Julius Hobson

Julius Wilson Hobson (May 29, 1922 – March 23, 1977) was an activist and politician who served on the Council of the District of Columbia and the District of Columbia Board of Education.

Hobson was a native of Birmingham, Alabama.

He was the son of Irma (Gordon) and Julius Hobson.

His mother was a schoolteacher and later a principal.

His father died when he was a very young child.

His mother remarried a man who had a dry-cleaning plant and a drugstore.

As a child, Hobson worked at a public library, where he could clean the floors, but he was not allowed to borrow books.

He read a lot of books about abolitionist John Brown, who he said was the greatest and most under-appreciated American in history.

He graduated from Industrial High School, the only public high school in Birmingham that allowed black children to attend.

While attending Tuskegee Institute, he was called away from his studies due to World War II.

During the war, he served in the United States Army in Europe.

He was awarded three bronze stars for his many piloting missions.

After returning from the war, Hobson graduated from Tuskegee Institute.

After graduation, he moved to Harlem and attended Columbia University.

He did not learn well from the lecture-style classes, and he left after a few months.

In 1946, he moved to Washington, D.C. to attend graduate school in economics at Howard University.

He particularly loved the visiting professors and the small classroom sizes at Howard.

For his first job after graduation, he worked as a researcher for the Library of Congress.

He wrote papers on economic theory for Congress.

After about six years, he changed jobs and worked at the Social Security Administration.

Walking his son to school, past the all-white school to Slowe Elementary School in Northeast, Washington, D.C., gave Hobson the drive to fight for school desegregation.

He was elected president of the school's parent-teacher association, and he argued that overcrowding at black schools would be alleviated if white schools were to admit black students.

During the 1960s, Hobson served as the chair of the Washington chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality.

While a part of the organization, he led several sit-ins.

Hobson later joined a local civic association, where he marched the streets of Downtown, Washington, D.C., with signs encouraging shoppers to boycott stores that would not hire black employees.

When Hobson threatened to encourage a boycott of the city's bus system because the system would not employ black drivers, the bus system backed down and hired 44 black employees.

The group helped desegregate restaurants in Maryland and Delaware, ended discrimination in public housing in the District of Columbia and forced private businesses to open employment to black people.

He practiced non-violence, although he would say he did not go around saying he was non-violent because violence was never his intention.

When the Congress of Racial Equality expelled him from the organization for being too authoritative, Hobson and his closest associates formed a new civil rights organization, Associated Community Teams.

When Hobson's ten-year-old daughter Jean was assigned the lowest educational track, Hobson sued the public school system.

In the case of Hobson v. Hansen, he displayed many charts for the court as evidence that the District spent more on each white student than on each black student.

The court ruled in his favor, banning discrimination in the District of Columbia Public Schools and stopping its overly rigid system of grouping students by ability on June 19, 1967.

Hobson was elected to an at-large seat on the District of Columbia Board of Education in 1968.

He decided to run again for a seat representing Ward 2 the next year, but he lost the race to Evie Mae Washington.

In an effort to protest the employment discrimination practiced by Pepco, Hobson distributed stamps that were intended to be pasted on check payments sent to Pepco that would prevent Pepco's computers from processing the checks.

He was later ordered by court to stop distributing the stamps.

In 1969, Hobson founded the Washington Institute for Quality Education, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ending discrimination in schools.

Hobson taught a class at American University on social problems and the legal system.

His students researched whether the legal system could be a recourse to remedy problems in society.

The D.C. Statehood Party was founded to convince Hobson to run under the party for District's delegate to the United States House of Representatives.