.
On Tuesday, that point came to a head during a press conference held by Black leaders.
LeRon Montgomery, president of the New Hanover County NAACP called for “an end to these unwarranted claims about the integrity of Chief Donny Williams’ leadership.”
Sonya Patrick, who chairs the New Hanover County chapter of the National Black Leadership Caucus, dismissed even ‘sustained’ complaints against Williams as part of a broader agenda to remove Black leaders from power – pointing, as other Black leaders have, to the ousting of Endowment President William Buster and the firing of Superintendent Dr. Charles Foust.
On Facebook, Councilman Spears called for Williams, who had previously released only a short statement, to directly confront his critics. He also presented the situation in stark racial terms.
“I wish Donny Williams would finally address his naysayers, because the city is tired of trying to figure out what’s going on! I mean I know, and I said what I said. Oh, and I meant what I said, I just wish the WECT reporter would have played the entire clip of what I said! He asked me what was their issue, and he asked me what did I think their issue was with Donny, it’s the same thing WE’RE BLACK,” Spears wrote.
The next day, Williams did respond.
On Wednesday afternoon, a little before 3 p.m., I got a tip that Williams was holding some kind of press conference at his office.
I called a department spokesperson, who told me it was an informal, last-minute meeting – with no cameras or recording. I prodded a little, and the spokesperson told me it was in regards to the third-party investigation into department leadership – more specifically, into Williams. He also told me, somewhat cryptically, that we’d “have a chance to listen to some recordings.”
I scrambled to the parking deck, got in my car, and drove to the WPD headquarters on Bess Street. WWAY, WECT, and StarNews were already there.
WHQR and Port City Daily hadn’t been invited. According to emails shared with me later, PCD was told, “Both TV stations and the Star News had been in regular contact with us since early October expressing an interest in speaking with the Chief if he chose to make a statement. The Chief made the decision to give a statement to media outlets who had asked for a statement since the story broke.”
(Side note: Since I was the one who actually did break the story, and had asked for comment, I was annoyed. But since the department spokesperson apologized – and, hell, I’d found a way to show up, anyway – I didn’t give him too much grief. Do I think PCD, and even the general public, should have been invited? Yes.)
We were led into the chief’s office and Williams, who is good with names, greeted each of us personally.
He initially told one WECT reporter that he wouldn’t talk to him, because he “didn’t give me a fair shake on that first story.” The reporter protested that he’d reached out for comment multiple times. Williams relented and, in fact, was warmly conciliatory with the reporter from that point on, apologizing for the awkwardness.
Williams laid out the reason we were there: he was going to address some of the allegations that had been made against him, and then he was going to play us some recordings. And, although I’d been told ‘no cameras, no recording,’ Williams did allow the TV crews to bring in their equipment. I recorded on my phone.
Williams refuted Fanta’s bowl claim, showing us a plastic cube (not a bowl) on his bookshelf. It contained only the badges and ID cards of the three racist officers. (Fanta would later confirm he never looked at them up close.)
Williams was clear that any other badges from officers he’s fired simply went back to the quartermaster. Williams was later more direct. He felt that, because Fanta had made an issue of the ‘bowl of badges,’ which was a testament to the reality of white supremacy within the department, Fanta’s complaint itself was racially motivated. Who would complain about shaming the worst of the worst? (Fanta, for his part, has pushed back, saying Williams could be risking a defamation suit.)
Williams also pushed back on reporting that had focused on retention issues during his tenure – presenting HR data from before he was chief that indicated he’s been judged unfairly for the department's more recent struggles.
“It was pointed more at me while we lost 207 employees. Well, let's talk about the four and a half years prior to me being chief, from July 2015 to October 2019. We lost 187 employees, and times were better then,” Williams said, noting this was before Covid, the unrest prompted by George Floyd’s murder, and in general a nationwide trend of law enforcement agencies struggling with recruiting and retaining officers.
Then, Williams asked us to turn off our recorders and cameras.
We were taken into the adjoining conference room, asked to sit down, and given notepads (I had, embarrassingly, forgotten mine in my haste).
Williams told us that systemic racism was still very much alive and kicking in the department, something he’d had to deal with for his entire career. He told us – as he’s told me in the past – that he’s been called the n-word to his face by a fellow department employee.
He told us that, to illustrate the problems he still deals with, he was going to play us a recording. And, for the next fifteen to twenty minutes or so, we listened to excerpts from two conversations.
I can say, with no disrespect intended, that some of the reporters in the room looked a little lost. We were, after all, being plunged into the middle of a low-fi recorded conversation, taken out of context, and without a lot of backstory provided.
One of those conversations was between a woman – initially identified by Williams only as a white female civilian employee – and David Yanacek, who retired as Captain several years ago.
I was lucky enough to recognize the female voice – Bethany MacGillivray (who goes by Bethany Pridgen). She was the longtime director of the Wilmington crime lab and, for several years, I’ve been covering her lawsuit against Sheriff Ed McMahon, former District Attorney Ben David, former WPD Captain David Oyler, and Williams himself.
The recording we were listening to, as I told the reporters when the listening session was over, was from the lawsuit’s discovery process. Pridgen had recorded a host of conversations as part of her growing concerns, which included a toxic and misogynistic workplace. Her suit, it should be noted, was dismissed this year in New Hanover County Superior Court, but is currently headed for an appeal.
So I had a little context for the conversation between Pridgen and Yanacek, as they discussed a 2014 incident that’s been related to me several times over the years. Essentially, Williams – then a lieutenant – showed up to a crime scene in his street clothes and was mistaken for the suspect by a rookie crime-scene tech.
Yanacek describes Williams as a “thug” and a “mutt.” And while he’s defended those comments to the StarNews as being the parlance of the times – I would argue those were pretty racist times. Not thinking something is racist doesn’t automatically mean it isn’t. As a white man, I can’t imagine the frustration, the humiliation, the anger, the indignity – all bound up in that moment. And I know there are plenty of Black men who don’t have to imagine it at all.
For her part, Pridgen laughs at some of this. To me, she sounds like she’s cringing – and it’s worth noting she’s a woman and a civilian, speaking to her supervisor, a man with a badge. There are other power dynamics in a police department besides racial ones. (It’s also worth noting that while Pridgen is suing Williams, she’s also suing three white men, including two powerful elected Democrats.)
I wasn’t overly concerned with transcribing the conversations, so I was able to look around the room as some of my fellow reporters scribbled. I looked at Williams. His expression said: “See?”
In a way, it was almost smug, like he’d known something we hadn’t as we were all blithely reporting criticisms of him. But I also saw genuine hurt.
When the recordings were done, that second emotion won out. Haltingly, Williams told us about the frustration he feels with the lingering presence of the kind of racism he’d just played on tape for us. I’d been told Williams would resort to crocodile tears and theatrics. But to me, this looked sincere. We weren’t allowed to record, so you’ll have to take my word for it, or not, I suppose.
Williams told us about how much he loves the community and how, in spite of the pain he’s felt over the years, he loves serving Wilmington. And he begged – using those words, “I’m begging you” – not to judge all employees of the Wilmington Police Department based on the racism of a smaller group.
“I’m just begging you to judge them by the color of their hearts, not the color of their skin,” Williams said.
Williams asked each of us if we had any questions. When it was my turn, I told him I didn’t really. I told him I was well aware he had some racist cops working for him, and I told him he had my sympathy. And I meant that.
Seven years earlier, I’d sat in the same office with Chief Ralph Evangelous. It was one of our first meetings, and before we got down to business – I think I was there to discuss that year’s FBI crime stats – we talked a little about our respective backgrounds.
He told me a harrowing story about a recording of a police officer who had been taken hostage and tortured during a siege. Unauthorized copies, he told me, had made their way all around the country. I believe Evangelous had been chief of police in Temple, Texas at the time – some point in the mid to late 1990s.
I remember Evangelous as he recalled telling his officers, “I will never let anything like that happen to you.”
That stayed with me, and maybe colored too much how I thought about Evangelous. I’ve heard his attitude described simply as old school – usually as a compliment. To me, while there was something endearing in the way he talked about his officers, it was also paternalistic, even militaristic. Us versus them. Kick doors, crack heads, cuff bad guys. Rough men standing ready to do violence on the public’s behalf, as Orwell had it. It’s an attitude that lingers in pretty much every law enforcement agency I’ve ever come across.
Williams knows firsthand what it’s like to have your neighborhood patrolled like it was Belfast. And he knows what that does to a community like Creekwood – and the young people who grow up there.
Evangelous saw Creekwood and other housing projects as a lost battle and called for them to be torn down. Williams has said he imagines the city’s low-income Black communities as a place where cops are a welcome and unthreatening sight – or even neighbors.
That’s a hell of a contrast between one administration and the next. And you have to imagine some officers, who spent decades in Evangelous’ mindset, are struggling to catch up. Some of them, I guarantee, are racist. But some of them are just experiencing culture shock. And many of them are struggling with the way we ask police officers to be so many things: dispassionate investigators, frontline warriors, mental health responders, and community engagement workers who are mentors, coaches, and friends.
There are plenty of valid critiques of law enforcement. The question is: can race be the skeleton key to unlock all the answers?
Many, including the NAACP and Black Leadership Caucus, see Donny Williams, William Buster, and Charles Foust through the same racial lens: powerful Black men attacked by a largely white power structure. For many, it’s part of a brutal legacy dating back to 1898, when white supremacists, enraged at the growing political, economic, and social agency of Black people, turned to genocidal violence. Over a century later, the Black middle class remains decimated, and the power structure in Wilmington remains overwhelming white.
As I’ve said before, the lack of transparency – if not the outright secrecy – around the ouster of Buster and Foust made it hard to discount that narrative.
Did race play a role in Foust’s firing from the school district? Watching Foust clash with Pat Bradford, a white school board member, over the Constitution’s failure to uphold Black humanity – and then watching white conservatives around town clutch their pearls at Foust’s audacity – I’m hard-pressed to say no.
But having spoken with Black school district employees, particularly women, about their interactions with Foust, I can tell you, it wasn’t just about race. They described Foust’s demeanor as standoffish and condescending. “Dr. Guicci,” they called him, a reference to his habit of wearing designer shoes that cost more than some made in a whole paycheck.
Did race play a role in Buster’s departure from the Endowment? Perhaps. I’ve been accused of peddling that narrative by board member Woody White. But, to reiterate a point I’ve made many times before, if people in the community believe that then it’s the Endowment’s secretive behavior to blame, far more than anything I’ve ever written or said.
I personally think Buster’s departure had to do with scope and scale more than race. Buster was thinking about projects that were ambitious and all-encompassing, and the Endowment was still trying to get off the ground and keep local nonprofits from rioting. That’s just my opinion, and I could be quite wrong, but I think if you try to see what’s going on at the Endowment solely in terms of race – or gender, or partisan affiliation – you’re going to misunderstand it.
And then there’s Williams.
On Wednesday he’d done the right thing, in my opinion, by meeting the press and addressing the allegations against him. It was an awkward, slapdash affair, which unfairly excluded some of the press, but the underlying motive – addressing the issue instead of hiding from it – was admirable.
Williams’ main point was that he believes Yanacek and Fanta, the two highest-profile former officers who have so far gone on the record against him, are racist – or at least making racially-motivated allegations (though, again, both former officers deny this).
I take Williams at his word, that racism persists in his department. I can see how it would, from his point of view, underwrite every insult, every perceived act of insubordination, every question about his leadership.
But that doesn’t mean he should be immune from criticism. And it doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be held accountable — whether that’s by the city, the courts, the press, or the public.
Wilmington’s ugly history of racism and the way it’s persisted and evolved will always play a role in the power structures here in our town. But there are other forces at work, other factors in this and every story.
If we ignore race, we’re blind. But if that's all we see, I doubt we'll get the complete picture.
