He was born to Anderson and Ada Hines, a sharecropper and a maid, in Bossier. William grew up on a plantation in a house with no glass windows, a tin roof and pine floor. He went to Missionary Rosenwald School, where teachers often dismissed classes at noon in fall so children could help pick cotton. He reports he could pick 400 pounds of cotton a day, earning 50 cents per one hundred pounds. On the farm, he says, "you worked from can until can't." William moved to San Francisco in 1948 where he worked in a shoeshine stand and parked cars until he was hired by the U.S. government to process automobile parts to be sent to Korea. Drafted into the U.S. Army William was sent to Fort Chaffee near Fort Smith, Arkansas, for basic training on November 2, 1950. His platoon was integrated, and there was "lots of tension; lots of fights," he recalls. Trained on the machine gun, he was sent to Korea in April of 1951, where he was placed in the 8^th Regiment, 1^st Cavalry Division. In one of his combat experiences, he was sent with his unit to hold Pork Chop Hill. "I've seen them stacked up like cords of wood when they'd bring them back from the front," he recalls of casualties. He earned four battle stars and was a corporal when his unit was replaced and sent to Japan on December 29, 1952. Three months later it was sent on to Fort Chaffee, where he and several other black soldiers integrated the main NCO club. Assigned to transportation he was sent to Fort Bliss near El Paso, Texas, where he drove a truck in transporting troops. After his discharge he helped his father on the farm briefly, then moved to Shreveport to work at Wilson Packing Company. In 1954 he joined the Shreveport police force as the city's first black policeman. He walked his beat for four years in African-American sections of town before he and another black patrolman, Joe Johnson, were given a patrol car. Unable to join the Fraternal Order of Police William formed the Magnolia State Peace Officers Association in 1956. In 1973 he brought a class action suit against the department to force it to promote more black officers and allow them to work in more areas of the department and the city. He also petitioned the governor to hire the first black state trooper in North Louisiana. William retired from the police force in 1975. On June 10, 1976 he married Marie Hudson, his second wife. They have three children and eight grandchildren. Entering the ministry in December of 1978, he served as minister of St. Luke Missionary Baptist Church for 20 years and Antioch in Homer for eight years before taking over as pastor of Emmanuel Baptist Church in Shreveport. He was elected as first vice-president of the Missionary Baptist State Convention and moderator of Union District Association. He was also an instructor in the National Baptist Convention. Meanwhile, William served in the U.S. Army Reserves for more than 20 years. He was elected as a post commander in the American Legion, where he was chaplain. He also graduated from Wiley College, the same year as one of his granddaughters.