Civil Rights Legend Tyrone Brooks & Maynard Eaton: One on One, Q&A

By: Maynard Eaton, Editor in Chief SCLC Magazine

Tyrone Brooks can talk! And armed with a photographic memory, the wordsmith can regale, enthrall, and educate you spinning stories about the SCLC Civil Rights Movement and its colorful and charismatic former leadership.

Brooks, a former Georgia State Representative who was elected 18 times, is a riveting raconteur as you will read.

Maynard Eaton: The cover photo of this current SCLC National Magazine issue features you and President Charles Steele Jr. in front of the MLK Statue at the Georgia State Capital. “We collaborated to make it happen,” says Dr. Steele. Tyrone, what was your key role in making that statue a reality?

Tyrone Brooks: As a disciple of Dr. King, my job was to carry forth the legislation that would bring Dr. King’s statute to the state capitol. In December 2013, I pre-filed the legislation, and ironically that day, Martin Luther King III walked up to me at the front steps. I told him, I’m getting ready to introduce legislation that, if it ever passes, will bring a statue of your father and our leader to the grounds of this building. He looked at me and said “Really”?

The next week a reporter called and told me, “The governor is going to embrace your bill and he’s going to do it at Ebenezer Baptist Church on the MLK Holiday.” And the governor did. The legislation passed and Gov. Nathan Deal signed it in the Rotunda in May of 2014, and all of the SCLC family came. Right before then President Steele, Dr. Joseph Lowery, Rev. Albert Love, Rev. Samuel Mosteller, and all the great leaders had come to endorse the legislation under Dr. King’s portrait in the Capitol. So, that’s how it happened and, of course, the Capitol put Dr. King’s statute there in 2017.

ME: What is the significance and lasting impact of that King Statute? What does it mean today and forever?

TB: It is absolutely appropriate, and most significant, to have him on the Capitol grounds of this state more than any other place in the world because he was born in Atlanta. His house where he was born on Auburn Avenue is just a few blocks from the State Capitol. The other thing that touches me deeply, Maynard, is that after the assassination of Dr. King and after we came back from Memphis, as we marched on April 9 from Ebenezer past the Capitol, Gov. Lester Maddox ordered all the State Troopers to turn their backs on us; turn your backs on Martin Luther King, Jr. He wouldn’t allow us to bring Dr. King’s body inside the Capitol to lie in state so people could view his body That’s why it is so important to me.

I told Hosea Williams that, ‘One day we’ve got to bring Dr. King back to the Capitol.’ So now he is standing on Martin Luther King Jr. and Capitol Avenue looking toward Ebenezer Baptist Church and Auburn Avenue. So, now he’s back, and he will stand there, as long as the Capitol Building stands there.

ME: Speaking of the late Rev. Hosea Williams, it certainly seemed to many observers, including myself, that you two enjoyed a special relationship and kinship?

TB: Maynard, he was my second father! Moses Brooks Jr. from Warrington, GA is my biological father, that’s on my birth certificate, but as far as the public is concerned, they think Hosea Williams is my daddy because Hosea would walk around telling people that I was his son. He told [iconic Atlanta radio disc jockey] ‘Alley Pat’ Patrick that one day and ‘Alley Pat’ got on a live radio show said, ‘Hosea Williams is here in the studio with his son, Tyrone Brooks’, and I replied, I am his son in The Movement. But Hosea wanted everyone to think I was his son. Even his wife Juanita Williams, who later assumed his seat in the Georgia state legislature, looked at me one day and asked, ‘Are you and Hosea related? You two have the same mannerisms, you both like the same foods. I said, Juanita, I’ve been around him too long!

ME: Tyrone, looking back on your distinguished and multi-faceted career, should history remember you as politician or a civil rights leader and activist?

TB: DeMark Liggins, [SCLC’s Chief of Staff] said to me recently, ‘Tyrone, we’ve always viewed you as a civil rights warrior or a civil rights activist who just happened to be inside the body politic doing the civil rights work. We saw you going into politics at the State Capitol to carry on The Civil Rights Movement.’ I said, that’s exactly what [former SCLC President] Dr. Joseph Lowery used to say. That’s exactly what Dr. Ralph Abernathy and Rev. Joe Boone used to say. That’s what Hosea used to say. So, I want people to see me, Maynard, as a civil rights/human rights activist, and someone who is trying to fulfill the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr and other SCLC leaders who have followed him; but I don’t want them to ever consider me a politician. They can call me a public servant because that is part of my civil rights work. I spent 35 years in the body politic as an elected official, but my love has always been The Civil Rights Movement.

ME: Something that puzzles, and often troubles me is that when it comes to the infamous crossing of The Edmund Pettis Bridge in 1965, why does history give John Lewis more credit than “your daddy” Hosea Williams?

TB: We let the media take that and spin it in a way that’s inaccurate. If the late Rev. C.T. Vivian was sitting here right now, he would say let me set the record straight. C.T. would say, it was Hosea Williams there representing SCLC, and representing Dr. King. He was Dr. King’s agent there that day.

So many SCLC members have asked the question of how John Lewis got from Lowndes County to Selma? On the last Saturday in June of 2010, John Lewis came to our Georgia Association of Black Elected Officials [GABEO] convention and he articulated how he got to the bridge. He said Hosea was the leader. He had been kicked out of SNCC by Stokely Carmichael and he just came up to be with Hosea. He said, Hosea invited him to go from Brown Chapel AME to the bridge. I give John Lewis credit for coming to Savannah to really explain how he got there to be with Hosea on Bloody Sunday.

I think John just let the media take that, and spin it, and it just got out of control. John was never untruthful about how he got there. He always gave Hosea credit.

ME: Speaking of bridges, The Moore’s Ford Bridge civil rights crusade is dear to you. Why is that so significant, why should people care, and why are you so devoted to it.

TB: On July 25, 1946, when the Malcolm’s and Dorsey’s were lynched and brutally attacked before they died. Ms. Dorsey was seven months pregnant, and they cut the baby out her womb. So, Robert Malcolm, Dorothy Malcolm – and we named the baby, Justice in 2008 – and then you have George Dorsey, a retired military veteran who fought all around the world for his U.S. Army and his wife Mae Murray Dorsey.

Dr. King was a 17-year-old student at Morehouse when the lynching’s occurred. He was outraged and began to write letters about lynching’s in America. He was on a crusade at Morehouse. Dr. King launched a movement as a student around the same time that Dr. Charles Steele, and I were being born.

Then Hosea assigned me to Monroe, Ga in January of 1968 to go meet the undertaker who had buried the victims. His name was Dan Young. The first thing he asked me was ‘who’s with you’? He said, ‘you can’t drive over her by yourself. You are in the headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan.’ So, I got my warning from Dan Young about just how dangerous this project was.

We come to March 23, 1968, and we are in Macon, Ga. Dr. King, Dr. Abernathy, Hosea and all the great leaders are there promoting the Poor Peoples Campaign March to Washington. We heard Dr. King make a promise to Mr. Dan Young as they’re getting ready to go back to Memphis to be with the sanitation workers on their second march.

Dr. King said, ‘Dan, when Ralph and I finish helping the sanitation workers in Memphis, we are coming to Monroe to help you.’ And he told Hosea Williams to assign some staff ‘to be working as we come in.’ Hosea chose Willie Bolden and me. We were sent to Monroe, and that’s where we were on the day Dr. King was assassinated, April 4, 1968.

Maynard, this was a project that was assigned to me, and I have no other choice but to carry it forth.

We have proven that the Malcolm’s and Dorsey’s were lynched because they dared to vote in 1946. We have proven the fact that Gov. Eugene Talmadge, U.S. Senator Richard B. Russell, and others were complicit in organizing the lynch mob.