Cancer kills civil-rights pioneer Hosea Williams

By Erin Texeira

Los Angeles Times

Hosea Williams, the straight-talking, uncompromising civil-rights leader who led 1965's pivotal "Bloody Sunday" march and was one of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s most influential field representatives, died of cancer yesterday. He was 74.

Mr. Williams, whom King referred to as "my wild man, my Castro," was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1997 and had a kidney removed last year. He was being treated for an infection at Atlanta's Piedmont Hospital.

"A great warrior has fallen," said Julian Bond, chairman of the board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). "Among everything else, Hosea Williams was an organizer and an agitator. Today's activists have much to learn from his life. We will not soon see his like again."

Mr. Williams was among the handful of Southern Christian Leadership Conference organizers accompanying King when he was assassinated in 1968 in Memphis.

In his later years, the chemist, Baptist minister and self-described rebel held several local and state political offices in Georgia.

In an extension of his and King's push to make poverty a civil-rights issue, he spent 30 years organizing thousands of free meals for homeless people in Atlanta. He also ran several chemical companies that made cleaning supplies.

Mr. Williams was often celebrated and sometimes ostracized in civil-rights circles for freely speaking his mind. In recent years, he criticized King's family for profiting off his legacy. In 1980, he infuriated many when he blasted President Carter's "history of broken promises" and endorsed Republican nominee Ronald Reagan for the presidency.

"He didn't always follow the plan," said the Rev. Joseph Lowery, a longtime friend who worked--and sometimes argued--with Mr. Williams.

Born Jan. 5, 1926, in Attapulgus, Ga., he was the illegitimate son of a blind girl who fled a state training school when she discovered she was pregnant. He was reared by his grandfather, whom he described as a tough man who had killed at least three people, including one on church steps on a Sunday morning.

An Army staff sergeant during World War II, he was wounded by shrapnel in Germany before returning home to face intense segregation. Beaten bloody when he tried to use a "Whites Only" water fountain, he also faced a growing sense of his own activism.

He often told the story of taking his two young sons to a segregated drugstore and facing their tears as he explained why they would not be served. "I started crying because I realized I couldn't tell them the truth," he said in the civil-rights book "My Soul is Rested" by Howell Raines. "I guess I made them a promise I'd bring them back someday."

Years later, he did. "That was one of the happiest days of my life," Mr. Williams said in "The Way It Was in the South."

After graduating from Morris Brown College in Atlanta with a degree in chemistry, he taught at a segregated high school and became a research chemist. He also agitated against segregated schools and lunch counters in Savannah, Ga. By the early 1960s, he had attracted King's notice and support.

Mr. Williams' wife, Juanita Williams, whom he married in the early 1950s, died Aug. 23 of anemia at age 75. A son, Hosea Williams II, was 43 when he died of a rare form of leukemia in 1998. He is survived by two other sons and four daughters.