photo © Alonzo Boldin Photography
“What you love you will give your time to. I’ll take that to the grave!”
—CHERYL WILLS, award-winning television news reporter and anchor
It is almost impossible to live in New York City without having heard the name, or seen the face, of Cheryl Wills. An award-winning television reporter and news anchor, she appears five nights a week as host of her own nightly news show, “Live at Ten,” on Spectrum’s NY1, one of the city’s most-watched local news stations. Yet, it’s her goal to ensure that her last name of Wills becomes known far beyond the streets of New York City, and for far more than just personal glory. In fact, she is on a mission, she told me, “to make a wrong right, no matter what.”
Her ancestors, the Wills, worked on a plantation as slaves, where they were buried in unmarked graves. She’s come a long way from the cotton plantation of Mooreland County, Tennessee, where her great-great-great-grandfather, Sandy Wills, served as a slave, and where the former slave shack still stands. Yet her ancestral history is present within her, permeating Cheryl’s commanding presence and all-knowing smile.
“Digging into my ancestry has given me a sense of worth and pride like nothing else,” she told me during our interview, as we sat together in the station’s towering boardroom overlooking the massive newsroom below. Cheryl wore a sleeveless lavender summer dress, complementing her glowing mahogany-colored skin. She looked ready to step in front of the camera at a moment’s notice, though it was only four in the afternoon, and her live show wouldn’t begin until ten o’clock. She’s used to appearing on air throughout the day to introduce scheduled topics and guests, and on the night I interviewed her, she’d be discussing coverage of Donald Trump’s latest tweets where he called the City of Baltimore “a disgusting, rat- and rodent-infested mess,” while sparring with the Reverend Al Sharpton after he responded that Trump “has a particular venom for blacks and people of color.”
I interviewed her just a few days after a video of her went viral, in which her reaction to a fellow anchor’s comment about Donald Trump crashing a wedding at his New Jersey golf club was widely shared. After her colleague remarked, “You have to say that was pretty cool that he stopped by …” Cheryl did not respond. Instead, keeping it cool and professional, she immediately moved on to the next news story. Her reaction was shared tens of thousands of times on Twitter, and replayed on numerous national news sites for days.
The day of our interview was not the first time I’d met Cheryl or observed her as a woman who stands up for what she believes in. This includes speaking out for the rights of others. Serving as a speaker, presenter, and honoree at numerous events dedicated to empowering the marginalized, she had been honored by Women’s eNews as one of its 21 Leaders for the 21st Century at our annual awards gala just one year earlier. She brought her mother as a guest, and upon receiving her award, she dedicated it to her ancestral family who, she said, provided her with “a warrior’s DNA” to make her voice stronger and to help her realize the standards she must live up to.
Those ancestral standards were initially as much a surprise to her living family members as they were to her. When her father died in a motorcycle accident on Brooklyn’s Williamsburg Bridge when Cheryl was just thirteen, she was surprised to see on his death certificate that his city of birth read Haywood County, Tennessee.
“I was born in New York City,” she told me. “My father was born in New York City. So was my grandfather, my great-grandfather, and my great-great-grandfather. Nobody ever talked about Haywood.” But once she learned about her heritage, she felt changed. “That birthed in me the desire to reconnect,” Cheryl told me. “After that, I referred to the rest of my life as ‘Cheryl Wills A.D.’”
In 2009, she first discovered that she was the great-great-great-granddaughter of an enslaved man named Sandy Wills who had fought in the Civil War. “I was shocked that no one ever talked about him and his bravery. My father and grandfather didn’t even know about him, which saddens me,” she continued. Yet, this was understandable, since after the Civil War ended, many black soldiers, who were still without sanctuary, were warned by their military sergeants to lie low and not talk about the war. “Sandy was a marked man for breaking away from the plantation and joining the Union Army. I know that he and his wife, Emma, must have lived in a state of terror at that time,” Cheryl said.
Her mission then became to find out where Sandy and Emma were buried so that she could finally provide them with a respectful memorial. “They deserve to have headstones, and to be buried in a real cemetery,” she asserted. Yet her broader goal is not only to memorialize her ancestors, but all slaves, particularly those who fought in the Civil War. “This ungrateful country allowed our soldiers to be buried anonymously because it did not see black people as full human beings, and when you don’t have a firm identity, it’s easy to throw your life away,” she continued, now moving forward in her chair. “There is an epidemic in this country,” she said. “We don’t know who we are. Black children need to know that their ancestors were much more than just slaves. They were brave, they were smart, and they were heroic.”
So she traveled back, way back, to the plantation where Sandy Wills served as a slave. “It was surreal to stand there and view the same landscape and horizon he saw when he was picking cotton in those fields,” Cheryl recalled. The plantation’s grounds still look exactly the way he left them, where cotton continues to be grown, picked, and sold. The plantation’s owners, who are direct descendants of his slave owners, tried to scrub the plantation clean,” Cheryl said.
“I believe they are fearful,” Cheryl continued. “I believe Sandy and his wife, Emma, are buried there, and I will prove it. I plan to hire an archaeological crew to dig up each of those graves, and get every bone tested. And when I find Sandy’s remains, I am going to give him the military funeral with honors that he deserves.” Until then, Cheryl has paid tribute to Sandy on the written page, through the publication of three books she has written in his honor: Die Free: A Heroic Family Tale (2011), The Emancipation of Grandpa Sandy Wills: A Children’s Book (2015), and Emancipated: My Family’s Fight for Freedom (2017).
Paying tribute to her great-great-great-grandfather is only half of the story. The other half is equally important, if not more so. Emma Wills, who was married to Sandy, was courageous in her own right. “She was smart, and she was pissed,” Cheryl told me. As the widow of a military man with nine children, Emma heard that the white widows were receiving their husbands’ pensions on a monthly basis, but that the widows of black soldiers were not. So she filed an application, submitted all of the paperwork, and detailed her life as a wife and mother to the government. “Still, they refused to pay her,” Cheryl said, “until one of the plantation owner’s sons, Joel Moore, offered to help Emma provide proof of Sandy’s birth and Emma’s marriage to him.”
Finally, in 1891, Emma was awarded her husband’s pension. “Joel had to sign her name for her to make it official, since it was illegal for slaves to learn how to read or write,” Cheryl recounted. “A space was left between her first and last name for Emma to place the letter “X.” She scribbled that letter, which was her way of saying that she was no longer at the bottom of the barrel. This is a women’s empowerment story if ever there was one.” Cheryl smiled proudly at the image of Emma’s actions.
Yet Cheryl considers the “X” she scribbled to be a metaphor for many others. “It is shared by countless other black girls and boys who have no idea where their ancestors came from,” she said. Bent on a mission to change that, Cheryl has decided to speak; to speak directly to children and teenagers at schools throughout the United States, and particularly to girls who feel disempowered, whether they be in some of the highest performing schools on Long Island, New York, or in the lowest performing schools like Mott Haven in the Bronx. “Regardless of whether these children are homeless or living on a plush estate, I teach them the same story, and their responses are always positive,” she continued. “What bowls these girls over every time is when I tell them about Emma’s courage, so my fourth book is going to be written about her, and bear her name as its title,” Cheryl said. “Although I haven’t yet exhumed Emma’s physical body, I have exhumed her bravery and her strength, and now I am using her as an example for current and future generations.” Cheryl looked determined as she stated, “She mattered, and now everyone will know about her through my next book entitled Emma.”
Cheryl believes that those in power have made use of a “trick of disempowerment” by getting black people to think that there were no brave and successful people in their families. “That makes you think you have to start from the beginning, like you’re building the wheel for the very first time, which can become all-consuming,” she said.
To counteract this, Cheryl hopes to create a foundation, The Sandy and Emma Wills Foundation, to provide scholarships to people who, as she put it, “have lost their way.” Its goal is twofold: To provide educational scholarships to people who show a desire to succeed, regardless of their academic grade point average, and to travel with students from low-income areas to the west coast of Africa, where there are untouched landmarks showing the history of slavery. These landmarks include the Island of Goree in Senegal, which served as the largest slave trading center on the African coast from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, and Cape Coast Castle, built in 1652 to serve as a slavery trading post for many European nations. “I can tell them that this is exactly the way it looked when black families were trafficked from West Africa and brought to the United States,” she said. “This will teach young black people that they came from somewhere, where their ancestors had a strong culture and traditions. Perhaps this will teach them to stop repeating the ‘N-word,’ one of many words white supremacists called their ancestors when they turned them into slaves.”
Still, Cheryl’s direction doesn’t come without its critics. She has heard a lot of pushback in the form of, “Who do you think you are?” during her lifetime, not only for becoming a powerful black woman, but also for trying to get her ancestors memorialized with respect. She imagines this is similar to the pushback Emma got. She told me, “And I’m proud of her for sticking to her guns, and now I’m expanding upon the ‘X’ she used, as the only signature she could provide, by my being excellent, by my being extraordinary, and by my being exceptional.” She looked at me contemplatively and added, “Never by being angry, but by being my very best, just like her.”