Born in a small Texas oil refinery town to working class parents, I came to Sociology via a number of early life experiences. That my father was nearly killed in the Texas City Disaster of 1947 impressed me with the blessing and importance of family--the social atom. As the son of an union steward, I gained an appreciation of the labor movement's sacrifice and accomplishments through several strikes. From these, I learned first hand my father's credo, "Strikes are future workers; striking workers never recoup their lost wages." Also through these union experiences, I gained a keen appreciation for the power of organization and solidarity. Since my parents never had a chance to go to college because of their own impoverished upbringing, I saw college as a ticket out of a life of toil.
Born to the daughter of a Methodist minister, I was reared by the Golden Rule. However,
during the Jim Crow Era, I also witnessed extraordinary examples of human cruelty and injustice
as all aspects of Texas life were segregated. Early on, I sensed the illogic and the hypocrisy
of the coexistence of racial inequality and the American Creed. School and especially sport
integration convinced me further of the hypocrisy, and adult recalcitrance notwithstanding,
the achievability of a racially equality.
Leaving home for college was a startling experience. Majoring in psychology, I learned that prejudice was indicative of mental/emotional disturbance, a lesson that made no more sense of my childhood experiences than did the illogic of segregation and discrimination. It was not until my senior year that I took Intro to Sociology and learned that prejudice was a social phenomenon that I finally discovered an academic perspective that allowed me to understand my world. The discovery, too late to change majors for the father of two children who attended school at night, redefined education as an avenue to understanding.
Other experiences had also led me to the sociological imagination. My early involvement in the civil rights movement bled into my involvement in the student movement and the birth of my son solidified my opposition to Vietnam. While these experiences reaffirmed my appreciation for the power of grassroots solidarity, they also convinced me that intellectual debate and rational reform had to be a more expeditious than civil disobedience. Therefore, I left a lucrative research position in the petrochemical industry and to go to graduate school---in sociology.
First at the University of Houston and then at the University of Arizona, I pursued my visions of a more egalitarian society by researching integration as conducive to white attitude change and analyzed the structural and economic foundations of segregation. Well into my graduate career, I became interested in social control and designations of deviance as euphemisms for entrenched racism, sexism, elitism, and the like. My interests in race, deviance, and social reform coalesced into what I perceived to be the new battlefield for equality--the courtroom. Until this day, my interests in juvenile justice, crime and delinquency, and deviance centers on the achievable principles of equity and autonomy--born in the ideals of humanitarians since the Enlightenment-- which remain elusive dreams for most Americans. I still draw from some of my earliest experiences and lessons to inform my credo: "No one is free until everyone is free."
Bill Reese has two grown children, Lauryn (and Howard) Hubbard and William III (and Stacye), a four year old granddaughter Alyssa, all of Houston, and has just celebrated his tenth anniversary with his wife Lynn. He has taught juvenile delinquency, criminology, corrections, social theory, juvenile justice, introductory sociology, and social problems at ASU since 1989.