Elisabeth Williams-Omilami knows the high price of serving others. She's literally been paying it for almost all 65 years of her life. As the daughter of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s iconic field general Hosea Williams, a pivotal leader of the Bloody Sunday march on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965, struggle has been a constant frenemy.
“I was 8 and 9 when I was going to jail and we were singing freedom songs in the jail and they were passing out sandwiches,” she recalls. Other civil rights leaders kept their kids away from the fire. Not her father. He put his children right in the frying pan at very young ages. “My sister went to jail on my mom’s back,” Williams-Omilami says. She was just 3.
The Ku Klux Klan took care of the rest with Williams-Omilami recalling her first cross burning at just age 5 or 6. It was at their home in Savannah, where the family lived when her father became the Department of Agriculture’s first black chemist in the Southeast.
Still of the five children Hosea Williams and his wife, Juanita Terry Williams (a librarian by profession who served as a state representative in Georgia from 1985 to 1993), would have of their own, only Williams-Omilami answered the call. Since 2000, the year her father passed, Williams-Omilami has run Hosea Helps (http://4hosea.org), formerly known as Hosea Feed the Hungry, which her father founded in 1971. She's supported in the endeavor by her husband, Afemo, who serves as chief operating officer.
As well as feeding the homeless on major holidays, Hosea Helps provides a variety of services year-round.
Entering 2017, Williams-Omilami is looking at her organization possibly being homeless itself. “We need people to know that we are in desperate need of a location, that our building (at Donnelly in the West End of Atlanta) was bought out from under us and we’d been there for at least 26 years,” she shares.
For now, they will rent their current space month to month beginning in March and then should have six months at the current rent as they look for a large warehouse building with freezer and refrigerator space as well as office and chapel spaces. They plan to launch a building campaign in January and to hold a town hall meeting in February to discuss the future of Hosea Helps.
There was a time Williams-Omilami would never have believed that she would follow in her father’s footsteps. “My father and I had an adversarial relationship,” she admits while seated in her office of the renovated home on East Lake where she lived as a teen that now serves as Hosea Helps’ headquarters. While attending Boggs Academy, a black boarding school in Keysville, near Augusta, she fell in love with drama and decided she would become an actress. Her father’s response: “With all these important things going on in the world, you’re telling me you want to be an actress?”
Ironically, Mao Zedong, communist China’s founding father, slightly softened Williams’ stance. During his international travels following King’s assassination, Williams was impressed with how Mao used the arts to communicate political messages. So much so he later agreed to support his daughter, who received a degree in theater from Hampton University, Booker T. Washington’s alma mater in Virginia, and the theater company she founded, People’s Survival Theatre.
There were caveats, though: In exchange for his support, she and her actors would work for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which he headed in the 1970s, and perform message plays only. She and her husband, who volunteered with her father while a student at Morehouse, actually met and fell in love while performing “Contributions,” a humorous yet serious trilogy by Ted Shine. When acting started interfering with their deal on both fronts, he withdrew his support.
Williams-Omilami left Atlanta for New York when Afemo studied acting at New York University before returning in the mid-1980s. She juggled marriage, being a mother of two and acting, booking roles on such TV series as “I’ll Fly Away” and movies, TV mainly, including “Selma, Lord, Selma” with her husband, Afemo, and King’s eldest child, Yolanda, before her father passed away from cancer in 2000. It was a week before Thanksgiving and, though grief-stricken, she told reporters who asked that her father’s annual holiday meal for the homeless was still on. And she’s been doing that and more ever since.
Under Williams-Omilami’s leadership, the organization her father started nearly 50 years ago has extended far beyond feeding the homeless during the major holidays of Thanksgiving, Christmas, MLK Day and Easter. Today, Hosea Helps serves all year-round, whether distributing weekly unprepared meals to those in need, assisting senior citizens and others with navigating the social service maze or providing rent and utility assistance, at their warehouse at 1035 Donnelly Ave. S.W. in Atlanta’s West End. Williams-Omilami stresses that the homeless are not the only ones in need in this city.
“It’s not just the homeless,” she insists. “It’s the working poor. It’s the people working from paycheck to paycheck. It’s the people who are doing the best they can. Some of these people are working two or three jobs.” And even fewer resources are available to them.
Williams-Omilami could easily do the big event meals that Atlanta celebrities like Arthur Blank, the one-time homeless Tyler Perry as well as rappers T.I., Young Jeezy, David Banner and B.O.B have all supported and still do right by her father. So why do so much more? Truth is she is every bit her father’s daughter and doesn’t know how not to help when called.
“Who is aggressively involved in fighting poverty when poverty kills more people than accidents and health issues combined?” she asks.
That fight is increasingly more challenging.
“We have great challenges,” Williams-Omilami admits. In many ways, they always have. Atlanta’s philanthropic community is not the lion’s share of their funding. Everyday people, working people, provide most of it. There are no guarantees that even they will be able to continue to help.
She credits her perseverance only to a higher power. “When I wake up every morning, the first thing that hits me is my faith,” she says. “I start talking to myself through my faith and it gets me through every day.”
As she struggles to keep Hosea Helps “as Christ-like as possible on a dime,” it pains her to admit she is fearful of her son and daughter following in the family legacy. “I’m scared to death that they do this,” she confesses.
“Would I be doing this if I were not his daughter?” she ponders. “I never knew anything else.”
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