We’re familiar with seeing Porsha Williams on Bravo TV’s hit series Real Housewives of Atlanta season after season, but what many people don’t know is that the reality star is a descendent of a famed civil rights leader. Hosea Williams worked closely with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and was instrumental in fighting for the rights of Black people in America, and during a recent episode of Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen, Porsha revisited her ver first civil rights march when she was just six-years-old. According to the reality star, the group she was with was chased down by the KKK.
Paras Griffin / Stringer / Getty Images
“I was about six-years-old when I went to my first march,” Porsha Williams said. “It was here in Forsyth County, Georgia, and I was excited to go, of course as a little kid, you finally get to go to work with your granddad, you hear he’s doing all this stuff. We get out there and I’m excited, again, innocent, singing the songs, ‘We Shall Overcome,” etc.”
“We came across Ku Klux Klan, and they decided to protest our protest,” she added. “They threw rocks at us, I actually got hit with one. They chased us all the way back to the buses, because we had busloads of people with us. They called us the n-word and any other thing the KKK would be calling us.”
Porsha also stated that Forsyth County was known for its racism and “had actually driven out all of the African-Americans who lived there over the years.” She added, “We were going to basically say, ‘No. We need to bring Black people in here.‘” Although the concept of racism was something she didn’t fully understand at six-years-old, the experience taught her a valuable lesson.
“What I got out of that was to keep going regardless,” Williams said. “I never saw my grandfather stop, I never saw my dad stop. The movement is still continuing on and I think that is apart of what’s inside of me that’s not gonna stop. I know that people are protesting now, and I know that a lot of the times when the media stops covering it, it kind of dies down and ends. But it’s not gonna stop this time.” Watch Porsha Williams share her story below.