Rufus Williams, who rose from Burger King worker to Oprah Winfrey’s chief financial officer, has won Mayor Richard Daley’s backing as the next president of Chicago’s Board of Education, city and school officials said Monday.
Daley is expected to announce Tuesday that he is appointing Williams, 49, to fill the spot vacated by Williams’ political patron, Michael Scott.
Williams’ ascendance to the high-profile, non-paid presidency has been predicted since early June, when Scott resigned and recommended Williams, who joined the board a year ago.
In picking Williams, Daley is making a choice for continuity, choosing a friend and protege of the outgoing president, who also grew up on the West Side.
“I have been helping to prepare him for this ever since he got on the board,” said Scott, who joined the board five years ago, at the same time Arne Duncan was named the district’s chief executive officer.
Coming from North Lawndale and Orr High School, Williams attended college because he won a scholarship, after a semester off flipping burgers.
Since then he has gone from working as an accountant to one of Chicago’s black professional elite. In addition to working for Winfrey’s Harpo Productions and running her charitable foundation, he has represented celebrities such as Yankees outfielder Gary Sheffield.
He and his wife have been very involved in Whitney Young High School, the public school from which their son recently graduated as senior class president. Williams also has an older daughter.
The son of a factory foreman and one of six kids, Williams dreamed of a life beyond the West Side.
“All that I knew was I wanted to have a job where I wore a suit and went to a job downtown,” he said. “I just wanted to be different from what I was seeing every day.”
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It almost didn’t happen, he said.
“I sensed directly what it was like not to be able to go to college,” he said.
But at the suggestion of a friend, Williams applied and won scholarship money from a Lawndale-based organization, the Better Boys Foundation. He graduated magna cum laude from Southern University in Baton Rouge, La., with a degree in accounting.
After college, Williams moved up the ranks at Arthur Andersen.
He left the firm to go to work for Winfrey through the 1990s. Williams provided a steady hand at the helm of Harpo’s complex financial division, a former colleague said.
“When you meet Rufus and you are around him, he does have this quiet strength about him, that he has everything under control and that it is being managed well,” said Robin Beaman, a publicist for Winfrey in the mid-1990s.
That self-assured personality has come in handy in his current role as a business manager. From a corner office on the 14th floor of a building on the Magnificent Mile, Williams manages the financial lives of a handful of professional athletes and entertainers, whose identities he won’t divulge.
Williams’ name was linked to Sheffield two years ago, when the baseball star became entangled in an extortion plot involving a West Side community activist Derrick Mosley.
Williams helped Sheffield avoid trouble, he said, approaching the FBI, which tapped phones and recorded conversations between Williams and Mosley. Ultimately, Mosley was convicted of trying to use a sexually explicit videotape to extort $20,000 from Sheffield and his wife, gospel singer DeLeon Richards-Sheffield.
“Rufus is good at keeping his head while everyone else is losing theirs,” said Lloyd Logan, a close friend and a managing director for Northern Trust Global Investments. “He provides a level of focus, passion and energy that has made him very successful.”
He is taking the reins in the midst of the school system’s third wave of reform. Duncan has been closing low-achieving schools and is on track to open 100 new, independently run schools by the end of the decade.
The effort has not come without controversy, especially in Williams’ childhood neighborhood of North Lawndale. Duncan’s closing of Collins High School and Frazier Elementary School last year was met with fierce community opposition.
Williams admits to flaws in the execution of the Renaissance 2010 plan, but he is a backer nonetheless. He said something drastic must be done to turn around failing schools.
“There are so many discussions about what will make the difference,” he said. “Is it the leadership? Is it the teachers? The parents? But it is all of them–the system and the resources. We have to marshal all of it and put a laser focus on it as a society, because we just have to do better.”
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