Stanley Williams - Childhood

Childhood

Stanley Williams III was born December 29, 1953, at the New Orleans Charity Hospital in New Orleans, Louisiana to a 17-year old mother.

Williams' father abandoned the family when he was just a year old. In 1959, at the age of five, Williams moved with his mother from New Orleans to Los Angeles, California by a Greyhound Lines bus. His mother moved the two into an apartment on the West Side of South Central Los Angeles.

Because Williams' mother worked several jobs to support them Williams was a latchkey kid (long before the term achieved national popularity in the 1980s) and often engaged in mischief on the streets. Williams recalled that, as a child, he would hang out in abandoned houses and vacant lots around his neighborhood in South Central where he would watch adults get drunk, abuse drugs, gamble and engage in pit bull fights. Williams stated that after the adults finished the dog fighting they would make the children fight each other. Williams participated in these street fights regularly as a child where adults would bet on him and give him part of the proceeds for winning his fights. Williams was often the target of older bullies in his neighborhood and, by the age of twelve, he began carrying a switchblade in order to protect himself against older street thugs.