Celebrity Deathwatch: Hosea Williams, Civil Rights Activist, 74

["Deathwatch Central" <cdw@slick.org>]

http://www.cnn.com/2000/US/11/16/hosea.williams.02/

Hosea Williams, dead at 74, kept up fight for rights

November 16, 2000
Web posted at: 7:32 p.m. EST (0032 GMT)

>From staff and wire reports

ATLANTA, Georgia -- Hosea Williams, who died Thursday after a long illness,
was on the front lines of the civil rights struggle for four decades.

Williams, 74, died at Atlanta's Piedmont Hospital, where he was being
treated for an infection since October 20, hospital spokeswoman Nina
Montanaro said.

Inspired by Martin Luther King Jr., Williams and John Lewis organized the
"Bloody Sunday" march in Selma, Alabama, that left more than 80 people
injured. The police violence that day led to the passage of the Voting
Rights Act of 1965.

He would later retrace his steps across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and say
afterward: "I was thinking about how we suffered, how we bled, how we were
brutalized -- how Dr. King told us that the sweetest walk was to that ballot
box, and we made that walk."

Williams was by King's side in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, when
King was assassinated.

He served as a national executive for the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference; pastor of King's People's Church of Love, Inc.; Georgia state
representative; Atlanta councilman and county commissioner. He also operated
a chemical company that specialized in cleaning supplies and a bonding
company.

Williams received national attention once again in 1987 for a march in
Forsyth County, Georgia. Williams and others marching for integration were
pelted with rocks from an angry crowd. Williams, undaunted, returned for a
more peaceful march.

He was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1997 and had a cancerous kidney
removed in October 1999. After the surgery, he underwent a series of
chemotherapy treatments.

A runaway at 14
Williams said in interviews that he left home about age 14 because of
wanderlust and local outrage at his alleged relationship with a white girl.

He held odd jobs across north Florida and worked for a time as a shill for a
gambler who plied the citrus camps.

He wound up in the Army, was badly wounded in Europe and returned to
Georgia, where he was beaten bloody while trying to use a whites-only
drinking fountain at a bus station in Americus.

During the next five weeks in a military hospital, he recalled, he kept
thinking he had fought "on the wrong side."

Williams later finished high school and Morris Brown College and taught
chemistry briefly.

He joined the civil rights movement full-time in 1962 while living in
Savannah, Georgia. He recalled his children crying in a Savannah drugstore
when he told them they could not join white children spinning on soda
counter stools because of segregation laws.

King's advance man
Williams became King's advance man throughout the South in the 1960s.

In the ensuing years, he retained the mentality that carried him through the
often-bloody '60s.

Williams retired from politics in 1994, but managed to stay in the public
eye through his holiday dinners for the poor, which fed thousands each year,
and through '60s-style symbolic gestures, such as jailhouse fasts or camping
out atop King's tomb.

In 1977, he was ousted as executive director of the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference by then-President Joseph Lowery in a power struggle.
Officially, the reason was that he was not devoted full time to the job. It
took a court order to get Williams to vacate his office.

He was arrested twice on charges of trying to carry a gun aboard an
airliner. One charge was dropped, and Williams pleaded no contest to the
other.

Williams' wife, Juanita Williams, died August 23 from a form of anemia at
the age of 75. Their son, Hosea Williams II, was 43 when he died of a rare
form of leukemia in 1998

CNN Correspondent Catherine Callaway and The Associated Press contributed to
this report.

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