Introduction
Justice Williams was a gifted child. Grammar school weekends, natural exam results, a father who had her whole professional life mapped out: law school, LPC, six-figure salary, the big house. By twenty-one she had a criminal record instead, no university place, and a father who told her siblings to pretend they didn't know her when they passed her in the street.
Seven years later she stood in Buckingham Palace receiving an MBE for services to young people, on the same date, to the day, as her last arrest. This is not a redemption story told in soft focus. It is a working account of what it actually takes to rebuild, several times over, and what you learn about yourself in the process.
A childhood mapped out by someone else
Justice's path was decided early. She was identified as academically gifted, spent weekends at grammar school doing extra English, maths and science, and absorbed her father's plan for her: law, in a very strict and religious household where she couldn't wear trousers, had to cover her head, and wasn't allowed to attend parties. Her parents divorced when she was ten. At fifteen or sixteen, she ran from her father's house to her mother's at four thirty in the morning, and he didn't speak to her for years afterwards.
The fall from grace
College brought a version of freedom she had never had, a first car, living alone, and what she calls a slippery slope into the wrong side of the law. She ended up with a criminal record and a short prison sentence, an outcome she describes as ironic given she had planned to study law. Her father disowned her publicly, telling her brothers and sisters to pretend not to know her. The plan for six figures, a big house and holidays abroad was, in her words, off the table.
Finding purpose with nothing left to lose
What followed was not a spiral but a redirection. In prison, assigned to the library, Justice began scanning newspaper job adverts for what might come next. She landed a commission-based role scouting music and sports talent, and through a chain of small connections, including a friend who worked at a youth project, found her way into volunteering with young people involved in gangs in Birmingham. She was on Jobseeker's Allowance, doing thirty hours a week of unpaid work, walking to the project rather than driving, because her car had been repossessed. She describes it as one of the happiest periods of her life. She had money before, with nothing to show for it, because she had no purpose. Now she had purpose and almost nothing else, and it was enough.
She is candid about why that leap was possible: at twenty-one, with no children and nothing left to protect, the appetite for risk is simply different. People had already written her off. There was very little left to lose.
The pivot that built a career
Eighteen months into full-time work at that youth project, after fundraising around one hundred and fifty thousand pounds for the organisation and a disagreement with leadership over her own salary, Justice walked away with only her paperwork and her resources. She calls that decision, and the eighteen months of head-down learning that preceded it, the tipping point of her working life. It wasn't chased for money or recognition. It was simply about doing the work.
Losing an office overnight
Years later, running her first venture, True Life Magazine, with around one hundred and forty young people gaining work experience under her, the 2008 recession hit the publishing industry hard. Advertising sales, the model the magazine depended on, dried up. The office closed. In one of the rawest moments in the conversation, Justice describes returning after hours, before losing building access entirely, to empty the office of computers and files across roughly twelve trips through a dark building with one remaining colleague, finishing at three in the morning. She called it the biggest failure of her life at the time, worried about what her growing public profile would make of it.
A phone call from her creative director reframed it: most of the entrepreneurs she admired had failed at something too, with bigger profiles and more money than she had at the time, and rebuilt anyway. She took a few weeks to recover, then went back to running enterprise and youth support programmes.
An MBE, seven years to the day
In 2009, a letter arrived from St James's Palace: Justice had been nominated for an MBE for services to young people in Birmingham, put forward by the then Prime Minister. She had worked largely unpaid or on minimal income for seven years at that point, and had asked, in a low moment, for a sign that the work was the right path. The letter arrived the following week.
She accepted, aware she was likely the only Black person at that particular investiture, and aware of the tension in her own community about whether to accept an honour tied to the British Empire at all. Her reasoning was practical: visibility built her platform, and her platform built her ability to be of service. The investiture fell on the fifth of November, seven years to the day after her last arrest, a coincidence she reads through a spiritual lens as the completion of a cycle.
Public work, private wiring
Despite the stages, the keynotes and the MBE, Justice describes herself as a genuine introvert who finds large crowds and networking events draining. She prefers panels and teaching formats where the subject matter, not her own story, is the focus, and she deliberately limits how often she goes out in a week to protect her capacity to parent and to work. That self-knowledge led her to launch a monthly brunch club for women, an intentionally low-pressure alternative to typical breakfast networking, which sold out for three straight years without advertising.
Building Black Business Magazine on purpose, not luck
Black Business Magazine grew out of a specific observation: mainstream business publications only tended to feature Black-owned businesses during Black History Month or as part of a themed list. Justice and her co-founder had already been quietly building folders of businesses worth profiling, drawn from years in the Midlands business ecosystem. When a partnership opportunity came together with under two days' notice, they had a proposal ready before the meeting was even confirmed, registered the company in advance of getting a yes, and delivered a finished print magazine within four weeks of the first photoshoot, when nothing but a vision existed beforehand. They chose the word "black" deliberately over softer, diluted alternatives, arguing that specificity, not broad inclusion language, is what actually gets underserved communities the attention and support they need.
