There was almost no sign of the hardscrabble beginnings of the annual Hosea Helps holiday dinner on Thanksgiving in Downtown Atlanta. Little to remind of an era when turkeys were reported stolen days before the event and the founder would plead for donations.
Williams knew his way around the public stage. He used those skills to nurture the “Feed the Homeless” event on Thanksgiving. Even when the cupboards must have been bare. He started the Hosea Feed the Hungry and Homeless program on a shoestring in 1971.
It seems that a week or so before Thanksgiving, Hosea – everyone called him Hosea – would gather the media to say the turkeys planned for the meal had been stolen. There was no telling who would take food from the mouths of the homeless. But it had happened. Hosea would lament that without a major donation, the event wouldn’t recognize the community’s “least of these” as human beings.
Former state Rep. Billy McKinney, an Atlanta Democrat, often chuckled when he’d talk about Williams’ latest plea for donations of turkeys.
And every year, it seemed, a corporate benefactor would step forward to donate a trailer-load of turkeys. Crisis and empty stomachs were averted once again.
It was the kind of feat that illustrates the waning days of the old guard of the modern civil rights movement.
For Williams was the old guard.
Williams is one of three men pictured with the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, in Memphis, the day before King was assassinated there on April 4, 1968.
“It was also in 1963 that Williams joined the SCLC at the urging of King, the organization’s president. Two years later King asked Williams and John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to lead a march from Selma, Alabama, to the state’s capital, Montgomery. The goal of the march was to peacefully deliver to Alabama governor George C. Wallace a petition for African American voting rights.
The protest on March 7, 1965, became known as “Bloody Sunday” after several hundred marchers, including Lewis and Williams, were beaten with clubs and whips and fired upon with tear gas while crossing Selma’s Edmund Pettis Bridge.
The journey of the Thanksgiving dinner has taken it to the Georgia World Congress Center, where thousands gathered in Building B from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Along with a hot meal they saw live entertainment, had the chance to receive health check-ups and tests for various illnesses, clothing, personal hygiene. And the chance to be seen as human beings.