Born in America just a year after his parents immigrated here, Bill Agapion had grown up in a close-knit Greek community. From his parents and their friends, he understood their sense of being from someplace else. He had also been raised with that strong sense of patriotism that lives in people who are American by choice. And so, he enlisted in the Army to fight for his country during World War II, and when he came back home, he was a combat veteran who had earned three Purple Heart medals.
He went to school on the GI Bill and continued to law school and became the first Greek American admitted to the North Carolina Bar. Bill moved to Greensboro and supplemented his fledging law practice by buying and managing rental houses.
Soon his real estate business had grown to where he was managing hundreds of houses and apartments. Because of his family’s history, he had a special interest in immigrants, and many became his tenants. He also had a deep sense of American justice and fairness, and although he hadn’t set out to become an activist, he found himself in the center of the American civil rights struggle during the 1960s.
Bill had purchased and was managing a once-grand-old-hotel, The King Cotton, in downtown Greensboro. The hotel had fallen on hard times, and Bill thought he could turn it around. His idea was to rent out some of the rooms to students from nearby North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, a historically black college which didn’t have enough student dormitories. His idea was a hit with the students, but some people in the city were outraged that whites and blacks would be living in the same building, and the hotel became the scene of demonstrations and attempts by city leaders of the time to put the hotel out of business.
Bill Agapion’s business outlived those tumultuous days and it has continued to thrive with a new generation of leadership that keeps Bill’s commitment to fairness and justice at its heart.