Hosea Williams was a lion of the Civil rights Movement. He was as Martin Luther King expressed it ‘his chief field lieutenant’.  When he needed a bull in a china closet to get things done he called on Hosea Williams. He could get things done. He was in charge of the Voter Registration for King’s famed Southern Christian Leadership Conference and later the organization’s Executive Director for two, two year terms. He would be the chief organizer of the St. Augustine Movement and the notorious Selma Movement. He was leading the Selma March across the Edmund Pettus Bridge when they were attacked in what was called ‘ Bloody Sunday’.  He was with King when he was assassinated in Memphis. He can be seen on the far left of the famous picture of King and his inner circle on the balcony of the hotel with King right before he was assassinated.   After King’s assassination he would continue to fight for civil rights for the rest of his life.

Williams was born in Attapulgus, Georgia to parents who as teenagers were committed to a trade institute for the blind in Macon. At the age of ten when his mother died he moved to Florida to be with his grandparents. But at fourteen fearing for his life after people became upset he had befriended a white girl he ran away from home. After several years of scrapping for a living he joined the Army. He would serve with an African-American unit under General George S. Patton. He rose to the rank of Staff Sergeant. He was injured in a Nazi bombing and his injuries were so severe he spent a year recuperating in Europe. He earned a Purple Heart.

After the war he came back to America. Freshly arrived from the war and dressed in his uniform he was beaten severely for drinking from a white’s only fountain. He was left for dead. A black funeral home hearse and driver came to pick up the body and on the way to the morgue noticed he was still alive. He had to be taken to a hospital a hundred miles away to find a hospital that would serve blacks. He spent over a month this time recuperating.

But Hosea who would create the slogan ‘Unbought and Unbossed’ for himself did not let any of this stop him. He earned a high school diploma at the age of 23. He earned a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in chemistry from Atlanta's Morris Brown College and Atlanta University. After graduation, he moved to Savannah to work for the United States Department of Agriculture as a research scientist. He would be the first black scientist to be hired by the government to work in the Deep South. It was here in Savannah for the next eleven years (from 1952 to 1963) that he would start his civil rights work.

He became known for his lectures on civil rights in the various squares of Savannah. He also came under the tutorship of Savannah’s great Civil Rights leader, W. W. Law, when he joined the local Savannah NAACP while Law was the director. He served as vice president under W. W. Law. Williams led marches and sit-ins to protest segregation in Savannah. These protest led to Savannah becoming the first city in Georgia with desegregated lunch counters. He also helped to integrate the Nancy Hanks the passenger train that people rode to Tybee Island.

In the summer of 1961 Williams took part in the campaign to register voters in Savannah. In 1963 he led protests by the Chatham County Crusade for Voters. He was arrested after several white citizens swore out peace warrants against him. Williams was jailed for sixty-five days, the longest continuous sentence served by any of the civil rights leaders. During the riots that followed his arrest, the Sears and Firestone stores in Savannah were burned. Mills B. Lane Jr., president of Citizens and Southern Bank and prominent white Savannahians, fearing for their city, formed a "Committee of 100" to secure Williams's release and to work on completing the desegregation of the city.

These efforts would be recognized by King who would come to Savannah to speak to assist in the effort. In 1962 King called Savannah the most integrated city in the South.  King saw in Williams a person he needed in his work. So he raised money to create a position as the Director of Voter Registration in the SCLC. King said in fund-raising letters that such a talent as Williams needed to be extended out from Savannah to the rest of the United States. 

After King died Williams would continue the struggle for civil rights. In 1974 he began a political career and was elected to the Georgia Senate where he served five terms as a Democrat, until 1984.  In 1985 he was elected to the Atlanta City Council and, served there for five years. In 1989, Williams successfully campaigned for a seat on the DeKalb County, Georgia County Commission which he held until 1994.

But Hosea did not stop there in 1971 he founded a non-profit foundation, Hosea Feed the Hungry and Homeless, widely known in Atlanta for providing hot meals, haircuts, and other services to the poor. He also served as pastor of King's People's Church of Love.

But he had a surprising flashback to the sixties movement during a "Brotherhood March" planned to honor Martin Luther King Jr. on the national King holiday in Forsyth County outside of Atlanta.  His ninety marchers were assaulted with stones and other objects by several hundred counter-demonstrators led by the Nationalist Movement and Ku Klux Klan. The public outrage led to 20,000 marchers, including Coretta Scott King, Atlanta mayor Andrew Young, and Jesse Jackson, and of course Hosea to march the very next weekend. They were protected by more than 2,000 National Guardsmen and police, in what became the state's largest civil rights demonstration.

With this show of force by Williams, he gave Forsyth County a list of demands that included fair employment, the return of property lost when blacks were expelled from the county by the Klan in 1912, and a biracial council. A jury later awarded $950,000 to the marchers in a class action suit filed by Williams against the Klan.

Hosea Williams would die in 2000. In 2001 the Georgia General Assembly passed a House Resolution honoring Hosea and Juanita Williams (his wife) and directing that a portrait of them be placed in the state capitol. This battering ram for social justice is one of the many folks who were forces that help change Savannah and our country into a more ‘civil’ place.

In every town there are the places or objects that carry a certain holiness to them. These are places and objects that are not only religious buildings but places that might be labeled secular too. Yet they are sites that hold a meaning that is greater than the site to its citizens. These places may change from time to time but they usually endure for decades if not centuries with a special quality to them.

One of the monuments of Savannah that held meaning to the citizens of Savannah is the old Exchange Bell. The bell was rung as a call for the ending of the work day. It was rung on special occasions such as when a president visited.  It was rung when ships that were late and thought that they may have been lost are first seen sailing up the Savannah River. Its rich tones were heard in celebration of American victories during the War of 1812. It was rung to call citizens up to fight a fire. It was rung to announce city council meetings. It was involved in the daily ritual of the citizens and was the harbinger of great events in the life of the citizens. As Savannah grew it no longer was possible to hold the local newspaper, city government, and customs staff in one building. The Exchange Building became obsolete and was torn down to make way for the gold domed City Hall we now have. We also saw the building of a Customs House across from the new city hall and the newspaper too built.

But in the tearing down of the Exchange Building the question was raised what to do with the Exchange Bell. No one wanted to see this bell leave the public life. This bell’s historic significance was it was the oldest in Georgia. It was constructed in 1802. It was imported from Amsterdam and hung in the City Exchange Tower in 1804. But its prominence in the hearts of Savannah was even more important. 

In 1902 with the destruction of the City Exchange Building the Bell was acquired by the Rourke Iron Works, where it hung until 1940, but the tower holding the bell came down in a hurricane. When the tower fell the bell could have passed into obscurity but Walter L. Mingledorff acquired it, and gave it to the Chamber of Commerce.

It was decided that they would create a replica of the old Exchange belfry to be constructed on Bay Street, just east of the old Cotton Exchange Building. The replica of the tower in which the historic bell presently reposes was erected in 1957 through the combined efforts of the Savannah Chamber of Commerce, the Pilot Club of Savannah and the Savannah-Chatham Historic Site and Monument Commission. The new monument was to memorialize to Mabel Clair Speth Hand, first president of the Pilot Club of Savannah (1932-4) and president of Pilot International (1935-6) who was influential in seeing the project through.

The bell stands today as a monument to communication before cell phones and emails. It stands as a treasured artifact that the citizens of Savannah could not let pass into oblivion.

Rebecca Stiles Taylor was one of Savannah’s early civil rights leader. She was born in Savannah in 1879. Reconstruction had ended in 1877 when President Rutherford B. Hayes, in a bargain to attain the presidency, agreed to withdraw Federal troops from the South if Southern states granted him enough delegates to win his presidential election. They did. The world of Jim Crow was gaining strength by the time she was a teenager. Freed slaves were now under a new regime. But this would only stiffen her resolve to see change in the world of her fellow black citizens.  
Taylor went to school at the Beach Institute here in Savannah and college a Atlanta University. She later also attended Hampton Institute and Columbia University. She was a well-educated woman. While in Savannah she started writing for a local newspaper. It was here her voice was first heard on racial issues and civil rights. She was the first woman to become a Probation Officer in Savannah. She wrote a letter to southerner and President Woodrow Wilson asking him to address lynching in the South. Remarkably, he soon after made a strong condemnation of lynching in the South.
Her journalism skills were quickly recognized and the legendary Chicago Defender hired her as journalist. She would be one of the few women journalists for the paper. She would work there from 1937-1953. Her writings soon put her on a national stage as a voice against racial segregation and for civil rights. She wrote a weekly column, “Activities of Women’s National Organizations”, during the war time in order to keep the readers up to date about women’s organizations across the country. This column helped her to organize the National Association of Colored Women. She led the Savannah Chapter of the National Association of Colored Women’s Club, which provided the means to open a nursing home, a home for girls, and two free health clinics. In 1917 she founded the Toussaint L’Ouverture Branch of the American Red Cross.
She joined hand in hand with Mary McLeod Bethune to organize the entire Southeastern Region of the National Association of Colored Women’s Club in 1919, assuming the position of corresponding secretary and president of the Association's Georgia State Federation. She was convinced of the power of women to better the lives of everyone. She wrote:
‘It is the duty of the Negro woman to join hands with the women of the world ... to bring about a better order of things. The white woman has only two battle fronts-rousing her women and educating her men. The Negro woman has a harder fight to arouse her women, a harder fight to inject manhood into her men while she educates them, and the hardest of all fights to educate her government and the entire world to see her as a HUMAN BEING deserving of the rights and privileges accorded her under the constitution of the government.’
 She died in 1958. She lived long enough to see Rosa Parks in 1955 refuse to sit in the back of the bus, an act that started the Civil Rights Movement. She probably smiled to herself at the time, ladies now that is what I’m talking about. Taylor was inducted into the Georgia Women of Achievement in 2014.
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