Civil Rights Veteran Hosea Williams Faces Battle to Keep His Credibility Politics: : Frequent arrests, questionable church bring criticism. He insists that he is a target of persecution.

In the autumn of Hosea Williams’ life, he has endured a summer of discontent. The man who walked with Martin Luther King Jr. has become a laughingstock for all seasons.

He hears taunts on the radio, where his legendary civil rights name is used as a punch line. A cartoon depicts his likeness, crashing his car, as Atlanta’s Olympic mascot. There’s a magazine layout, “Driving Mr. Hosea,” picturing Miss Daisy chauffeuring him.

His friends suggest that maybe he needs help.

None of it bothers him. “Not worth a damn!” he shouts.

Then the 65-year-old Williams hangs his head and sighs. “This is unbelievable,” he says. “I don’t know what keeps me going. . . . “

Williams is taking heat this summer on two fronts.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, long an object of Williams’ wrath, detailed how his “mysterious” Martin Luther King Jr. Poor People’s Church of Love has no sanctuary and no services and operates the state’s largest bingo operation.

His driving record, long the stuff of local legend, became an issue again. Days after his latest drunk-driving charge was dropped--he was asleep when a police officer found him stopped on a freeway ramp--he was cited for leaving the scene of an accident, and indicted last Monday on felony and misdemeanor charges. The civil rights activist who boasts of 129 trips to jail may be looking at five years in state prison.

“I hate to see these trivial accidents and accusations overshadow all of the good that he’s done over the last 30 or 40 years,” said state Rep. Tyrone Brooks, a longtime Williams ally and friend.

“I don’t want him remembered as someone who was arrested for drunken driving or left the scene of an accident or was sleeping in his car on an exit ramp with the detection of alcohol on his breath,” Brooks said.

But Williams insists that all of this is persecution for a lifetime of standing up for the poor and the downtrodden.

“This is ridiculous,” he said. “It’s ridiculous! Somebody’s done given their life helping the poor, and these low-down bastards come back with their money and their pressure. I know what’s going on. They’ve gone to the newspapers to get the newspapers to crucify me.”

Combativeness is second nature to Williams.

He was already a pioneer of sorts, the U.S. Agriculture Department’s first black research chemist, when he began organizing segregation protests in Savannah, Ga. He came to King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta in the early 1960s--older, married with children and maybe more hardened than some.

Williams was “clearly one of the five or six most significant people around King,” but he was “an unusual, forceful, unpredictable personality, even in 1964,” said David Garrow, the Pulitzer-Prize winning King biographer.

“He was three years older than King,” Garrow said. “He had been in the military. He wasn’t someone like John Lewis and a lot of people coming to this as 21-year-olds.”

After King, while Lewis and Andrew Young went on to Congress and Ralph David Abernathy became a revered pastor, Williams stayed in the trenches, winning local political offices and leading even more demonstrations.

He endorsed Ronald Reagan, then urged him to approve the King holiday. He conscripted white conservatives to help his annual “Feed the Hungry” holiday dinners. After he and a handful of marchers in all-white Forsyth County were pelted with rocks and bottles, he led a return march of 20,000.

Much of his work these days, and the work of his church, is “what we call the complaints,” he said. Each day, he explained, he fields dozens of calls, asking him to right a wrong, or help someone in trouble. He works the phone a lot, and splits his time between two nondescript, run-down offices, and meetings of the DeKalb County Commission.

Among his constituents in a mostly poor, black neighborhood, he remains wildly popular. He won his commission seat last fall with 82% of the vote.

But across the city, his name prompts snickers.

At least 25 times, he has been convicted of one driving offense or another. He acknowledges several drunk-driving charges, but insists that he has never been convicted. He once pleaded no contest. When asked why that doesn’t count, he snapped: “You wouldn’t have this job if you was that damn dumb.

“I ain’t no bad driver,” he said. “I’m no alcoholic. I take a drink, but I ain’t no alcoholic. I ain’t no drunk driver.”

“I think it’s a big denial problem,” Brooks said. “We love Hosea, no matter what he says. Many of us who care for him feel the responsibility to tell him he needs to seek help.”

Williams’ response: “I don’t have a problem. He’s tied up with the political power structure; I think that’s why he said that.”

When asked about his bingo operation, which runs six nights a week under three different charitable licenses and grosses $400,000 a year before expenses, he bristled again:

“Good God Almighty! I fed 42,000 people on Christmas Day. We didn’t make enough money from bingo to feed enough people no day. What makes me know that you don’t intend to do what’s right is you asking me about the gross. Gross don’t mean a damn thing.”

But while Williams says the criticism “has made me more popular than Martin Luther King Jr. has ever been in this town,” he interrupted an interview to phone a black journalist who pronounced him “a local joke.”

“I just want to say this to you,” he barked into the phone. “Here’s one of the terrible things: that my generation fought so hard to open the doors for people like you.”

For Williams, these are ominous times.

“Why would USA Today be interested in Hosea Williams? AP? There’s something bigger than I think it is, coming down. Something big, man. . . . But I’m not worried about me. I swear to God I’m not worried about me.

“The greatest people of all time--Jesus, Gandhi of India, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X--did not die natural deaths. And I’ve gone too far to turn around.”