Williams had previously served as chief financial officer for the district, managing to balance the budget and achieve a surplus within two years of appointment.

Williams, born Anthony Stephen Eggleton in Los Angeles on July 28, 1951, was adopted at age three by Virginia and Lewis Williams (a postal worker), who raised him and seven other children in their home: Lewis IV, Virginia II, Carla, Cynthia, Leif Eric I, Kimberly, and Loris.

After that, he worked giving piano and clay sculpture and other tactile art lessons to blind children and counseling Vietnam War veterans in Los Angeles.

[3] In 1982, he graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Yale College, where he was a member of the literary society St. Anthony Hall.

[5] By that time, however, Washington was in the midst of a fiscal crisis of such proportion that Congress had established a financial control board charged with oversight and management of the District's finances.

[12] When Barry declined to seek a fifth term as mayor in the spring of 1998, Williams finally entered the race, resigning as CFO to campaign.

Upon his election, the Control Board announced that it would begin ceding back to Williams much of the executive authority it had stripped of the mayor's office during Barry's tenure.

Longtime residents complained of being priced out of their homes and neighborhoods and forced to move to neighboring Prince George's County, Maryland.

As a result of the irregular petitions, the Williams campaign was fined $277,700 by the District of Columbia Board of Elections and Ethics[19] and his name was removed from the Democratic Primary ballot.

Despite this handicap, Williams won both the Democratic and Republican primaries as a write-in candidate and went on to be re-elected in the general election.

Williams was instrumental in arranging a deal to move the financially ailing Montréal Expos, a Major League Baseball (MLB) team, to Washington, D.C.

In 2018, Williams was campaign co-chair for S. Kathryn Allen, a former insurance executive seeking an at-large seat on the Council held by Elissa Silverman.

[22] Williams was generally seen as a moderate; he had good relations with Congress and the White House, business and labor, and the community and region.

Unlike many Democrats, he said he was "open" to Sam Brownback's proposal to implement a flat tax in D.C., and he supported school vouchers.

In its July 2004 issue, Black Enterprise magazine selected Washington, D.C., as the second-best city in the country for African Americans to live and work in because of its housing, jobs, health care and economic development.

King wrote, Williams leaves in his wake a city with a good bond rating, sizable cash reserves, a more accessible health-care system for the underserved, several promising neighborhood projects, a major league baseball team, a new stadium under construction and a home town that is no longer the laughingstock of the nation ... On his watch, the District underwent its most profound transformation in generations.

In 1999, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gene Weingarten interviewed Williams and wrote a feature article titled "A Funny Thing About the Mayor ...

He went on to describe Williams as "an incredibly, organically, wryly funny man who has turned self deprecation into an art form.

In January 2007, Williams entered into a partnership with the Washington-area investment bank Friedman Billings Ramsey Group, Inc. to form Primum Public Realty Trust, a real estate investment trust (REIT) focused on buying and leasing back government and not-for-profit real estate.

He joined D.C. law firm Arent Fox on May 14, 2009, as Director of State and Local Practice, assisting governments and municipalities with securing stimulus money and managing their budgets.

[28] In March 2008, Williams made headlines by purchasing a home in D.C., a condominium on the city's revitalizing H Street NE corridor.