Foreword / Ambassador Andrew Young Jr. -- "Little Turner", World War II, and Atlanta -- "The defiant house nigger" -- Savannah's rebellious "Negro chieftain" -- "King's Kamikaze" : St. Augustine and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 -- Selma and the Voting Rights Act, 1965 -- SCOPE, SNCC, and black power, 1965-1966 -- Chicago, the Kentucky Derby, and the Poor People's Campaign -- The movement continues, 1968-1974 -- Politics, prosecution, and persecution, 1975-1984 -- "I'm and opportunist", 1985-2000 -- Hosea Williams's family tree.
Summary:
"Rolundus Rice offers the first scholarly biography of civil rights leader Hosea Lorenzo Williams. When Williams died in in 2000, John Lewis said of him, "Hosea Williams must be looked upon as one of the founding fathers of the new America. Thorough his actions, he helped liberate all of us." Rice's work brings to the fore the significant role that Williams played in a way that previous studies have not. While Williams has been forgotten by scholars, Rice argues that his story is more important than is typically acknowledged. Whereas Williams generally appears as a secondary figure within studies of other movement leaders, Rice provides a full examination of his life and career. This biographical treatment illuminates the entire landscape of the civil rights movement from a different vantage point, broadening the familiar geography and chronology of the Black Freedom Struggle even as it complicates our understanding of better-chronicled events and civil rights campaigns. Hosea Williams's activism in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was of central importance to the success of the larger movement. Williams's role in pressuring municipal, state, and federal government officials to ensure that African Americans' social, political, and economic rights were fully guaranteed yielded notable victories in Savannah, Georgia, St. Augustine, Florida, Selma, Alabama, and elsewhere. His tactical innovations, most notably the pioneering use of night marches, were vital to the success of several local campaigns. Williams's reputation as SCLC leader Martin Luther King Jr.'s "hammer" made him the SCLC's most effective leveraging tool during the 1960s. Hostile southern Whites resistant to change grudgingly made concessions to the SCLC if the organization agreed to withdraw Williams from their cities. This paved the way for Andrew Young, King's soft-spoken diplomat, to negotiate favorable settlements with city officials. Rice argues that Williams's grit and tactical genius, his motivational skills and ability to cultivate a reputation as one "unbossed and unbought" were critical to the success of the SCLC and the broader civil rights movement. He traces Williams's journey from the obscure periphery to the vital center of the most successful nonviolent revolution in American history, and later his effective erasure from the popular memory of that movement. Williams's story provides valuable insights into the long civil rights movement and parallels the trajectory of the modern civil rights movement, from its origins in grassroots activism to more national campaigns of the 1960s and beyond. Of particular importance is the light that Rice's biography sheds on the evolution of the Savannah movement. The civil rights movement in the South was largely built around activism in individual cities. While some of those campaigns are well-chronicled (Montgomery; Selma), others like Savannah are much less understood. Rice shows how the growth of the Savannah Movement during the 1950s and its sustained persistence in the early 1960s makes it one of the most dynamic and successful local movements of the era. This is just one facet of the of the movement that a close study of Hosea Williams helps to reveal. While magisterial studies by historians such as Adam Fairclough and David Garrow have done much to explore the inner workings of SCLC, Rice's account, focused as it is on Williams and bolstered by personal accounts from Williams and others near to him, offers a layered perspective that adds to these more King-centric narratives"-- Provided by publisher. "When civil rights leader Hosea Lorenzo Williams died in 2000, U.S. Congressman John Lewis said of him, "Hosea Williams must be looked upon as one of the founding fathers of the new America. Through his actions, he helped liberate all of us."In this first comprehensive biography of Williams, Rolundus Rice demonstrates the truth in Lewis's words and argues that Williams's activism in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was of central importance to the success of the larger civil rights movement. Rice traces Williams's journey from a local activist in Georgia to a national leader and one of Martin Luther King Jr.'s chief lieutenants. He helped plan the Selma-to-Montgomery march and walked shoulder-to-shoulder with Lewis across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on "Bloody Sunday." While his hard-charging tactics were counter to the diplomatic approach of other SCLC leaders, Rice argues that it was this contrast in styles that made the organization successful.Andrew Young Jr., former SCLC executive director, U.S. Congressman, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, and mayor of Atlanta, provides a foreword"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.