Hosea Lorenzo Williams (January 5, 1926 –
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#blacklivesstillmatter #blackmen #blackpeople #blackamerican #police #whitepeople #whitedevil #blackhistory #blackcivilrightsleaders #blackactivists #blackordainedministers #blackministers #blackbusinessmen #blackmastodon
November 16, 2000) was [a Black] American civil rights leader, activist, ordained minister, businessman, philanthropist, scientist, and politician. He was considered a member of famed civil
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#blackbusinesspeople #blackphilanthropists #blackscientists #blackpoliticians
rights activist and… Martin Luther King Jr.'s inner circle. Under the banner of their flagship organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King depended on Williams to organize and stir masses of people into nonviolent direct action in myriad protest
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campaigns they waged against racial, political, economic, and social injustice. King alternately referred to Williams, his chief field lieutenant, as his "bull in a china shop" and his "Castro." Vowing to continue King's work for the poor, Williams is well known in
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his own right as the founding president of one of the largest social services organizations in North America, Hosea Feed the Hungry and Homeless. His famous motto was "Unbought and Unbossed."
Background
…Both of his parents were teenagers committed to a trade institute
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for the blind in Macon. His mother ran away from the institute upon learning of her pregnancy. At the age of 28, Williams stumbled upon his birth father, "Blind" Willie Wiggins, by accident in Florida. His mother died during childbirth when he was 10 years old. He and his
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older sister, Theresa, were raised by his mother's parents, Lelar and Turner Williams. Williams was run out of town by a lynch mob at the age of 13 for allegedly consorting with a white girl.
Williams served with the United States Army during World War II in an
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all Black American unit under General George S. Patton Jr. and advanced to the rank of Staff Sergeant. He was the only survivor of a Nazi bombing, which left him in a hospital in Europe for more than a year and earned him a Purple Heart. Upon his return home from the war,
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Williams was savagely beaten by a group of angry whites at a bus station for drinking from a water fountain marked "[whites] Only." He was beaten so badly that the attackers thought he was dead. They called a Black funeral home in the area to pick up the body. En route to
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the funeral home, the hearse driver noticed Williams had a faint pulse and was barely breathing, but was still alive. There were no hospitals in the area that would serve [Black People], even in the case of a medical emergency; the trip to the nearest veterans' hospital
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was well over a hundred miles. Williams spent more than a month hospitalized recuperating from injuries sustained in the attack.
Of the attack, Williams was quoted as saying, "I was deemed 100 percent disabled by the military and required a cane to walk. My wounds had
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earned me a Purple Heart. The war had just ended and I was still in my uniform for God's sake! But on my way home, to the brink of [execution], they beat me like a common dog. The very same people whose freedoms and liberties I had fought and suffered to secure in the
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horrors of war ... they beat me like a dog ... merely because I wanted a drink of water." He went on to say, "I had watched my best buddies tortured, killed, and bodies blown to pieces. The French battlefields had literally been stained with my blood and fertilized with the rot of my loins. So at that moment, I truly felt as if I had fought on the wrong side.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosea_Williams
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Audubon Ballroon (he/him)