Robert Lee Williams was born in Biscoe, Arkansas, on February 20, 1930, during the Jim Crow Era.
Williams credited his mother as a central figure in his intellectual pursuits after she instilled the importance of education in him from an early age.
[4] After receiving a lower than expected score which recommended a career in manual labor rather than going to college, Williams later reported feeling that he "lost [his] confidence for a long time".
[4] This would become a defining moment in his life because it clearly inspired some of Williams' most notable future work, namely the Black Intelligence Test of Cultural Homogeneity or BITCH-100.
[5] Williams earned a BA degree (cum laude with distinction in the field), from Philander Smith College, in 1953.
[4] After earning his doctorate in 1961, he served as an associate chief psychologist at the Jefferson Barracks Veterans Affairs Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri from 1961 to 1966,[4] and then as director of a hospital improvement project in Spokane, Washington, and a consultant for the National Institute of Mental Health.
While serving as President of the Association of Black Psychologists (1969-1970), Williams created The 10 Point Plan and mailed it to 300 colleges and universities.
This plan was instrumental in recruiting and sustaining Black graduate students in Masters and Ph.D. psychology programs throughout the United States.
[5] In 2014, Washington University honored his legacy with a conference regarding the importance of maintaining diversity within academia.
Williams did not conclude, as had white psychologists, that this discrepancy in outcomes proved the intellectual inferiority of European Americans.
For example, the NAACP backed a 1977 lawsuit in San Francisco to stop black students from being classified as "mentally retarded" on the basis of traditional standardized test scores.
"[13] Williams received some backlash for his IQ testing theories, with critics arguing that he was attempting to lower standards for black students.
Williams' refuted his critics by declaring that traditional IQ tests often result in "death sentences" that black children acquire early and are stuck with the rest of their lives.
[13]" On January 26, 1973, Williams' created the term "Ebonics" (a combination of "ebony" and "phonics") to refer to African-American English at a conference called "The Cognitive and Language Development of Black Children," which he organized in St. Louis in 1973.
Ebonics has long remained a popular topic of contention, with several linguists questioning the accuracy of William's work and others arguing that the Williams theory of Ebonics harms black children by lowering their academic achievement standards.
Instead, the Black Personality Theory would draw on an African philosophy of collectiveness diametrically opposed to Western individualism.