Angela Williams was at a Christmas party in 2017 when she got the call. The police in Troy, Alabama, had beaten her 17-year-old son, Ulysses Wilkerson. As soon as she could, Williams posted pictures of his swollen and bloody face on social media where they went viral. He’d survived. But this would only be the beginning.
Two years later, Williams and Wilkerson filed a federal civil lawsuit. Another two years passed before they saw bodycam and dashcam footage.
Still, Williams hasn’t been able to see all of the footage of that December night. Since her son’s beating, she founded Mothers on a Mission to support mothers like her. In 2022, she appeared in the Netflix documentary “For Our Children,” which was released in May 2024.
This August, she described a journey we’re all too familiar with to the Marshall Project: a grieving Black mother thrust into the world of activism. “[P]olice will [only] release footage when it makes them look good,” Williams insists. “If my son had been wrong in that video, it would have been on CNN. If it incriminates them, they won’t show it.”
It doesn’t matter how many years have passed. Williams refuses to let people change the narrative or forget what police did to her son.