Hosea Williams: A Lifetime of Defiance and Protest

Hosea Williams

HOSEA

Williams

A LIFETIME OF DEFIANCE AND PROTEST

Rolundus R. Rice

FOREWORD BY ANDREW YOUNG

© 2021 University of South Carolina

Published by the University of South Carolina Press

Columbia, South Carolina 29208

www.uscpress.com

Manufactured in the United States of America

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/.

ISBN 978-1-64336-256-4 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-64336-257-1 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64336-258-8 (ebook)

Front cover photograph: Hosea Williams and John Lewis leading marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965. Photo by Tom Lankford, Birmingham News, courtesy of the Alabama Department of Archives and History, donated by Alabama Media Group.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

Williams seated behind Martin Luther King Jr. as King speaks at the Tabernacle Baptist Church in Selma, Alabama

Williams addressing a crowd in Eutaw, Alabama

Williams and John Lewis leading marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge

Williams addressing a crowd in front of Brown Chapel in Selma, Alabama, on Turnaround Tuesday.

Williams speaking to an audience at the Maggie Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama

Williams speaking to an audience at St. Paul AME Church in Birmingham, Alabama

Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, Bernard Lee, Martin Luther King Jr., and Williams at voter education rally

Williams, Fred Shuttlesworth, and other demonstrators marching to the Jefferson County courthouse in Birmingham, Alabama

Martin Luther King III, Martin Luther King Jr., Yolanda King, and Williams, Gadsden, Alabama

Williams, Bernard Lee, Martin Luther King Jr., and Stokely Carmichael enjoy a moment of levity during the Meredith March

Eva Grace Lemon, Martin Luther King Jr., Aretha Willis

Erecting tent shelter

Willie Ricks, Bernard Lee, Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Andrew Young, and Williams lead march through small Mississippi town

Song leaders Lester Hankerson, J. T. Johnson, and Williams. Birmingham, Alabama

Williams planning Chicago civil rights campaign in 1966

Pallbearers, including Williams, T. Y. Rogers, and James Orange around Martin Luther King Jr.’s casket at Southview Cemetery

Jesse Jackson, Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, and Williams at the committal service for Martin Luther King Jr’s remains at Southview Cemetery

FOREWORD

Hosea Williams and I had a love–hate relationship: I loved him, and he hated me.

That’s a joke. I hope it is, at least. I don’t believe Hosea actually hated me, but the two of us were at odds throughout the civil rights movement, and we often clashed—which is exactly as Martin Luther King Jr. wanted things to be. The roles he assigned to each of his top advisors suited our personalities and skills, but they guaranteed conflict among the upper ranks of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

Hosea was militant, confrontational, and impatient, whereas I was calm, careful, and deliberate. He was an advocate of aggressive, often reckless direct action, whereas I urged caution. Dr. King not only wanted me to be the voice of reason but he also insisted on it. Our leader, who was respected and loved by every one of us, wanted to be able to mediate our disputes and come down somewhere in the middle. It was only in this manner that Hosea’s great passion for justice could be moderated, and everyone could be kept as safe as possible under whatever circumstances we faced.

Hosea at times seemed to have a death wish, but Martin most definitely did not—and he was the man with a target on his back.

Dr. King recognized a mad genius when he saw one, and he was wise enough to know we needed one. Or more than one. As it happened, the SCLC had a few. Hosea Williams was crazy like a fox, but James Bevel, another brilliant strategist, was probably clinically insane. Yet, he also had a role to play. That was the power of Dr. King and the nonviolent social movement that changed America in the 1960s—an unlikely team of misfits who came together under the direction of one of the greatest leaders of the twentieth century. Without Hosea Williams, some of the most important moments of the civil rights movement would never have happened. Without me, he’d have gotten us all killed many times over.

We were both on the front lines, but I was under orders not to get arrested or harmed, which caused me no small amount of embarrassment at the time. Dr. King wanted me to be the one to post bail for everyone else and work behind the scenes with white business leaders and elected officials to broker peaceful solutions. Hosea and some of the others frequently derided me as pulling up the rear.

But I did get beaten once—savagely—and for that, I was always grateful. It made me one of the guys. And guess who I had to thank for the experience?

On June 9, 1964, Dr. King sent me to shut down a grassroots movement in St. Augustine, Florida, because he feared it could endanger passage of the Civil Rights Act, which was being filibustered in the US Senate. Hosea had gotten caught up with the locals, knew their cause to be righteous, and cared more about them than what happened in Washington, DC. As soon as I walked into the church where he had gathered demonstrators for a dangerous, nighttime march, he saw me from the pulpit and announced my arrival. Ladies and gentlemen, here’s the Rev. Andrew Young! he shouted. Martin Luther King Jr. has sent Rev. Young here tonight to lead this march!

The reaction was so overwhelming, the enthusiasm was so great, I simply couldn’t say no. I reasoned that if I led marchers to the edge of the downtown plaza, where they were able to see the angry mob that included hundreds of robed Klansmen, I could convince them to turn back.

But when we got there, nobody wanted to turn back.

Lives were at stake, and the Civil Rights Act hung in the balance, so I asked the marchers to wait where they were and let me cross the street and speak with a police officer. I was going to ask if we could walk as far as the old slave market, pray, and return immediately to the church.

I never got the chance.

Someone blindsided me—and that’s all I remember. It would be decades before I ever saw film footage from news cameras and realized how severely I was kicked around the intersection of King Street and St. George Street. It’s quite a sight. When everyone finally was out of harm’s way, I slipped behind the church and wept, not in pain but with relief that no one else was hurt that night. I wasn’t badly injured, but the responsibility for all those lives was as much stress as I could bear.

Hosea didn’t realize what had happened until much later that night. Hotels and motels did not admit Blacks, and the brave folks who opened their small houses to the SCLC during the movement usually had only one bedroom, and only one bed, which they surrendered to as many of us as needed a place to sleep. At the time, nothing about it was funny, but imagine the comedic possibilities of a scene with two people so opposite, having to share the same bed at that particular moment. Hosea and I were the original Odd Couple.

I still cussed him out.

I have no doubt Hosea felt bad, and I believe he worried that I carried a grudge, though that wasn’t the case.

The following year, Hosea accused me of getting back at him in a big way.

He had organized a march in Selma, Alabama, to protest for the right to vote—but there was a great deal of confusion over the date it was supposed to take place. On March 7, 1965, both Martin Luther King and Ralph David Abernathy were committed to preach sermons in Atlanta, and they wanted to postpone the demonstration for a week. Hosea was adamant that it should proceed because so many people had turned out and were ready to march. After considerable discussion, Dr. King relented—but he told me not to risk getting into any trouble myself. We expected the participants to get arrested, and Dr. King said he wanted me free to do my job. But this was an SCLC march, and we needed a representative up front.

So, it came down to a coin toss—among me, Hosea, and James Bevel.

Hosea won—or lost, depending on how one looked at it. He would lead the march beside well-known student leader John Lewis, who was not an SCLC member but had shown up wearing a backpack, ready to go to jail. No one anticipated the violence that ensued that day on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

I was at the rear of the line when people started running and stumbling back across the bridge, pursued by troopers on horseback as billows of tear gas filled the sky. It was a melee that changed the course of history and led directly to passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Many were seriously injured at the hands of Alabama troopers, and a few were singled out to be killed. John Lewis was beaten without mercy and left unconscious. Hosea was targeted, too, yet miraculously escaped. He avoided the troopers’ batons and, uninjured, slipped out of the crowd and disappeared. For hours, none of us knew what had happened to him or where he was. It turned out he was able to take refuge in a nearby house and hide out until it was safe to resurface.

For days, Hosea accused me of rigging the coin toss to put him at the front of the line. He thought I was exacting revenge for the beating I took in St. Augustine, though nothing could have been farther from the truth, and no one could have foreseen or engineered the circumstances that made him the leader of our march on what came to be called Bloody Sunday.

Then, the new edition of Life magazine hit the stands, with a color photograph on the cover of the Selma marchers—and Hosea Williams and John Lewis out in front.

Hosea could not have been happier. All was forgiven, at least for awhile.

This personal sketch, written with affection and admiration, is just a thumbnail of the man I knew and the relationship we had. Hosea Williams was a brilliant, complex, flawed leader, and history owes him a great deal. Credit for his courage and heroism—not just during the movement but also from the cradle to the grave—is long overdue, and I am exceedingly grateful to Rolundus Rice for his determined work on this impressive book. A definitive biography of Hosea Williams is no small undertaking. Perhaps that is why there hasn’t been one before now.

Most of us in the leadership of the SCLC had led relatively privileged lives for Blacks. None had endured as hardscrabble a life as Hosea. Born to blind parents in tiny Attapulgus, Georgia, he managed to overcome a violent childhood filled with deprivation, inadequate schooling, the rigors of working as a farmhand, and pursuit by a lynch mob bent on killing him for sharing a sandwich with a white girl. One of the few Black soldiers to see active combat in World War II—(he told me he joined the service so he could kill white people legally)—he was the sole survivor of a mortar attack that took out over a dozen other infantrymen in a foxhole. For months, he laid in a British hospital, wondering why he had been spared. Upon being discharged, he made his way back to South Georgia only to suffer another near-death experience. At a bus station in Americus, a gang of white hoodlums beat him senseless, and he spent more long months in a hospital. But after that, Hosea knew why he had been spared.

I happened to meet Rolundus Rice and his wife Dana in 2014 at an event at the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, where he was working at the time. When he mentioned he was completing a doctoral dissertation on the life of Hosea Williams, I lauded the accomplishment—and encouraged him to consider expanding his research into a book. I even believe the story could be made into a movie because it reads like an action movie with a larger-than-life hero.

With the determination of an old-school detective and the objectivity of a scholar, Dr. Rice located and searched through obscure records and other source material to dig out clues to the identity and life story of Hosea Williams, and he looked far and wide to capture the nuance of a controversial, sometimes contradictory, central character, who happened to have been my friend. As a result, the author delivers to his readers a rich analysis of who Williams was, the experiences and events that shaped him, and the forces that drove him to the lynchpin position of field general in a nonviolent war that shaped the second half of the twentieth century.

In this remarkable story, we embark on a tour of the last century with an expert guide. Through eight decades of one man’s remarkable life, William’s experiences are presented in the context of their times: the simultaneous struggles confronted by the American Black community. The story of Hosea Williams is Black History and American History. It is a lesson for the young and not so young—and a reminder that one’s difficult life circumstances do not always deter him from destiny, but sometimes point him toward it.

Andrew Young

FORMER EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, SCLC, AND

FORMER US AMBASSADOR TO THE UNITED NATIONS

ATLANTA 2021

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have accumulated many debts during the writing of this book. Librarians and archivists at the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture; Emory University’s Manuscript Archive and Rare Book Library; the Savannah State University Library and Special Collections; the Alabama Department of Archives and History; the King Library and Archives at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center, the Stanford University Libraries and Department of Special Collections, the Tulane University Special Collections and the Robert W. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center were generous with sharing their time and expertise with me.

My family, chosen and kin, have sustained me. My wife, Dana, has sacrificed so much of herself to see me publish this book. She provided immeasurably helpful insight while proofreading many drafts of the manuscript. Her brilliance was always on full display throughout the writing of this book. Our four children, Madison (11), Marley (6), Rolundus II (2), and Remington (1), have also assisted me in ways that they will not understand until they are parents. Other family members, most notably my mother Felecia Clark, also merit mention. My mother drove me past Williams’s house at 8 East Lake Drive in Southeast Atlanta each summer when I attended the Samuel L. Jones Boys Club as a child. She always pointed to Williams’s house and said, That’s where ol’ crazy Ho-say-uh lives. I was fascinated with his story ever since that time. Gloria Hill, my grandmother, has been my rock who kept me focused. I can still remember her wrapping pennies for me to buy gas for my 1979 Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham when I was an undergraduate student. I must also acknowledge my brother, Randall Rice, and aunt, Cherrica Swindle. My family through marriage has also made incalculable investments in me: William S. Lee I, Linda Lee, Neena Lee Weans, Andre Weans, William S. Lee II, and Sangima Lee have all played crucial roles in the six-year saga that culminated with the publication of this book.

I am also indebted to the professors, mentors, university administrators, friends, editors, and civil rights activists who encouraged me to complete this book: Dorothy Autrey, Willie Bolden, Tyrone Brooks, Doris D. Crenshaw, Marvin Crawford, Bertis English, George Flowers, Janice R. Franklin, Reagan Grimsley, C. B. Hackworth, Charles Israel, Adam Jortner, Bernice A. King, Mary Ann Lieser, Scott MacKenzie, Herman Skip Mason Jr., Terrie Randolph, Clyde Robertson, Dawnelle Robinson, Howard O. Robinson II, Jack Thomas, Andrew Young, and Tara White. A special thanks is due to David Carter. Carter was my dissertation advisor during my doctoral studies at Auburn University. He believed in the project since our first conversation in his office in Thach Hall. These individuals freely tendered their thoughts to me. However, the interpretations expressed in this book are solely mine. Therefore, no one named should be held responsible for any opinions in this book.

The family of Hosea Williams was particularly helpful to me while I was writing this book. Family members invited me to attend exclusive special functions that allowed me to engage Williams’s contemporaries. Williams’s oldest daughter, Barbara Williams Emerson, went to great lengths in assisting me with securing documents and other materials necessary to explore and understand her father. Elisabeth Omilami, Williams’s daughter who has assumed the responsibility of her late father’s charity, Hosea Feed the Hungry and Homeless, was also instrumental.

Hosea Williams

Introduction

Around 9:00 AM on Sunday, March 7, 1965, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) president, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., had a spirited conversation with his top advisors, including Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, Cordy Tindell C. T. Vivian, Dorothy Cotton, Bayard Rustin, and his field lieutenant—Hosea Williams. King’s brain trust, with the exception of Williams, had all supported King’s decision to reschedule the fifty-four-mile march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, despite King’s earlier agreement to participate in the march.

No. Doc. I can’t support you, said Williams. We don’t have the ability to stop the march.… They’re gonna march without us.

Call the march off today! Tell the people we’re going to march tomorrow, said King. The SCLC president did not believe that Williams had adequately prepared to lead five hundred to seven hundred marchers on the fifty-four-mile trek to Montgomery. King estimated that Williams, the professional march planner and menace to segregationist southern city leaders, had not made provisions for food and lodging. The four cases of boiled eggs and twelve sleeping bags that he secured for the march were insufficient. King continued with a measured, diplomatic reason: Postponing the march until Monday would give me a chance to help dad and march, too. King’s father, the Rev. Martin Luther King Sr., was not feeling well enough to deliver the Men’s Day Sunday morning sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where his son had co-pastored since 1960. King’s approach was not working; he had to develop a plan quickly to stop the march. Because Williams believed that there was no other alternative but to proceed to Montgomery, he was determined to pull from his arsenal of agitation every ingenious sophistry to proceed to Montgomery in defiance of King’s explicit order.¹

Martin Luther King Jr. deployed his chief diplomat, Andrew Young, to Alabama to meet with Williams and others to halt the march. Williams, the bull in a china shop, often reached deep into what I refer to as his arsenal of agitation to wreak havoc in racist towns ahead of Young’s peace offering with conditions. Young, who may have been eating breakfast with his family that morning, was directed to charter a plane from Atlanta to Montgomery shortly after the back-and-forth with King and SCLC staffers. Recalling the train of events of March 7, 1965, twenty years later, Young said, It was also one of the things that not only did we not plan the way it happened, ah, we were trying to call it off right up to the last minute.

Young met Williams at the airport in Montgomery. He got off the airplane and [was] acting crazy and everything, remembered Williams. Boisterously, Young claimed, You know you weren’t supposed to have this march. You have overstepped your boundaries! This is clear insubordination. Young drove to Selma with the objective of appealing to the march volunteers in or around Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church to march on the following day, Monday, March 8. He was not successful. It was a bad meeting for Andy said Stoney Cooks, an SCLC staffer who was not present in Selma on March 7.²

The march to Montgomery was not to be prevented. Despite his many strengths as one of King’s most savvy lieutenants, Young was overwhelmed, in part, by Williams’s obstinacy and, in other ways, his strategic leveraging of the marchers’ pent-up passion that was on the verge of exploding after a series of rallies and speeches. The spirit in Selma, as well as the forces of fate, were too powerful for anyone, including Martin Luther King Jr., to quench. I had people jumping all over the benches that morning, Williams bragged. Not yet an ordained minister, he preached to the people a fiery sermonette of liberation from the manacles of injustice that had for so long thwarted Black progress in Selma.³

The marchers’ energy and tone changed as they left Brown Chapel lined up in twos in a double-column line. No one said a word, recalled John Lewis. Lewis walked alongside Williams on the sidewalk as they marched across the bridge named for a Confederate general: Edmund Pettus. Marchers saw a gang of law enforcement officers wearing blue uniforms and gas masks and carrying guns and nightsticks by their sides. Some were on horseback. One unnamed male marcher, petrified with terror, abandoned the marchers and left his wife. Hosea looked down at the Alabama River, said Lewis. John, can you swim? said Williams. Lewis responded with a barely audible No.

The marchers continued walking, despite orders to disperse from Major John Cloud. Williams, the only marcher who spoke out loud to the police, responded with a question. Major, Williams said, may we have a word with you? Within ninety seconds, an estimated one hundred troopers began moving closer to the unarmed marchers. The troopers proceeded to gas and beat Williams, Lewis, and other marchers. Pandemonium ensued. Additional law enforcement officers armed themselves with shotguns and chased marchers through the George Washington Carver low-income housing project and back to Brown Chapel. Ambulances soon arrived and transported the injured marchers to a Selma hospital that was operated by the Sisters of St. Joseph. Members of the blue posse began beating on the hoods of Blacks’ automobiles and screeching at the drivers to leave. Go on! We want all niggers off the streets! shouted several troopers. Within thirty minutes, according to the Selma Times Journal, a negro could not be seen walking the streets.⁴

Bloody Sunday, the seminal event that gave President Lyndon B. Johnson the political capital to push a voting rights agenda through the 89th Congress, would not have occurred on March 7, 1965, if Williams had not defied Martin Luther King Jr. His insubordination was a serious organizational infraction. He rolled the proverbial dice on his career with the SCLC on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The professional provocateur suspected that King would have fired him from the organization if the vicious attack on nonviolent marchers had not galvanized the nation. They said they were going to get rid of me, Williams recalled. That his daring defiance, scrappiness, and unyielding self-serving quest for the spotlight were indivisible parts of his character were on full display for more than forty years as a bombastic civil rights activist helps to unravel the insoluble riddle that was Hosea Williams. There was not a civil rights campaign that better encapsulated these three traits than Bloody Sunday.⁵

Hosea Lorenzo Williams’s life illuminates the entire landscape of the civil rights movement from a different vantage point, broadening the familiar geography and chronology of the Black freedom struggle even as it complicates our understanding of better chronicled events and civil rights campaigns. This book argues that, by any measure, Hosea Williams’s activism was of central importance to the success of the movement, but for complicated reasons that might be boiled down to a question of historical palatability, his role has for too long been eclipsed in historians’ chronicles of the movement. Williams’s role in pressuring municipal, state, and federal government officials to ensure that Blacks’ social, political, and economic rights were fully guaranteed yielded notable victories in Savannah, St. Augustine, Selma, and elsewhere. His campaigns helped to create and maintain pressure on the White House, Congress, and the federal courts, and the resulting legislation and court rulings did more to topple the barriers of Jim Crow in a relatively brief period than anything in the century since emancipation and Reconstruction. Williams’s grit and tactical genius, his motivational skills, and his ability to cultivate a reputation as one unbossed and unbought were critical to the success of the SCLC and the broader civil rights movement. He, too, is a founding father of the newer America. Understanding his activist trajectory enables us to view the long civil rights movement through the biographical prism of a subaltern who moved from the obscure periphery to the vital center of the most successful nonviolent revolution in human history.

Perhaps Williams was ignored because he was the defiant, rabblerousing troublemaker who refused to replace the bullhorn with a lapel mic, despite his position as an elected member of the Georgia House of Representatives. Once when he was in an office on the fourth floor of the Georgia State Capitol, he noticed that marchers were protesting for a matter of which he was not aware. I better go out and lead them, he told staff and fellow legislators. The marchers gave him a round of applause. They gave me a bullhorn, too, claimed Williams. Even as a state legislator, more than twenty years after he last marched with Martin Luther King Jr., the thrill of marching feet still energized him. Williams was still rebelling.⁶

Williams’s proclivity for rebelling against leadership and his hunger for full control were his modus operandi as an SCLC staffer, but they were also dually the essence of his tactical genius and effectiveness as a grassroots organizer. His hardnosed approach caused headaches for King, but his talents were indispensable. He was SCLC’s competitive advantage. As Dorothy Cotton, the only woman on the SCLC’s executive leadership team, maintained:

Hosea’s style could sometimes repel rather than draw to. Hosea turned every staff meeting into a fight. Martin needed Hosea at one level, in a way.… We were struggling once what to do with Hosea. Everybody wanted to take Hosea to staff for something he had done … there were constant confrontations in the family. However, despite his inability to conform as an ideal team player, Williams was invaluable, and King knew it. Cotton continued, Martin said to me, who is going to get out there on the street and organize the way Hosea does? Cotton gave a final appraisal of the root of Williams’s inability, or his unwillingness at team building with SCLC leadership: Hosea wanted total control. That is where the problems came—over budgets and staff.⁷

Williams’s brashness and appreciation for his own imperfections created a cultlike following among the Black proletariat that is easy to detect throughout the pages of this book. He was the Teflon Don of Black Atlanta for the last thirty years of his life. There was not a jury comprising a majority of Black residents in Atlanta that would have convicted him of any crime, despite the overwhelming evidence stemming from his highly publicized incidents with law enforcement regarding the combustible mix of alcohol and automobiles. The white press, relentless in their coverage of every transgression, probably magnified his appeal through their vilification of the old movement warhorse. Williams aptly captured the sentiment of some Blacks in a 1996 interview: Hell, I know he’s no angel, but damn, he ain’t that bad. According to Williams, even Martin Luther King Sr., who was no supporter because of his unwillingness to abandon the street protests of the 1960s for a more palatable approach to racial equity, allegedly told an unnamed white person to Leave [Hosea] alone. You’re going to mess around and make him mayor. Don’t you see, the more you beat on him, the more these black folks come to his defense. There is no independent source that documents Daddy King’s statement. Nonetheless, Black Atlantans are still coming to his defense at the time of this writing in 2021. Each year, volunteers and staffers who marched with Williams in campaigns in decades past still gather at his burial chamber at Lincoln Cemetery in Atlanta to sing songs, share stories, and light candles.⁸

Perhaps his magnetic connection with the poor was accentuated by his unrelenting attack on the establishment and his many contributions to the poor long after 1968, when he refused to abandon the streets for more mainstream approaches to systemic racism. He continued his visible, persistent lambasting of the downtown power structure that, in his view, consisted of prominent and affluent Blacks including Atlanta Life Insurance President Jesse Hill, construction magnate Herman Russell, and Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson. Williams referred to this wealthy trio as the chief house niggers because of their less invasive approach to race relations. His popularity with the Black working class was also strengthened by his widely heralded commitment to the dispossessed and disinherited. One unnamed columnist wrote in 1991 that Williams was in the spirit of American populism, which has always included figures who combined, rascality, voter appeal and the guts to speak an uncomfortable truth.⁹ Gary Pomerantz, another columnist for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, showed considerable insight in arguing that Williams’s for-the-little man philosophy was a hybrid of Huey Long and Huey Newton. Williams began feeding Atlanta’s hungry in 1971, and since that year when he started the Poor People’s Chow House in the basement of the Wheat Street Baptist Church, the effort has fed an estimated one million Metro Atlantans, perhaps more than any non-state-affiliated entity in the State of Georgia since its founding.

Despite his standing as a folk hero in Atlanta, Williams has not been credited for his contributions to the civil rights movement and the modern Black freedom struggle.¹⁰ Williams often claimed that John Lewis received more credit than he deserved for Bloody Sunday. To some extent, the lionization of Lewis began during the same time that Williams was being branded as a useless mischief maker by the Atlanta press while Lewis was in his fourth term representing Georgia’s fifth district in the US House of Representatives. Lewis had greater cachet and leveraged his access in Washington, DC, while Williams was serving as a state representative in the Georgia House of Representatives. Lewis was the shining symbol of what the historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham coined as respectability politics. He opted to extend the civil rights movement in a different way by respectfully representing the district that produced Martin Luther King Jr.; Auburn Avenue; and Morehouse, Spelman, Morris Brown, and Clark Colleges.¹¹

The lionization of John Lewis came full circle when the seventeen-term congressman died of pancreatic cancer in 2020 at age eighty. On July 30, 2020, three of the four living former presidents of the United States—George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama—were among the mourners who assembled at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta to pay their final respects to the Conscience of the Congress. The service at Ebenezer was the last of three nationally televised memorials that commemorated Lewis’s lifetime of frontline activism for civil and voting rights, as well as his thirty-three years representing Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District in the US House of Representatives. Two of the former presidents ascended to the pulpit from the pews to deliver their prepared remarks in the order in which they occupied the Oval Office. Bush referred to Lewis as an American saint.¹² Clinton called Lewis a legend.¹³ The crowd interrupted the former presidents’ tributes with occasional bursts of applause before giving them standing ovations at the end of their respective speeches. Barack Obama, now four years into his postpresidency, was the last dignitary to address the mourners.

President Obama took a deep breath, adjusted the microphone before beginning his remarks, and quoted a biblical passage from James 1:4—Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, lacking nothing. After acknowledging Martin Luther King Jr. as the church’s greatest pastor, he immediately heralded Lewis as King’s finest disciple, likely because of Lewis’s self-sacrificing spirit throughout the civil rights movement and more than three decades of service in Congress. (It is worth noting that Ebenezer’s current pastor, the Rev. Dr. Raphael Warnock, was elected five months later as Georgia’s first Black US senator.) Obama, who had awarded Lewis the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011, reserved his greatest compliment for Lewis near the end of his eulogy.¹⁴

Presidential utterances are consequential, especially in the social media age of Facebook and Twitter. Obama mentioned the names of other civil rights activists during his eulogy. The former president talked about C. T. Vivian, another civil rights activist and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient. The appropriateness of acknowledging Vivian during Lewis’s eulogy was fitting, especially considering that both timbers, he and the congressman, fell on the same day. Obama also highlighted the role of Joseph Lowery, whom he awarded the nation’s highest civilian honor in 2009. The former president spoke the names of James Lawson, Robert Bob Moses, Diane Nash, and Bernard Lafayette—all familiar names in the historiography of the civil rights movement, all still living.

The president, when referring to Bloody Sunday, one of Lewis’s most celebrated acts of bravery, quickly acknowledged Hosea Williams. Obama’s recognition of Hosea Williams and others who played a role in the initial attempt to march from Selma to Montgomery in March 1965 was the first time that Obama, the first US president of African descent, publicly paid a mounting debt to Hosea Williams. Obama may not have awarded Williams the Presidential Medal of Freedom as he honored Lewis, Vivian, and Lowery, but he did bestow upon the controversial activist a posthumous gift that Williams never received during his lifetime—recognition from a statesman on the national stage. Unlike for Williams, however, Obama asserted that Lewis has a reservation in the pantheon of the nation’s greatest heroes. When this country finally makes good on its founding promises to guarantee inalienable rights for all citizens, John Lewis, said Obama, will be a founding father of that fuller, fairer, better America.¹⁵

President Obama was not alone in relegating Williams to more of a footnote than a profound shaper of American history. Historians of the civil rights era have consistently downplayed the significance of Hosea Williams. Were it not for his presence at the front of the line on Bloody Sunday, he might have been virtually consigned to the dustbin of history altogether. It is difficult to overstate the significance of the events of Bloody Sunday. Eight days after the melee, President Johnson, a son of the South, addressed a joint session of Congress. Speaking in the House Chamber, Johnson, in his long southern drawl, poignantly captured the gravity of Bloody Sunday. At times, Johnson said, history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama. Bloody Sunday, Johnson believed, was as much a defining moment for the Republic as the first shots of the conflict that led to American independence from Great Britain. This memorable quote from the speech also elevates the significance of Bloody Sunday in American history to that of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln five days after Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant to formally end the Civil War. Johnson did not acknowledge Williams in the speech that he used to galvanize Congress to take legislative action to address the disfranchisement of Black Americans. It took almost fifty-five years to the day that he signed the Voting Rights Act into law for his distant successor, Barack Obama, to credit Williams’s leadership in the seminal event that led to the nation’s most effective remedy to voter suppression.¹⁶

Hosea Williams is an anomalous figure, at once both known and unknown in the historiography of the civil rights movement. Historians have far too often relegated Hosea Williams to a peripheral figure seldom meriting more than a handful of sentences, a mere footnote in the pages of what have been otherwise solid treatments examining civil rights agitation in the United States in the years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, what many scholars have referred to as the classical phase of the civil rights movement. Within the past forty years, academics from a variety of disciplines have been joined by journalists and historical participants themselves in generating a proliferation of monographs, memoirs, and biographies. Some of the most acclaimed historians of the period have afforded only scant and fragmentary attention to Williams’s contributions to civil rights, and the historiographical silence is nearly absolute for the years preceding and following his fifteen-year career with the local Savannah affiliate and national SCLC from 1963 to 1979.

No author has attempted a biographical treatment of Williams’s life, even though some scholars have recognized Williams’s pivotal role in the 1960s. Moreover, only a few scholars recognized that Williams was actively engaged in civil and voting rights activism before meeting King and his subsequent full-time employment with the SCLC. Historians have been similarly silent regarding Williams’s post-1968 contributions to the struggle for Black equality for the thirty-two years after King’s assassination. His work clearly demonstrates that the civil rights movement did not end on a Memphis balcony in 1968.

Williams did receive some recognition for his life’s work after his passing on November 16, 2000, at the age of seventy-four. In an interview in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on the day after his death, David Garrow, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, said: In the 1964–1965 timeframe, Hosea was as valuable as anyone in SCLC to Dr. King because of his courage and willingness to lead dangerous demonstrations.… People may remember Andy Young and John Lewis, but … Hosea was just as important to the movement.¹⁷ Williams has been universally portrayed as courageous, fearless, and integral to the modern civil rights movement by the activists who marched alongside and strategized with him during some of the most dangerous protests during the 1960s. Even the recently anointed founding father and canonized American saint, John Lewis, believed that Williams, too, deserved a carving on the same slab of granite reserved for those responsible for America’s rebirth. Lewis, who marched shoulder to shoulder with Williams on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on Bloody Sunday, called the fiery activist an authentic hero. Hosea Williams must be looked upon as one of the founding fathers of the new America, he said. Through his actions, he helped liberate all of us.¹⁸ Joseph Lowery, a founder of the SCLC and Williams’s former boss who fired him as executive director of the SCLC in 1979, portrayed the old warhorse of the movement as fearless. Hosea wasn’t afraid of Goliath, he said. In fact, I was thinking about it, and I don’t think there anything he was scared of. He remembered Williams as someone who tackled the Goliaths of greed and indifference that created a permanent underclass.¹⁹ These more celebrated peers of Williams, both recipients of the nation’s highest civilian honor, suggest that he shared some of the same characteristics that they embodied. Perhaps the lack of historiographical representation is one of the reasons Williams is not mentioned in the same vein as Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, John Lewis, Jesse Jackson, and Joseph Lowery.

Williams was an integral member of the brain trust of the SCLC who merits biographical treatment, especially during a period where state and federal legislators are attempting to roll back the gains of the civil rights movement. Overall, there remains a dearth of full-length biographies of civil rights activists who were at the epicenter of the classical—or what Peniel Joseph refers to as the heroic—phase of the modern civil rights movement, which began in 1954 with the banning of segregation in the public school system and culminated with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.²⁰ After the critical success of recent biographies written on Septima Poinsette Clark and Ella Baker, the literature is begging for scholarly portraits of other activists involved with SCLC and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) during the high tide of the modern Black freedom struggle.²¹

This book explores how Williams’s legacy and undeniable talent for organizing working-class Blacks as a civil rights activist and elected representative have been overshadowed by defects in his personal decision-making, not by deficiencies of courage or effectiveness as a member of the SCLC brain trust. This includes a thorough examination of Williams as a leader within the Savannah, Georgia, branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); a political organizer with SCLC; and one of the four top lieutenants to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the peak years of the movement for equality in the middle of the twentieth century during the prime of his professional career. C. T. Vivian, an aide to Dr. King who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013, maintained that Hosea achieved status but it didn’t satisfy him. He gave up more than any of us ever had. Williams, the only aide to Dr. King with a degree and graduate coursework in chemistry, turned his back on a lucrative career as a research chemist with the US Department of Agriculture to work full time for SCLC. Elizabeth Williams Omilami, Williams’s second oldest daughter, claimed that her father, who had sacrificed so much for the cause of freedom, was simply a prophet without honor.²²

This book examines several important issues, seeking to explore through the lens of biography the magnetic leadership of Hosea Williams. What were the sources of his anxiety, and how did he manage to preserve his sense of humor at the core of his personality in very serious, life-threatening situations? What led him to cast his lot with the modern freedom struggle when he was enjoying a comfortable middle-class life in Savannah, Georgia, and had professional opportunities available to only a tiny minority of Blacks in the Deep South? He had secured a comfortable job with the US Department of Agriculture and was being steadily promoted when other Blacks could not even secure an interview. However, he knowingly drew the ire of his colleagues and supervisors by leading boycotts and voting rights initiatives against the local and federal governments.

Hosea Williams demonstrated a remarkable capacity to transcend class and educational divisions within Savannah’s Black community, and that ability served him admirably throughout the remainder of his career as a proud civil rights agitator in a host of other cities in and beyond the South. One might reasonably expect that Williams’s academic training as a chemist at Morris Brown College and Atlanta University would have hindered him in relating to the masses of undereducated Blacks, some of whom were still unable to read and write in the decades following World War II. However, like Martin Luther King Jr., Williams had an uncanny ability to connect with the poorest of the poor, many of whom had never traveled outside of their home states.

Williams’s capacity to touch and transform the minds of the forgotten rank and file he mobilized in the South during and after the classical phase of the civil rights movement was attributed to his genius as an organizer, and his belief that movements involved the community, not the welleducated intellectuals and theoreticians—individuals he routinely lambasted. He endeared himself to the crazies, people who were willing to go to jail or lose their lives for freedom. Williams believed that these crazies who were the salt of the movement had guts—the foundation of any sustaining campaign for a worthy cause. The crazies were drawn to him because, despite his middle-class status, he, too, was a crazy who dwelled amongst, and understood the aspirations of this vitally important movement demographic. At an informal graveside memorial service, which I attended in 2013, Willie Bolden, one of Williams’s closest friends who was considered a son, said in his remarks that, after watching Williams during the Savannah desegregation campaign, he thought that he was either crazy or one hell of a leader. He was both, Bolden said nostalgically. To make the point more clearly, Williams neatly fits the definition of what the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci referred to as an organic intellectual. In Gramsci’s thinking, the organic intellectual is not formally recognized as an intellectual in the traditional sense. The conventional intellectual is detached from everyday life and learns through reading and writing essays while being supported by university endowments and other forms of academic patronage. By contrast, the organic intellectual learns about life and the world they ultimately change from appreciating and understanding the expressed needs and aspirations of the group to which they belong by choice or circumstance. Gramsci also suggests that organic intellectuals are so firmly committed to social action that it is inextricably woven into the fabric of their existence. Social action is all-consuming. It is indivisible from one’s personhood.²³

This book also situates Williams’s organizational talents and background within the larger group of King’s colleagues, including Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, James Bevel, and later, Jesse Jackson. It is widely known that Hosea Williams and the remainder of King’s inner circle of lieutenants were constantly jockeying for favor and proximity to the president of the SCLC because of his influence and appeal to wider audiences. Examining Williams and his fellow SCLC lieutenants as they sought to advance the civil rights agenda despite these obstacles suggests that, ultimately, Dr. King was the glue that kept their egos in check. This book’s exploration of these dynamics is modeled on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. Goodwin’s prizewinning work focuses on Lincoln’s ability to balance the conservative and radical factions in his cabinet by shrewdly and subtly manipulating his various secretaries to push his agenda. The following chapters demonstrate that King used a similar method with his own inner cabinet of advisers. Goodwin analyzed the lives of Salmon P. Chase, William Seward, Edward Bates, and Edward Stanton, dissecting their respective backgrounds, personality traits, and career ambitions in contrast to Lincoln’s. A similar approach with King’s five lieutenants—Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, James Bevel, Jesse Jackson, and Hosea Williams—can also bear analytical fruit. Observers often contend that Williams and, to a lesser degree, James Bevel were the most contentious lieutenants in King’s inner circle.²⁴ This book sheds critical light on the question of how the internal politics of the SCLC shaped organizational strategy and tactics.

The pages that follow span Hosea Williams’s life from his birth in 1926 until his death in 2000. The narrative attempts to weave many disparate events and psychological analysis into a concise chronological framework. These chapters enter into Williams’s world and analyze how he moved through it, directly addressing his complex and, at times, conflicting personality traits. In addition to Williams’s own self-examination, the chapters rely on the perspectives of family members, friends, enemies, and colleagues. Their written and oral testimonies, in combination with his own accounts, help to paint a rich portrait of an underappreciated civil rights activist.

ONE

Little Turner,

World War II, and Atlanta

Hosea Williams’s early life in rural south Georgia and the circumstances surrounding his birth and rearing helped define his commitment to the poor and disinherited. His defiant nature as a child was evident when he disregarded the southern mores that almost led to him being lynched for having sex with a white girl. The first twenty years of his life are filled with overcoming remarkable circumstances. Williams was born to blind, unwed parents, Larcenia Williams and Willie Blind Willie Wiggins on January 5, 1926, in Attapulgus, Georgia. He was reared by his maternal grandmother and grandfather, Turner and Leila Williams. The younger Williams, known as Little Turner, was never referred to as Hosea in this small city in the far southwest corner of the state, because he exhibited many of the characteristics of his strong and domineering grandfather, whom he affectionately referred to as Papa. Although illiterate, Papa instilled a sense of toughness and courage into his grandson that enabled him to survive in hostile environments, including his tour of duty in the US Army during World War II and the many civil rights campaigns he led during the movement and post-1968.

Hosea Lorenzo Williams was born in an era when Georgia was a oneparty state dominated politically by the Democratic Party and its elected officials who fought to preserve segregation through fear and intimidation, as well as through ingenious legal sophistry. During the first eighteen years of Williams’s life, many citizens of Georgia routinely elected staunch defenders of states’ rights and the status quo who wittingly appealed to white racial fears of Negro equality. Nearly every state and local officeholder, from governors to US senators, as well as mayors and sheriffs, knew from an instinct tempered by history and experience that espousing campaign rhetoric or advocating policies that granted a semblance of the rights to Blacks already enjoyed by whites would be political suicide. Richard B. Russell—who, after a brief stint as the governor of Georgia from 1931 to 1933, served in the US Senate for thirty-eight years until his death in 1971—represents only one example of how an elected official’s shrewd political pragmatism in Georgia was influenced by race. Russell’s predecessor in the governor’s mansion was Democrat Eugene Talmadge, who was elected four times to the state’s highest office (he died shortly before being inaugurated for his fourth term). Talmadge’s political success was rooted in his ability to appeal to poor whites by offering voters a hybrid version of populism