Hosea Williams

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Hosea Williams bigraphy, stories - Recipient of the Purple Heart

Hosea Williams : biography

January 5, 1926 – November 16, 2000

Hosea Lorenzo Williams (January 5, 1926 – November 16, 2000) was a United States civil rights leader, ordained minister, businessman, philanthropist, scientist, and politician. He may be best known as a trusted member of fellow famed civil rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Martin Luther King, Jr.’s inner circle. Under the banner of their flagship organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King depended on Williams’ keen ability to organize and stir masses of people into nonviolent direct action in the myriad of protest campaigns they waged against racial, political, economic, and social injustice. King alternately referred to Williams, his chief field lieutenant, as his "bull in a china closet" and his "Castro".

Inspired by personal experience with and his vow to continue King’s work for the poor, Williams may be equally well known as the founding president of one of the largest social services organizations for the poor and hungry on holidays in North America, Hosea Feed the Hungry and Homeless. His famous motto was "Unbought and Unbossed" (which was also the motto of former U.S. Representative Shirley Chisholm of New York City).

Hosea L. Williams Drive

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 Williams Drive and East Lake Drive.

Hosea Williams Drive is in the DeKalb County portion of Atlanta and originates at Moreland Avenue, running east-west through the communities of Edgewood, Kirkwood, and East Lake. The street ends at Candler Road.

Hosea L. Williams Papers are housed at in Atlanta. His daughter Elisabeth Omilami also maintains a traveling exhibit of valuable civil rights memorabilia.

Civil rights

Though he courageously fought for his country in World War II, 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 for "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. In route to the funeral home, the hearse driver noticed Williams had a faint pulse and was barely breathing, but was still alive. Since there were no hospitals in the area servicing blacks, even in the case of a medical emergency, the detour to the nearest veterans hospital would be well over a hundred miles away. 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."

Over the course of his more than 40 years as a civil rights activist, he was arrested more than 125 times fighting to liberate the oppressed.

He first joined the NAACP, but 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. While organizing during the 1965 Selma Voting Rights Movement he also lead the first attempt at a 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, and was tear gassed and beaten severely. The Selma demonstrations and this "Bloody Sunday" attempt led to the other great legislative accomplishment of the movement, the Voting Rights Act of 1965.