When she was a young girl, Gail Wilson Awan walked her dog to a Ku Klux Klan rally.
It was the early 1970s, in Stone Mountain, Georgia, a landscape of lakes and oak trees set in the shadow of the granite dome towering overhead.
Awan, who became president and CEO of Urban League of the Upstate last September, remembers how she and her family had been on the road all summer, touring the country in an Airstream trailer, a trip that would be featured in a Trailer Life Magazine story detailing what it was like for a Black family to camp in the deep South in the 1970s.
But on that night in Stone Mountain, Awan was just enjoying any other summer evening. She’d spent the last few weeks traveling through beautiful landscapes, spending days on canoe rides with her sister, Vanessa Wilson, and making campfires with their mother, Kitty Wilson Evans, and walking the dog with their father, Marvin Wilson.
So when he asked his young daughters to go walk the dog one night, it didn’t seem unusual.
“My sister and I were so young, and he said to me, ‘I want you to go out and walk the dog,’” Awan remembers. “But my mom was freaking out about it, and I didn’t know why. Then my sister and I are walking the dog, while these hooded Klansmen appear, watching us.”
Her father, a bold man standing 5 feet 5 inches tall and weighing not more than 130 pounds, had known about the Klan rally — had known and had gone to that area on purpose, had set up their Airstream close by so his daughters could see it for themselves.
“All those hooded figures — the burning cross and everything,” Awan said. “My dad had wanted us to learn, to know it’s not going to be easy and you’re going to be afraid when you’re faced with that kind of hate, but that can’t stop you.”
Shoulders of giants
Since taking over last fall, Awan has been thinking a lot about the past. Urban League, a civil rights organization dedicated to economic empowerment in historically underserved urban communities, is celebrating its 50th anniversary in Greenville this year. Awan has been digging through the archives, flipping through old photographs, reading sepia-toned reports and correspondences.
“I am astounded, truly astounded, by the significance of the relationships that this Urban League had,” she said, adding that it’s about remembering that she is “standing on the shoulders of the giants” who came before her. “Somebody, and you may not think about it, but somebody paid the cost, paid the price for how far we’ve come.”
And in her own life, her parents loom particularly large.
“While my mother was very creative, my father was the entrepreneurial one,” she said.
Her mother, Kitty Wilson Evans, was a classically trained opera singer who toured Germany as a younger woman. Later, she served as a teacher, before building a legacy as an internationally renowned historical storyteller. Google the name “Kitty Wilson Evans” and you will find countless tributes and articles and remembrances. She was a historical interpreter and re-enactor who brought to life the stories of South Carolina’s slaves, earning herself a lifetime achievement award from the South Carolina African American Historical Commission before her death last year.
Awan’s father, a veteran, an early IBMer and technological innovator, has spent a lifetime as a cultural trailblazer.
“He made my mom so nervous, because he was the kind of man who would try to get into a country club, who would not back down from the Klan — always trying to break that color line. And that comes with a cost. You pay a price for that, emotionally,” Awan said.
To this day, in his 90s, Marvin Wilson still works; still walks his dog through the woods, just like he used to do with his daughters.
Embracing responsibility, not comfort
Awan has enjoyed an equally storied career. She started out as a touring theatre actor, starred in her own one-woman show about the Black experience in the Old West, worked in children’s theaters and museums, has written multiple books, received a doctorate, and eventually dedicated her career entirely to leading nonprofits focused on uplifting children.
“I sometimes compare my past to picking up Easter eggs, grabbing one thing here and there,” she said. “But now I’ve only got one egg in my basket, and that’s the sustainability and the mission of the Urban League.”
Now that she’s focused on that one task, she speaks about her own family’s history and the history of the Urban League not as two distinct stories, but as two aspects of a much larger, shared story.
“I think I know now what they were striving for, which is that they had something to contribute, whether it was intellectually, academically, business-wise, creatively,” Awan said. “That whole thing about, ‘To whom much is given, much is required’ — they felt so strongly that it’s your responsibility. It can be uncomfortable. You may not like it, and people may not like you here, but none of that matters, because you have something to offer.”
