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."

Wilson leaped from his comfort zone. He enrolled at Loras College, in Dubuque, Iowa, one of just a handful of black students there and the only one studying chemistry.

"I was in lab by myself," he recalls.

His first job was teaching sixth grade at an inner-city Catholic school in Chicago. The kids he taught -- the struggles they faced, the gangs they belonged to -- made an impression. Though his background was in chemistry and biology, he navigated to the social sciences. He got a master's degree in social work and a doctorate in criminal justice.

Contributions to NCCU

Wilson spent six years on the University of Cincinnati faculty before coming to NCCU in 1984, where he turned a criminal justice program into a full department and then bolstered it with a graduate curriculum. He spent 20 years as the program's director and department's chairman.

He did the academic work required for job security; then, he dove into service.

"I did enough publishing to get tenure, but my passion is getting involved," he says. "If you're not involved, nothing changes. If you don't get involved, don't complain."

Wilson is 60, with bushy hair, a wry smile and a beard flecked with gray. Around campus, he is in constant motion, always on the way to this meeting or that. Students, colleagues -- and at least one newspaper reporter -- seeking a quick chat often have to dive in alongside him as he moves. These days, NCCU's Faculty Senate, which he leads, keeps him busy.

"He's very high-energy," says Arnold Dennis, director of NCCU's juvenile justice institute. "That's the only way he can get everything done."

Wilson smiles when he talks. He jokes with students. He speaks so fast his words run together, and in an interview, he answers questions as if he's quizzing a student.

He urges policymakers to be proactive rather than just reacting to violent crime with tougher gang laws. "Reacting is not what? Solving the problem," he says.

Wilson says Durham's crime and gang problems are neither new nor disproportionate. He thinks a local judge's call for tougher anti-gang legislation in the wake of recent high-profile slayings of Carson, the UNC student, and Duke graduate student Abhijit Mahato is reactionary and falls short of addressing the root problems so many young black men face.

And perhaps most of all, he thinks felons need a hand when they get out of prison.

"I'm not against punishing folks, but if you punish folks, you have to have a way to help them readjust to society," he says. "We're setting them up to fail."

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