MALCOLM WILLIAMS ’23
War veteran earns Clemson degree at 84
You’re never too old to learn something new.
Malcolm Williams was 78 when Clemson University accepted him as an undergraduate student in 2018 and 84 when he earned a degree in sociology with a minor in Global Black Studies in 2023. It was something he’d dreamed about for more than half a century.
“It’s been quite a trip!” he says. “We grow through progression. If you stay back, you don’t learn anything. You don’t go anywhere. It’s also good to exercise your mind as well as your body. It keeps you sharp.”
An unwaveringly dapper dresser with a thick, curled mustache, Williams stood out among his fellow students like a visitor from another time. Indeed, he was undoubtedly the only undergraduate who experienced the Jim Crow South. Having grown up in Detroit, he vividly remembers seeing “White Only” and “Black Only” signs when the Army sent him to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio for training in the late 1950s.
“It was a real eye-opener,” Williams says. “I said, ‘Oh, mercy, this is going to be pure hell.’ And it was.”
Williams joined the Army in 1956 out of high school, served in both Korea and Vietnam as a surgical technician, and was assigned to the 101st Airborne Division, the “Screaming Eagles.”
Williams left the Army in 1962 and moved back to Detroit. After that, he moved to California for a time and then returned to Michigan to attend Ferris State College in Big Rapids, where he became a charter brother of the school’s Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity Zeta Beta chapter in 1966. He left before graduating when state funding for the school was cut, leaving him without the means to continue.
Fifty-seven years later, he finished what he started there.
“I knew with an education, I’d always have something to fall back on, and I wouldn’t ever be destitute,” he says.
Williams’ most cherished memories of Clemson happened in the classrooms.
“My favorite times were in my sociology classes,” he says. “I think, really, understanding where I belong has been the most important thing I’ve learned. I belong in sociology because I want to understand people.”
He says his advice for young people is to “study hard and try to live clean.” He doesn’t drink and feels that’s a big part of why he’s so vibrant in his later years.
“If I’m blessed, I’ll get to 100,” Williams says. “I can only say it’s been an interesting trip so far. As for Clemson? To quote Julius Caesar: ‘I came, I saw, I conquered.’”
FUN FACT: After leaving the Army, Williams spent the next chapter of his life working as a chauffeur for Motown’s Hitsville U.S.A. studio and a bartender in the Detroit club scene, among other things.
