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Julius Wilson Hobson was born on May 29, 1919 in Birmingham, Alabama, United States. His mother, Irma Gordon, a schoolteacher and principal, was apparently married only briefly to his father, Julius Hobson, about whom little is known. The father figure in young Hobson's life was Gordon's second husband, Theopolis Reynolds, who ran a dry cleaning plant and a drugstore.
Hobson graduated from the Industrial (later Parker) High School in Birmingham and attended Tuskegee Institute from 1937 to 1940. Later, after a three-month stint at the university in Florence, Italy, he was honorably discharged in November 1945.
He earned his Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from Tuskegee in May 1946. While living briefly in Harlem, in New York City, Hobson attended classes at Columbia University; he then entered Howard University in Washington for the fall 1946 semester.
He did graduate work in economics at Howard under a number of prominent teachers, such as Otto Nathan and Eric Williams and the Marxist scholar Paul Sweezy.
Hobson worked for a local paper company until April of 1942, when he joined the United States Army. Hobson was sent to Europe as a staff sergeant with the Ninety-second Division and served as an artillery spotter pilot.
In 1948 he entered government service. His first post was as a desk attendant in the Library of Congress. He became a scientific and technical reference librarian in 1959. Hobson then moved to the Health, Education, and Welfare Department, where he was posted to the Division of Program Analysis and worked as a Social Security research analyst into the 1970's.
Hobson attributed the start of his civil rights activism to the days when he walked his young son past an all-white elementary school to an overcrowded and distant black school in Washington. His work in civic reform began in 1956, when he was elected president of his local civic association; he became vice-president of the Federation of Civic Associations that same year. He then was named to the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, where his first major effort was to lead a suit against the city's police department, alleging racial discrimination in its promotion practices.
In 1960, Hobson was elected chairman of the Washington chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). From then on, as he said, "I was locked into the whole business of protest. " During the next three years, he put up more than eighty picket lines at over 120 retail establishments. The result was the employment of more than 5, 000 African-American workers. He later said, "My proudest achievement in this city is that I changed the complexion of employment downtown. When I started out with picket lines in 1960, a black clerk was as rare as a white crow. " In response to a threatened boycott in 1962, the local bus company hired forty-four African-American drivers and clerks. Following Hobson's picketing of a major automobile dealership, black salesmen were hired.
He used such unorthodox tactics as setting up banks of telephones in a local church, which were supposedly being used to communicate with demonstrators lining Route 40 in Maryland and Delaware. There were no such demonstrators. Through this ruse, Hobson was able to convince state officials to desegregate restaurants along Route 40. His work led to the integration of hospital services in Washington and to the desegregation of both patient wards and the physicians staff at the Washington Hospital Center. He achieved the latter by himself occupying a bed in an all-white ward.
In 1963, Hobson led 4, 500 demonstrators to the steps of city hall, demanding that segregation in rental housing in Washington be outlawed. The campaign was successful. During the same year he rallied the community to participate in the March on Washington, which culminated in Martin Luther King Jr. 's, "I Have a Dream" speech.
In mid-1963, Hobson was expelled from office by the national CORE leadership, allegedly for his militant stance; he did not endorse nonviolence. Hobson then joined a new black power organization called ACT. Among the more publicized events Hobson organized was the presentation to the press of long-range parabolic microphones designed to expose police brutality during arrests of blacks. Although the microphones were fakes, the police department allegedly upgraded its treatment of arrestees as a result. Similarly, in 1964 Hobson held "rat rallies, " driving into the affluent Georgetown section of Washington with numerous caged rodents. The goal was to publicize the need for a rat suppression program in the black ghetto. Hobson threatened to "relocate" the rats to Georgetown. The city fathers capitulated and started an anti-rat program. It later developed that the rats were quietly drowned in the Potomac once the television crews had left the Georgetown venue.
Hobson went down in history as an activist and politician who served on the Council of the District of Columbia and the District of Columbia Board of Education. He was awarded three bronze stars for his many piloting missions. In 1980, a group of co-operative apartment buildings at First and M streets and New York Avenue NW built in the 1930s were rehabilitated, renamed the Julius Hobson Plaza Condominiums and sold as condos. In 1979, the Edmonds School on Capitol Hill was closed and the students and staff moved to Watkins Elementary School as the Region 4 Middle School. In 1981, the school was renamed the Julius W. Hobson Middle School. In 1986, schools in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington were reorganized, and Stuart Middle School was combined with Hobson to create Stuart-Hobson Middle School.
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Hobson was a member of the D. C. Statehood Green Party. He had a critical opinion about democracy in the United States, stressing that in America you don't have any democracy for real, and you have the right to elect but not to select. He also didn't consider himself a politician.
A militant, he never owned a gun and even dismissed the Secret Service guards assigned to him as a candidate for national office because he felt the detail was a waste of taxpayers' money. A vocal advocate of black power, he insisted on taking his white wife to public meetings and was one of the earliest civil rights leaders to denounce incipient black racism.
Quotations:
"In this country, you don't have any democracy really. You have the right to elect but not to select. For example, here's two people: you get to vote for one of them. But you didn't choose in the first place either of them. That's not democracy from what I understand. "
"I am not a politician. A politician is someone who does things to get elected. He's a guy who says things to please the public, that he thinks the public wants to hear, and his story changes with every passing day. I want to be elected, but I am not going to say a damn thing for your benefit, or that person's benefit out there on the street, or anybody's. "
"Perhaps the greatest destructive force in life is hate because of sex, race, religion or ethnic origin. We have seen what this has done to us, as well as to others. I look forward to the day when my people can be as easy beyond their neighborhoods as Tina and I have been within our family. "
"My wife thinks black is beautiful, and I think white is beautiful, and anybody that's got a psychological problem about that--don't come aboard the Statehood Party. "
"As long as the courts offer justice, there's no excuse for the bomb throwers. "
A man whose public persona was built on outrage ("I sleep mad, " he once said), Hobson was in his private life a devoted son, husband, and father.
While attending Howard University, Hobson met Carol Smith. They married in 1947, and they had a son, Julius Hobson Jr. Carol filed for divorce in 1966, citing religious differences and that Hobson occasionally prioritized activism over the needs of his family.
Three months later, he was on his second date with Tina Lower when he asked her to marry him. Tina was originally from Anaheim, California, a graduate of Stanford University, and an employee at the National Institute for Public Affairs. He admired her sense of peace and justice. She was divorced with two teenage sons. Some local activists criticized Hobson for having a relationship with Tina, saying he "talked black but dated white. "
