Hosea Williams: A Lifetime of Defiance and Protest by Rolundus R. Rice

Abstract

Reviewed by: Hosea Williams: A Lifetime of Defiance and Protest by Rolundus R. Rice Anthony Siracusa Hosea Williams: A Lifetime of Defiance and Protest. By Rolundus R. Rice. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. xviii, 394. Paper, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-64336-257-1; cloth, $89.99, ISBN 978-1-64336-256-4.) In his biography of Hosea Williams, Rolundus R. Rice documents the man Martin Luther King Jr. relied on as a field organizer in key campaigns throughout the 1960s. Rice’s telling is largely a favorable one, arguing that Williams’s “campaigns helped to create and maintain pressure on the White House, Congress, and the federal courts, and [that] the resulting legislation and court rulings did more to topple the barriers of Jim Crow in a relatively brief period than anything in the century since emancipation and Reconstruction” (pp. 3–4). But Rice rightly balances this description of Williams by calling him a “a con man with convictions,” noting that Williams described himself as neither a conservative nor a liberal but an “opportunist” (p. 297). Chapters 1 and 2 focus on Williams’s early life and career, while the third chapter recounts his leadership in the Savannah freedom movement of the early 1960s. It was in Savannah that Williams introduced the “night marches,” a mass mobilization tactic designed to place additional pressure on local white power structures (p. 71). Williams’s work in Savannah put him on the radar of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and chapters 4–7 focus on his work with King’s organization. This section of the book is built around an analysis of Williams’s leadership of the 1964 campaign in Selma, Alabama. Notably, King told Williams to call off the famous “Bloody Sunday” march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, but Williams and his colleague John Lewis went ahead with the plan after fellow SCLC staffer James Bevel deceived them into thinking that King had changed his mind. The book breaks new ground in covering Williams’s work after King’s death in 1968, most notably Williams’s role in the Poor People’s Campaign, which took him to Charleston, South Carolina, Daytona Beach, Florida, and Columbus, Georgia. Williams criticized King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, for “prostituting” her husband’s legacy by fund-raising for the King Center in Atlanta in the years after his death (p. 238). But this tension between Coretta Scott King and Williams is not sufficiently explored in the book, with Rice instead opting to let Williams’s words tell the story. This approach reveals a larger problem, as Rice does little to explain how sex and gender influenced the movement, Williams, or male senior SCLC staff members. [End Page 187] Numerous scholars of the movement have chronicled Ella Baker’s discontent and resignation from the SCLC after serving as co-founder and president, as well as the fact that King kept his family in near poverty throughout his public life. His choice to split the more than $54,000 he received for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 among civil rights groups, and other similar choices, inflicted real hardship on his wife and children—challenges that became acute when King was murdered in Memphis. Such context would have been helpful in presenting Williams’s demeaning comments about King’s widow, and the absence of a deeper analysis of sex and gender dynamics in the book—just like the absence of women in positions of leadership at the SCLC—is notable. The last portion of the book is dedicated to Williams’s life as an elected official. In 1974, Williams was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives, where he served ten years before leaving that office and running—successfully—for chair of the Atlanta city council in 1985. Williams then won a DeKalb County commission seat in 1990 before retiring from politics in 1994, a fitting end to a career defined by a passion for political education and voter mobilization. At 325 pages, the book is detailed in its treatment of a figure central to the heroic era of the civil rights movement, and it is helpful as a resource for understanding the...