Hosea Williams

Activist and politician

• Born: January 5, 1926
• Birthplace: Attapulgus, Georgia
• Died: November 16, 2000
• Place of death: Atlanta, Georgia

Williams led a direct-action movement that desegregated public facilities in Savannah, Georgia. He served on the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s board and led the 1965 Summer Community Organization and Political Education (SCOPE) project. In the 1970’s, he became a politician and founded a charity, Hosea Feeds the Hungry and Homeless.

Early Life

Hosea Lorenzo Williams (ho-ZAY-ah loh-REHN-zoh WIHL-yuhms) was the illegitimate son of a blind woman who died shortly after his birth. Brought up by his grandfather in Attapulgus, Georgia, Williams left home when he was twelve years old after a lynch mob attacked him for dating a white girl. After working as a hustler, he joined the U.S. Army during World War II. He was the sole survivor when a shell exploded near his platoon in France. He believed that God had saved him so that he could serve a higher purpose.

After leaving the Army in 1947, Williams took advantage of the G.I. Bill to complete high school and went on to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemistry from Morris Brown College in Atlanta. He moved to Savannah to begin work as a chemist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Williams traced his growing consciousness of racial injustice, and his subsequent involvement in the Civil Rights movement, to several incidents in his early life. After being unable to buy his children a soda at a segregated lunch counter, he became involved in Savannah’s local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He became branch membership chairman in 1955 and vice president in 1960. Williams took part in various activities, including desegregating the city’s public library and joining with several other parents to sue for school desegregation.

Life’s Work

On March 17, 1960, three members of Savannah’s NAACP Youth Council sat down at a segregated lunch counter in a downtown department store and refused to leave when they were refused service. Before the demonstration, they had asked the local NAACP president, W. W. Law, for support. Law asked Williams to train them in nonviolent methods, and Williams subsequently led the direct-action campaign. Believing that social change also required political action, Williams founded a voter registration committee, the Chatham County Crusade for Voters (CCCV), the following month. In the fall of 1960, Williams also cooperated with Septima Poinsette Clark of Highlander Folk School to open a number of “citizenship schools.” The schools, which trained local African Americans to read and write so that they could pass the state’s literacy test and register to vote, also encouraged Afrincan Americans to join the city’s direct-action movement. In the summer of 1963, Savannah’s direct-action campaign escalated, and Williams spent thirty-four days in jail. In order to quell racial protest, Mayor Malcolm Maclean appointed a racially mixed committee of businessmen and NAACP representatives to desegregate the city’s stores and lunch counters.

In 1964, Williams moved to Atlanta to join the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) as a full-time staff member. The following year, he designed the Summer Community Organization and Political Education (SCOPE) project, in which three hundred northern white students worked to register African American voters in fifty-one counties in the South. As a result, some counties saw a significant increase in the number of African American voters; for example, in Hale County, the number of voters rose from 235 to 3,242 in a month. Williams regularly participated in SCLC demonstrations, including the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers’ strike. He was with Martin Luther King, Jr., when the SCLC leader was assassinated in 1968 at the Lorraine Motel.

After King’s death, Williams remained on SCLC’s staff until 1979. However, during the 1970’s, he turned his attention to other social and charity work. In 1971, he founded Hosea Feeds the Hungry and Homeless (HFTH) in Atlanta, which has since distributed more than three billion dollars’ worth of aid to people in need. In 1987, he organized a march against racism in Forsyth County, Georgia. Williams also entered politics, serving in the Georgia House of Representatives from 1974 to 1985, on the Atlanta City Council from 1985 to 1990, and on the DeKalb County Commission from 1985 to 1990. He ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Atlanta in 1989. Williams died of cancer on November 16, 2000, in Atlanta.

Significance

Williams led a campaign in Savannah that resulted in the desegregation of the city’s facilities a year before the 1964 Civil Rights Act. When King visited Savannah in January, 1964, he lauded it as “the most integrated city south of the Mason-Dixon line.” Williams supported voter registration drives and citizenship schools that not empowered and educated African Americans. He remained committed to the Civil Rights movement and voter registration throughout the 1960’s, including leading the SCOPE project. His legacy continues through HFTH, which was particularly active in New Orleans, Louisiana, during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. After Williams’s death, his daughter Elizabeth Omilami took over as the charity’s leader.

Bibliography

Branch, Taylor. Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998. Critically appraises Williams’s role in the SCOPE program, noting controversies over his financial administration.

Gillespie, Deanna M. “They Walk, Talk, and Act Like New People: Citizenship Schools in Southeastern Georgia, 1960-1975.” In Teach Freedom: Education for Liberation in the African American Tradition, edited by Charles M. Payne and Carol Sills Strickland. New York: Teachers College Press, 2008. Gillespie discusses the development of citizenship schools in Savannah and surrounding areas and the contributions that the schools made to the local direct-action movement.

Tuck, Stephen G. N. Beyond Atlanta: The Struggle for Racial Equality in Georgia, 1940-1980. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001. Presents a detailed history of the Civil Rights movement in the state, including behind-the-scenes maneuvering and tensions among and within the various organizations working for equality.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “A City Too Dignified to Hate: Civic Pride, Civil Rights, and Savannah in Comparative Perspective.” Georgia Historical Quarterly 79 (October, 1995): 533-559. In his extensive account of the Civil Rights movement in Georgia, Tuck critically assesses Williams’s early life, his activism in Savannah, and the SCOPE project.