Unbought and Unbossed:

SISTERS: L-R Actress Elizabeth Omilami, and scholar Barbara Emerson are two of Hosea Williams’ eight children. Omilami has carried on his work of feeding poor and homeless people in Atlanta, serving thousands at Easter, Christmas and Thanksgiving. (Mary Silver/The Epoch Times)

ATLANTA—Martin Luther King called him “My wild man.” His slogan was “unbought and unbossed,” and he wore bib overalls and red tennis shoes to show his kinship with poor country people.

His daughter Barbara Emerson called him “the other guy on the Edmund Pettus Bridge,” standing next to John Lewis at the beginning of Bloody Sunday on March 7, 1965 in Selma, Alabama. Hosea Williams was a chemist, a military veteran, a city councilman, a state representative, a minister, a world traveler. He was a DUI offender. “He had a good time in that juke joint on Auburn Avenue on Friday night,” said his daughter, Elizabeth Omilami. “Don’t judge him. Try to be more like him.’

Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History got his papers, which were in attics, storage spaces, basements and trunks. Archivist Kerrie Cotten Williams worked for four years to rescue and organize thousands of pictures and documents. They will be significant for scholars, she said. A selection went on display for the first time starting Sunday, November 16. The library is joining the Digital Library of Georgia to digitize all the papers.

Xernona Clayton, CEO of the Trumpet Awards Foundation, spoke at the exhibit opening. She promised to tell the audience something they did not know. She said when Martin Luther King got the Nobel Prize, Williams was excited, because he had been working for free and expected to see some cash for his family from the $25,000 award check. He had eight children.

King insisted on giving all the money away. Williams was angry and disappointed, but he “lived the philosophy of Martin Luther King more than anybody,” said Clayton. She said Williams was sacrificial, put on earth to bring light to dark places, to lift the veil of ignorance.

After the peak of the civil rights movement, Williams started feeding the hungry, first by simply giving a sandwich to a homeless man on the street. “The man was magnificent.” People gossiped about his motives, said Clayton. “Well so what. If people are hungry you feed them.”

Elizabeth Omilami kept Hosea Feed the Hungry and Homeless going after her father’s death in 2000. After Clayton’s keynote speech, she said she knew what he would say. “He would be wondering what about the people in the city of Atlanta right now, who are passing ordinances saying we can’t feed the homeless… Would he say we have come so far because we look so pretty and dress up so nice, when there are still fifteen thousand people homeless in Atlanta?”

“He would still bow his head, he would weep, and say we still have so far to go,” said Omilami.