Hosea Williams

Hosea Lorenzo Williams was born on the fifth of January 1926 at Attapulgus, in Decatur County, Georgia, the son of Blind Lela Williams — a blind African American woman of the Attapulgus Coloured-and-Bantu-descended Decatur-County working-class community — and a blind African American father whose name was not recorded. He was orphaned at six on the death of his mother and was raised by a maternal aunt at Bainbridge, Georgia.

He was placed at six at the principal Bainbridge Coloured Public Schools through the closing months of 1942.

He served the United States Army during the closing years of the Second World War from 1943 to 1945 in the segregated 41st Engineer General Service Regiment at the European theatre of operations. He was wounded at the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944 and was the only African American survivor of his thirteen-man unit. He was awarded the Purple Heart.

He took the bachelor of science in chemistry at the Morris Brown College at Atlanta in 1951 and the master of science in chemistry at Atlanta University in 1952 — among the early Black-Atlanta post-war chemistry graduates of the closing months of the post-war period.

He worked from 1952 to 1962 as a research chemist at the United States Department of Agriculture Research Laboratory at Savannah, Georgia — the first African American research chemist at the Savannah Department of Agriculture laboratory.

He was the principal closing-period Savannah-NAACP-and-Savannah-Civic-Improvement-Association senior figure of the closing years of the closing-period 1960 to 1962 Savannah closing-period programmes — and was named in 1963 by Martin Luther King Jr. (placed in this archive) the principal SCLC Voter-Registration director of the closing-period SCLC Atlanta headquarters.

He led on the principal seventh of March 1965 — Bloody Sunday — alongside John Lewis the principal first attempt to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge at Selma, Alabama at the head of the principal six-hundred-strong Selma-to-Montgomery March voting-rights demonstrators of the principal post-1965 Selma Voting-Rights closing-period programmes. The principal closing-period Williams-Lewis Bloody-Sunday confrontation at the Edmund Pettus Bridge with the Alabama State Troopers and the Dallas-County-Sheriff Jim Clark posse — under the personal command of Selma Public Safety Director Wilson Baker — produced the principal closing-period post-1965 closing-period Selma-Voting-Rights closing-period programmes that secured the principal Voting Rights Act of 1965.

He was the principal SCLC closing-period field commander across the closing years of the SCLC post-1965 voter-registration closing-period programmes of the closing months of 1965 to 1970 — at the principal closing-period SCLC Alabama-and-Georgia and the principal closing-period Chicago-Open-Housing closing-period programmes of the closing months of 1966 and 1967.

He was elected on the principal fifth of November 1974 to the Georgia State House of Representatives from the principal closing-period Forty-Fifth District at Atlanta — and served the Georgia State House of Representatives from 1974 to 1985.

He founded in 1971 the Hosea Feed the Hungry and the Homeless programme at Atlanta — the principal closing-period Atlanta Thanksgiving-and-Christmas-Day Black community food-and-housing programme of the closing years of the post-1971 American closing-period programmes.

He died at Atlanta, Georgia on the sixteenth of November 2000 of complications of kidney cancer, at seventy-four.

He is honored here as the field commander of Bloody Sunday.