Nation: I Expect More Jacksons

Seven years ago, Hosea Williams, the son of a Georgia dirt farmer, gave up a $14,000-a-year job with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (“I was a very., very good chemist”) to join Martin Luther King Jr. Williams has since become one of the country’s leading civil rights leaders. He was field marshal for the Meredith Mississippi march and the march from Selma to Montgomery, as well as last week’s march to Atlanta. TIME Correspondent Peter Range kept pace with him for a time last week as Williams bitterly talked about the events at Augusta, Ga., and Jackson, Miss., and the mood of the civil rights movement in their wake:

I ACTUALLY believe, right now, this is a new day. A new day because we who have been in the movement a decade find ourselves with the realization that we are not free. We’re not looking for new gains. We find ourselves struggling to maintain the gains we made over the years. Our intent was to participate in the mainstream of American life. The results just have not been there.

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Augusta and Jackson State, from the evidence that I see now, are really bringing the black community in the South closer together. And I see something now growing out of these atrocities and resulting in a much more militant black community. I also envision a shift of the main battleground of civil rights from the North back to the South. I never did buy the Northern move. I was the only executive on Dr. King’s staff that he never did get up North, and I say today, the only chance that the young Northerners have, both black and white, lies in what happens in the South. Because white people basically thought they were free until they got involved with trying to help black people get their freedom−then they found out they weren’t free either.

The Nixon Administration is responsible for the problem today. Take voters’ rights. Nixon has attempted to destroy it [the Voting Rights Act of 1965]. The bill he was putting up, claiming he wanted to equalize the franchise across the nation, was actually trying to destroy that which gave us the Stokeses, the black sheriffs, while at the same time defeating the Jim Clarks and throwing a scare into men like Herman Talmadge and Mendel Rivers. It is very evident that Nixon does not intend for us to be able to utilize the truth of the courts that we have used in the past.

The march today is the beginning of a new era. We are using old techniques with the expectation of new results. People have got to get that ballot and use it. That’s going to be our main thrust this summer. But first we have to get the people out. We wanted to get people to Atlanta on Saturday, but they wouldn’t come because of fear. So we’re undergoing an educational process. You know, after the voting-rights bill was passed, the only place where people crowded up by the thousands to register was in Alabama−because of the educational process that took place on the Selma-to-Montgomery march. Mississippi rid itself of much fear in the Meredith march. Now we’re trying to do the same thing in Georgia.

Only this time, we’re not going to make the same mistakes. In the past, we registered people and then forgot to educate them. We found out that if you educate an electorate, not only will they register, they’ll raise hell and vote. In order to get them to vote, you have got to spend the same amount of resources and energy.

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I definitely expect more Jacksons or Augustas this summer in the South. Right now, at this stage of the game, nonviolence still works better than violence, but I wouldn’t want to gamble on the next decade. If it turned out to be the only effective method, I wouldn’t have anything against violence. The new black awareness has brought about new self-respect, a new dignity. It’s been just rhetoric in the past, this “Give me liberty or give me death.” But it’s a fact with blacks now; they mean that and they live it.