Dr. Williams has worked in the public sector as a historic site specialist for the Florida Department of State Division of Historical Resources in Tallahassee, Florida, and has served as a trustee for the Historic Savannah Foundation in Savannah , Georgia. He has written on the education of freed African Americans in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War and has recently completed a biography of black abolitionist and former Florida Secretary of State Jonathan Clarkson Gibbs c.1826-1874. His current research projects include an examination of slavery and emancipation in the Georgia low country and he has been busy creating an oral history of North Nashville.