Hosea Williams as a Founding Father of A Better America By: Rolundus R. Rice
The Rev. Hosea Williams is an anomalous figure who is both known and unknown in the historiography of the Black freedom struggle. I was perplexed when I approached the prospect of writing my dissertation on Williams as a Ph.D. student at Auburn University to my adviser. Dr. David Carter. Carter and I plowed through hundreds of books in the historiography of the civil rights movement to confirm our initial observations about the lack of ink that scholars had devoted to the fiery and bombastic agitator from Attapulgus, Georgia. Historians had relegated Hosea Williams to a few paragraphs or to a footnote to the pages of what had been otherwise solid treatments that examined civil rights agitation in the United States post the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. Some of the most celebrated historians of the period have chosen to give only scant and fragmentary attention to Williams’ contributions to civil rights before and beyond his fifteen-career with the local Savannah affiliate and national Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) from 1963-1979, and no author, prior to this writing, had attempted a scholarly biographical treatment of his life. A few scholars and some of Williams’s contemporaries recognized the old warhorse’s contributions to the Black freedom struggle. According to David Garrow, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, “in the 1964-1965 timeframe, Hosea was as valuable as anyone in SCLC to Dr. King because of his courage and willingness to lead dangerous demonstrations…People may remember Andy Young and John Lewis, but…Hosea was just as important to the movement.” John Lewis, a founder of SNCC who participated in the Freedom Rides and marched shoulder-to-shoulder with Williams on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on “Bloody Sunday,” called the fiery activist an authentic hero. ‘’Hosea Williams must be looked upon as one of the founding fathers of the new America,’’ he said. ‘’Through his actions, he helped liberate all of us.’’ Joseph Lowery, a founder of the SCLC and Williams’ former boss who fired him as Executive Director of the SCLC in 1979, portrayed the old warhorse of the movement as fearless. ‘’Hosea wasn’t afraid of Goliath,’’ he said. ‘’In fact, I was thinking about it, and I don’t think there anything he was scared of.’’ He said Williams tackled ‘’the Goliaths of greed and indifference’’ that created a permanent underclass. Williams has been portrayed as courageous, fearless, and integral to the modern Civil Rights Movement. However, few scholars stopped shy of recognized that Williams was actively
SCLC National Magazine/ King 2022 Issue
17
