HOBSON, JULIUS (29 May 1922–23 March 1977), prominent Civil Rights activist and District of Columbia politician. Hobson was a fierce advocate for the rights of African Americans, confronting systemic racism and inequality with courage and conviction.
Hobson was born in Birmingham, Alabama, at the height of the Jim Crow South. His early life was shaped by the pervasive racial discrimination of the time, and his childhood hero was John Brown, whom he would later call “the greatest and most underappreciated American in history.” After serving with distinction in World War II, Hobson settled in Washington, DC, earning both a law degree and a graduate degree in economics at Howard University. Inspired by prominent Civil Rights leaders such as Thurgood Marshall and Charles Hamilton Houston, Hobson was determined to use his legal training to fight for social change and equality under the law.
In the 1950s and 1960s Hobson emerged as a leading voice in the struggle for African American civil rights in the nation’s capital. He agitated for the desegregation of local schools in the run-up to the landmark ruling Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, and as chair of the DC chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality he spearheaded desegregationist initiatives regarding housing and hiring. He also cofounded Associated Community Teams (ACT), which rejected moderate approaches to civil rights and focused instead on direct action.
Perhaps Hobson’s most notable legal victory was Hobson v. Hansen, a 1967 federal-court case he brought against the District of Columbia’s school system claiming it enforced de facto segregation, even after so-called de jure school segregation had been outlawed, via the notorious practice of “tracking” overwhelmingly poor and Black children into poorly resourced educational trajectories. Thanks to Hobson’s exhaustive analysis of the educational data and forceful arguments, the courts ended the practice.
In 1968 Hobson was elected to the District of Columbia Board of Education in a landslide, and in 1972 he ran for vice president alongside the physician Benjamin Spock on the People’s Party ticket. Three years later he was elected to the Council of the District of Columbia, on which he served until his death in 1977.