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Meet the Mayors: Leonardo Williams on Durham gun violence, goals for his second term, and his path to politics
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0:01:00
Meet the Mayors: Durham's Leonardo Williams
Leonardo Williams has been Durham’s mayor since 2023. Before that, he was on the City Council from 2021 through his election as mayor.
Williams shares his criticisms of decisions by the City Council to end programs he says would help curb gun violence, including using a technology called ShotSpotter, and his vision of what would help.
A string of shootings killing children and other Durham residents led Williams to publicly address gun violence. On Feb. 20, he held a news conference to discuss the shootings, and a partnership between the city and the Violence Reduction Center at the University of Maryland. Durham announced the partnership in 2025.
Leonardo “Leo” Williams, Mayor of Durham since 2023, and a member of the City Council since 2021. Before that, he was a teacher at Durham Public Schools, and he is a restaurant co-owner with his wife Zweli Williams.
0:33:00
An ancestor’s coded journals led a NC author on a path to understand himself
Jeremy Jones found the encrypted journals of his great, great, great, great grandfather, William Thomas Prestwood. After sharing some salacious stories with relatives, he dug into the journals and learned some previously unknown secrets about his ancestors.
Jeremy Jones, author of the memoir Cipher: Decoding My Ancestor’s Scandalous Secret Diaries and a professor of English Studies at Western Carolina University