African Americana

Typed letter signed ("Hosea") to Lerone Bennett, Jr., of Johnson Publishing Company. [Atlanta], 20 October 1975.  1p, 8 1/2 x 11 in. on "Save Atlanta SCLC Drive" letterhead (bottom left corner clipped, toning, light soil). Provenance: The estate of Lerone Bennett, Jr.

A personal appeal in which Williams directly requests that Bennett donate funds towards the costs of his lawyers and legal research team. Williams was indicted by a Fulton County, Georgia, grand jury on felony charges stemming from an alleged traffic violation, and was facing prison time if convicted. Additionally inscribed by Williams at lower margin: "Do you have a list I can use to send out the regular mail appeal? Why don't you pull together a group to do some fundraising for me?"

[With:] Fundraising appeal signed in type by Julian BOND, Dick GREGORY, Ralph ABERNATHY, and Howard MOORE, as co-chairmen of the National Defense Fund to Free Reverend Hosea L. Williams. 2pp, 8 1/2 x 11 in. (creasing, light soil, some chipping).

Williams was "an eighteen-year civil rights veteran," a close associate of Martin Luther King, Jr., and a leader in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. At the time of these letters he had recently been elected to the Georgia State Legislature, and the authors of the fundraising appeal suggest that "this may be the major reason for the indictment, because Reverend Williams has been leading the fight against the annexation of Atlanta - whicih would reduce the Black vote from 60% to a mere 35%, assuring the defeat of Atlanta's brilliant, young Black political leader, Mayor Maynard Jackson." Williams and his fundraising team write to Bennett, an influential African American historian and author, who worked as executive editor of Ebony magazine. Bennett had attended Morehouse College in Atlanta, and had been a classmate of Martin Luther King Jr.