Hosea Williams

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Hosea Williams
Williams in 1966
Born
Hosea Lorenzo Williams

(1926-01-05)January 5, 1926[1]
Attapulgus, Georgia, U.S.
DiedNovember 16, 2000(2000-11-16) (aged 74)[2][3]
Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.
Resting placeLincoln Cemetery
(Atlanta, Georgia).
Occupations
  • activist
  • minister
  • philanthropist
  • research chemist
  • entrepreneur
  • politician
Years active1956–2000
Known forActivist during the civil rights movement
SpouseJuanita Terry Williams
Children7, including Elisabeth Omilami
FamilyPorsha Williams (grandaughter)

Hosea Lorenzo Williams (January 5, 1926 – November 16, 2000) was an American

social injustice. King alternately referred to Williams, his chief field lieutenant, as his "bull in a china shop" and his "Castro." Vowing to continue King's work for the poor, Williams is well known in his own right as the founding president of one of the largest social services organizations in North America, Hosea Feed the Hungry and Homeless. His famous motto was "Unbought and Unbossed."[a]

Background

Williams was born in

Attapulgus, Georgia, a small city in the far southwest corner of the state in Decatur County. Both of his parents were teenagers committed to a trade institute for the blind in Macon. His mother ran away from the institute upon learning of her pregnancy. At the age of 28, Williams stumbled upon his birth father, "Blind" Willie Wiggins, by accident in Florida.[4] His mother died during childbirth when he was 10 years old. He and his older sister, Theresa, were raised by his mother's parents, Lelar and Turner Williams. Williams was run out of town by a lynch mob at the age of 13 for allegedly consorting with a white girl.[5]

Williams served with the

Staff Sergeant. He was the only survivor of a Nazi bombing, which left him in a hospital in Europe for more than a year and earned him a Purple Heart.[6]
Upon his return home from the war, Williams was savagely beaten by a group of angry whites at a bus station for drinking from a water fountain marked "Whites Only." He was beaten so badly that the attackers thought he was dead. They called a black funeral home in the area to pick up the body. En route to the funeral home, the hearse driver noticed Williams had a faint pulse and was barely breathing, but was still alive. There were no hospitals in the area that would serve blacks, even in the case of a medical emergency; the trip to the nearest veterans' hospital was well over a hundred miles. Williams spent more than a month hospitalized recuperating from injuries sustained in the attack.

Of the attack, Williams was quoted as saying, "I was deemed 100 percent disabled by the military and required a cane to walk. My wounds had earned me a Purple Heart. The war had just ended and I was still in my uniform for god's sake! But on my way home, to the brink of death, they beat me like a common dog. The very same people whose freedoms and liberties I had fought and suffered to secure in the horrors of war ... they beat me like a dog ... merely because I wanted a drink of water." He went on to say, "I had watched my best buddies tortured, murdered, and bodies blown to pieces. The French battlefields had literally been stained with my blood and fertilized with the rot of my loins. So at that moment, I truly felt as if I had fought on the wrong side. Then, and not until then, did I realize why God, time after time, had taken me to death's door, then spared my life ... to be a general in the war for human rights and personal dignity." After the war, he earned a high school diploma at the age of 23, then a bachelor's degree and a master's degree (both in chemistry) from Atlanta's Morris Brown College and Atlanta University (present-day Clark Atlanta University). Williams was a member of Phi Beta Sigma fraternity. Williams' birthday coincided with the anniversary of the death of one of that organization's most prominent members, George Washington Carver. After college, Williams worked for the United States Department of Agriculture as an analytical chemist in Savannah from 1952 until 1963, in its Bureau of Entomology and Plant Quarantine chemistry laboratory where his work focused on insecticide analysis and he would develop a method of pyrethrin determination. In 1976, Williams founded the Southeast Chemical Manufacturing and Distributing Company, which manufactured and sold specialized cleaning supplies. Williams would go on to found three other chemical companies and a bonding company.

Early civil rights activism

Hosea Williams, image and text from recognition documents distributed by the Alabama Dept. of Public Safety in the mid–1960s.

Williams first joined the NAACP, during which time he was a leader in the Savannah Protest Movement. However, he later became a leader in the SCLC along with Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, James Bevel, Joseph Lowery, and Andrew Young, among many others. He played an important role in the demonstrations in St. Augustine, Florida, that some claim led to the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.[7]

While organizing during the 1965 Selma Voting Rights Movement he also led the first attempt at a 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, and was tear gassed and beaten severely. On March 7, 1965 – a day that would become known as "Bloody Sunday" – Williams and fellow activist John Lewis led over 600 marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. At the end of the bridge, they were met by Alabama State Troopers who ordered them to disperse. When the marchers stopped to pray, the police discharged tear gas and mounted troopers charged the demonstrators, beating them with night sticks. Repercussions from the "Bloody Sunday" attempt led to the other great legislative accomplishment of the movement, the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

After leaving the SCLC, Williams played an active role in supporting strikes in the Atlanta, Georgia, area by black workers who had first been hired because of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.[7]

Political career

In the

Atlanta Journal. Ultimately, after a general election deadlock, Maddox was elected governor by the state legislature.[8]

Campaign button used in Williams' 1972 primary race

In 1972, Williams ran in the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate seat formerly held by the late

Walter F. Mondale.

Williams delivering a speech at a rally, 1974.[9]

On January 17, 1987, Williams led a "

bail bond
agency located in Decatur, Ga.

Family and death

In early 1951, Williams married

Ebenezer Baptist Church, where close friend Martin Luther King Jr.
, was once the co-pastor. Williams was preceded in death by his wife three months prior and by his son Hosea II two years earlier. Williams is interred at Lincoln Cemetery.

Legacy

Williams’ first comprehensive biography, Hosea Williams: A Lifetime of Defiance and Protest, was written by Dr. Rolundus R. Rice, an educator and historian who currently serves as COO and Vice President of Student Affairs at Tuskegee University. Rice traces Williams's journey from a local activist in Georgia to a national leader and one of Martin Luther King Jr.'s chief lieutenants.[10]

Boulevard Drive in the southeastern area of Atlanta was renamed Hosea L Williams Drive shortly before Williams died. Hosea Williams Drive runs by the site of his former home in the

East Lake neighborhood at the intersection of Hosea L. Williams Drive and East Lake Drive. Hosea L. Williams Papers are housed at Auburn Avenue Research Library On African American Culture and History in Atlanta. His daughter Elisabeth Omilami also maintains a traveling exhibit of valuable civil rights memorabilia. Williams was portrayed by Wendell Pierce in the 2014 film Selma
.

Williams' granddaughter Porsha Williams stars on The Real Housewives of Atlanta.

See also

Notes

  1. U.S. Representative Shirley Chisholm
    of New York City.

References

  1. ^ King Encyclopedia – Hosea Williams
  2. ISBN 9780199887095
    . Retrieved November 20, 2017.
  3. ISBN 9780810880375
    . Retrieved November 20, 2017.
  4. ISBN 0-684-80819-6
    .
  5. ^ Wheatley, Thomas. "Circa: Atlanta's Past In Pictures". Atlanta Magazine (April 2018): 128.
  6. ^ "International Civil Rights: Walk of Fame - Hosea Williams". www.nps.gov. Retrieved August 3, 2020.
  7. ^ a b "Civil Rights Act of 1964". Archived from the original on October 21, 2010. Retrieved October 2, 2008.
  8. Atlanta History: A Journal of Georgia and the South
    , XXXI (Winter 1987–1988), p. 44.
  9. ^ Black Leaders of The Civil Rights Movement
  10. ^ "Hosea Williams: A Lifetime of Defiance and Protest". uscpress.com. Retrieved March 25, 2024.

External links

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