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Prophet Without Honor: Hosea Williams and the Anomalies of the Black Freedom Struggle


Metadata FieldValueLanguage
dc.contributor.advisorCarter, Daviden_US
dc.contributor.authorRice, Rolundusen_US
dc.date.accessioned2015-05-18T13:44:01Z
dc.date.available2015-05-18T13:44:01Z
dc.date.issued2015-05-18
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10415/4658
dc.description.abstractExamining the life of civil rights activist Hosea Lorenzo Williams’s life 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 understanding of better-chronicled events and civil rights campaigns. By any measure Hosea Williams’s activism in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was of central importance to the success of the larger movement, but for complicated reasons that might be boiled down to a question of historical “palatability” his role has for too long been eclipsed in the historiography of the 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 “kamikaze” 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 embattled cities. This paved the way for Andrew Young, King’s soft-spoken diplomat, and others like him, to negotiate favorable settlements with city officials. 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 Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the broader civil rights movement. Peering through the biographical prism of a subaltern who moved from the obscure periphery to the vital center of the most successful nonviolent revolution in human history – only to be effectively erased historically from collective memory of that movement – affords valuable insights into the long civil rights movement and the profound challenges of racism and economic inequality that still remain to be overcome.en_US
dc.rightsEMBARGO_GLOBALen_US
dc.subjectHistoryen_US
dc.titleProphet Without Honor: Hosea Williams and the Anomalies of the Black Freedom Struggleen_US
dc.typeDissertationen_US
dc.embargo.lengthMONTHS_WITHHELD:80en_US
dc.embargo.statusEMBARGOEDen_US
dc.embargo.enddate2021-12-31en_US
dc.contributor.committeeGrimsley, Reaganen_US
dc.contributor.committeeIsrael, Charlesen_US
dc.contributor.committeeJortner, Adamen_US

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