LESSONS from LEADERS: Willie Watkins

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This episode follows the career highlights of Willie Watkins, a mortician. 

Willie doesn't like the word mortician. He starts the podcast explaining that he is an undertaker and then provides his definition of what an undertaker does.  It is unlike anything you have ever heard because Willie Watkins understands how to grab a person's attention.  He does that when he speaks and he does that when he stages funerals because he learned as a child that presentation matters.

The ceremonies honoring the dead that he saw as a child in Scottdale, GA motivated him to seek employment in the funeral industry.  He landed his first job at age eight. He spent almost every weekend from that point of time until he was nearly 30, working funeral services. 

He had a very successful real estate career before achieving his dream of founding a funeral home. 

The shifting racial composition in southwest Atlanta, GA neighborhoods meant there were a record number of homes being sold by white people and an equal record number of Black people ready to buy them.  Willie was the first Black mortgage representative for a nationally recognized real estate company.   He lived a flashy lifestyle and helped a lot of Black people find financing to buy homes.  However, he still worked for a small mortuary company on Saturday and Sunday, because that was his first passion.   Willie quit his  real estate job to start a funeral company.  However, the timing of his decision put him in a precarious financial situation. The bottom fell out of the housing market and Willie didn't have the money needed to start his funeral home.  

He got funding by turning to a segment of the African American community that few know.  

Numbers running was a bedrock industry in places with large Black populations. It was big business in Atlanta and Auburn Avenue was a major hub for kingpins.   Few can remember their names or how their underground businesses supported churches and politicians.  Willie does. He describes entrepreneurs who  both flourished on Auburn Avenue and ran numbers.  He also explains how the numbers runners were connected to his business. 

Willie's podcast story is more than a look at his life and business successes.  This episode opens a pipeline to the people and companies that made  Atlanta's Auburn Avenue  economically functional.  He  explains one of the reasons Black business owners could flaunt racially limiting financial and property owning laws of the times and set up their own system of financial support.  

Willie is an example of the type of business excellence based on hard work and a vision. But his story and his legacy are unique among Black business leaders in the south. He has not only created a company that he has efficiently scaled, but has done so while retaining the memories about Black entrepreneurs and communities from the 1960s through the 1980s. His humor, success and respect for the past make this podcast valuable because of the stories Willie tells and the names of Black business leaders who helped to make Auburn Avenue memorable.