Hosea Williams - Civil Rights

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.

After leaving SCLC, Williams played an active role in supporting strikes in the Atlanta, Georgia area by black workers who had first been hired because of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

In the 1966 gubernatorial race, Williams opposed both the Democratic nominee, segregationist Lester Maddox, and the Republican choice, U.S. Representative Howard Callaway. He challenged Callaway on a myriad of issues relating to civil rights, minimum wage, federal aid to education, urban renewal, and indigent medical care. Williams claimed that Callaway had purchased the endorsement of the Atlanta Journal. Ultimately, after a general election deadlock, Maddox was elected governor by the state legislature.

In 1972, Williams ran in the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate seat formerly held by the late Richard Russell, Jr. He polled 46,153 votes (6.4 percent). The nomination and the election went to fellow Democrat Sam Nunn.

In 1974, Williams organized the International Wrestling League (IWL), based in Atlanta, with Thunderbolt Patterson serving as president. The promotion ran three cards before folding.

In politics, he was elected and served on the Atlanta City Council, Georgia General Assembly, and the DeKalb County Commission. He was one of few Georgia elected officials to ever be elected to serve on the city, county, as well as state level of government. He one of the few, and perhaps the only Georgia official ever to win an election while incarcerated. Not only did Williams win the election, but his margin of victory was characterized as a landslide. In 1972, Williams was a candidate in the primaries for U.S. Senator from Georgia, but victory went to fellow Democrat Sam Nunn. In 1976, he supported former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter for president. Then, he surprised many black civil rights figures in 1980 by joining Ralph Abernathy and Charles Evers and endorsing Ronald Reagan. By 1984, however, he had soured on Reagan's policies, and returned to the Democrats to support Walter F. Mondale.

In 1987, he led another internationally-covered march, this one consisting of seventy-five people in Forsyth County, Georgia, which at the time (before becoming a major exurb of northern metro Atlanta) had no non-white residents. He and the others were assaulted with stones and other objects by the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists. Another march the following week brought 20,000 people and an enormous showing of police and sheriff department officers, plus national media. Forsyth County began to slowly integrate in the following years due the expansion of the Atlanta suburbs and the availability of reasonably priced housing. Forsyth is no longer considered merely an exurb of Atlanta but is a rapidly growing suburb.

In 1989, Williams unsuccessfully ran against fellow Democrat Maynard Jackson in the nonpartisan race for mayor of Atlanta.