Hosea Williams; Civil Rights Leader, Influential King Ally

Hosea L. Williams, the straight-talking, uncompromising civil rights leader who led 1965’s pivotal “Bloody Sunday” march and was one of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s most influential field representatives, died of cancer Thursday. He was 74.

Williams, whom King referred to as “my wild man, my Castro,” was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1997 and had a kidney removed last year. He was being treated for an infection at Atlanta’s Piedmont Hospital.

“A great warrior has fallen,” said Julian Bond, chairman of the board of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People. “Among everything else, Hosea Williams was an organizer and an agitator. Today’s activists have much to learn from his life. We will not soon see his like again.”

Williams was among the handful of Southern Christian Leadership Conference organizers accompanying King when he was assassinated in 1968 in Memphis, Tenn.

In his later years, the chemist, Baptist minister and self-described rebel held several local and state political offices in Georgia.

In an extension of his and King’s push to make poverty a civil rights issue, he spent three decades organizing thousands of free meals for homeless people in Atlanta. He also ran several chemical companies that made cleaning supplies.

Williams was often celebrated and sometimes ostracized in civil rights circles for freely speaking his mind. In recent yeas, he openly criticized King’s family for profiting from his legacy. In 1980, he infuriated many when he blasted President Jimmy Carter for a “history of broken promises” and endorsed Republican nominee Ronald Reagan for the presidency.

“He didn’t always follow the plan,” said the Rev. Joseph Lowery, a longtime friend who worked--and sometimes argued--with Williams. “Hosea was a battering ram in the movement. The one thing that matched his courage was his commitment.”

In his later years, Williams, wearing his trademark denim overalls as a symbol of his efforts as a civil rights field worker--not an office worker--led protests using a cane.

His mantra was: “I’m still unbought and still unbossed.”

Born Jan. 5, 1926, in Attapulgus, Ga., Williams--unlike many civil rights leaders--was raised in abject poverty. “Hosea was one of the most complex people we had in the movement [because] he came from a truly deprived background,” said the Rev. C.T. Vivian, a former SCLC staff member.

Williams was raised by his grandfather, left home at age 14 and worked odd jobs for several years.

An Army staff sergeant during World War II, he was wounded by shrapnel in Germany, and returned home to face intense segregation. Beaten bloody when he tried to use a whites-only water fountain, he also faced a growing sense of his own activism.

He often told the story of taking his two young sons to a segregated drugstore and facing their tears as he explained why they would not be served. “I started crying because I realized I couldn’t tell them the truth,” he wrote in the civil rights book “My Soul Is Rested” by Howell Raines. “I guess I made them a promise I’d bring them back someday.”

Years later, he did. “That was one of the happiest days of my life,” Williams wrote in “The Way It Was in the South.”

After graduating from Morris Brown College in Atlanta with a degree in chemistry, he taught at a segregated high school and became a research chemist. He also agitated against segregated schools and lunch counters in Savannah, Ga. By the early 1960s, he had attracted King’s notice and support.

“It’s important to remember that Mr. Williams made a very valuable contribution to the civil rights movement in Savannah even before he began working for Dr. King,” said Emory University historian David J. Garrow.

He was arrested, by his own estimate, about 135 times while leading marches and supervising voter registration. He would serve in a string of SCLC positions, including executive director.

On March 7, 1965, Williams, civil rights leader John Lewis and others stood in the lead of about 600 marchers on a trek from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., to protest voting restrictions. The group started across the Edmund Pettus Bridge over the Alabama River. They never made it to Montgomery.

Teargassed and beaten by hundreds of blue-unformed state troopers, dozens of marchers suffered severe injuries as white spectators cheered and television cameras rolled.

The day would be called “Bloody Sunday,” and the nation, including President Lyndon B. Johnson, was outraged. Within months, Johnson pushed through the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Williams became one of King’s most fervent workers, and was with him on the balcony at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis when he was assassinated in 1968.

He would go on to win a seat in the Georgia General Assembly, and later on the Atlanta City Council and the De Kalb County Commission.

Williams was never an angel. He collected a string of arrests for hit-and-run driving offenses, some alcohol-related. He claimed that at least some were politically motivated.

But he continued marching. In 1987 he marched with 75 others into all-white Forsyth County, Ga., and was pelted by rocks and bottles hurled by members of the Ku Klux Klan. The next week, 20,000 marchers came.

Emory historian Garrow, who wrote “Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,” said: “Over the last 20 years here, in Atlanta, Mr. Williams, maybe more than any other of Dr. King’s former associates, has really tried to stay true to Dr. King’s legacy.”

Williams’ wife, Juanita, whom he married in the early 1950s, died last August of anemia at age 75. A son, Hosea Williams II, was 43 when he died of a rare form of leukemia in 1998.

Next week, Williams would have celebrated the 30th anniversary of his Hosea’s Feed the Hungry and Homeless, a program that started by feeding 200 homeless men on Thanksgiving Day and was feeding about 35,000 by last year.

In 1999, struggling through cancer treatment, he was unable to attend the meals, said Georgia state Rep. Tyrone Brooks, a lifelong friend.

“It was the first time he missed it in 30 years,” Brooks said. Noting that the program has faced financial difficulties in recent years but is now being run by Williams’ daughter, Elizabeth Williams Omilami, Brooks said: “The program will go on. It will not die.”

Services will be held Tuesday morning at King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.