Hosea Williams

Hosea Lorenzo Williams was born on January 5, 1926, in Attapulgus, Decatur County, Georgia. His parents were young and unmarried, both blind, and had been sent to a trade institute for the blind in Macon; his mother died giving birth to a second child while Hosea was still a boy. He was raised by his maternal grandparents, Lela and Turner Williams, in the rural Jim Crow South, a childhood shadowed by poverty and the ever-present threat of racial violence.

As a young man he served in the United States Army during World War II under General George S. Patton, was gravely wounded in an enemy attack, and survived a long recovery in a European hospital. Returning home, he earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Morris Brown College and a master's degree from Atlanta University, then worked as a research chemist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Savannah — a rare professional standing for a Black man of his era.

Williams gave that standing to the freedom struggle. He rose through the NAACP and the Southeastern Georgia Crusade for Voters, joined Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and became its most fearless field commander. On March 7, 1965 — "Bloody Sunday" — he and John Lewis led marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma and were beaten by state troopers, an act of witness that helped force the Voting Rights Act. He was at King's side in Memphis in 1968.

He later served in the Georgia legislature, the Atlanta City Council, and as a DeKalb County commissioner, and founded Hosea Feed the Hungry and Homeless to clothe and feed the poor. He died in Atlanta on November 16, 2000. A soldier, a scientist, and a servant of his people, Hosea Williams walked into danger so that others might one day walk free.