Wesley T. Williams

Wesley Williams was an African-American from Oakland, California, who served time in the French Foreign Legion. According to Vincent Sheean's Personal History (Doubleday Doran, 1935), Williams had "wandered away from California to France, in a spasm of adolescent romanticism, and over a café table in Bordeaux had met the inevitable recruiting agent for the Legion." After being sent to fight in the Moroccan Rif Wars, he deserted in favor of the Rif leader Abd el-Krim and met the malarial Sheean, who was covering the late stages of the war for a New York publisher. Sheean notes that Williams was 20 years old at the time, which would indicate his birth date was sometime around 1905-6. Show less «