Need a grant proposal written? George will do it. Is the heater broken? Call George. Need an accountant to do the nonprofit group's taxes on the cheap? George probably knows someone.

"He's the first line of defense," says Ethel Simonetti, a friend and fellow board member for the community center, which provides after-school programs for poor neighborhood youngsters. "He's our board leader, and he replicates that role all over town."

By day, Wilson is a criminal justice professor at N.C. Central University. But by night -- as with the midnight-to-8 a.m. shifts he once pulled at a local halfway house -- he can often be found working with underprivileged children or with groups that help rehabilitate felons.

Wilson grew up in Birmingham, Ala., in the 1960s, a place and time of great racial turmoil. His current view of the world -- and of recent violence attributed to young black men from Durham -- is influenced by his upbringing and his academic training. He sees imbalance in the attention given to the killing of UNC-Chapel Hill student body president Eve Carson -- a pretty, blonde, white woman -- and thinks killings of blacks are often glossed over. He preaches prevention and sees little point in ratcheting up punishment -- such as tougher anti-gang laws, for example -- if resources aren't also poured into intervention.

"Poverty does not create crime; being black does not create crime," Wilson says in an interview in his cluttered NCCU office. "You get doctors from the same neighborhoods from where you get thugs."

But don't complain, he says, if you don't get involved.

Ready to help anywhere

Wilson's involvements ranges widely. He co-founded a local chapter of the National Association of Blacks in Criminal Justice. For the group Durham Rites of Passage, he trained mentors to work with young at-risk black men.

With the Durham Dispute Settlement Center, he was a community mediator. With the Durham County Youth Advisory Board, he helped decide where more than $400,000 in grant money went each year. With Durham County Sentencing Services, he badgered legislators for funding for a project to relieve prison overcrowding.

From 1990 to 2003, Wilson served on the state's sentencing and policy advisory commission, which changed the state's sentencing practices.

When the Troy Halfway House's board dismissed the director and half the staff quit several years ago, Wilson worked the overnight shift for several weekends until new employees were hired. He worked with other community groups to craft a positive image for the halfway house -- which houses more than a dozen former offenders -- and helped establish a community relations board.

"Troy House would not be open if it had not been for the commitment and diligent work of Dr. Wilson," wrote James W. Ellis Jr., its executive director, in a letter recommending Wilson for the UNC system's first distinguished public service award.

Wilson received that award last fall.

Learning amid horrors

Wilson's father was at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham one September day in 1963 when members of the Ku Klux Klan bombed it, killing four young black women preparing to sing in the choir. Wilson, a teen at the time, knew those four girls. He saw his city on the brink of riot; he developed a distaste for white people at the same time as he listened intently to Martin Luther King Jr. preach against violence.

"I didn't deal with white folks then," he recalls. "I hadn't gone to school with white folks before. I had to go through a transition where you learn that all white folks aren't bad, all white folks aren't racist."

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