Porsha Williams revealed Monday that the first time she ever experienced racism was during a run-in with the Ku Klux Klan as a child.
The 38-year-old Real Housewives Of Atlanta star made the admission during a special two-part Watch What Happens Live with her fellow guest W. Kamau Bell.
After Andy asked both guests to share their first experience with racism, she was transported back to her first civil rights march as a six-year-old child.
Chilling: Porsha Williams, 38, revealed Monday on Watch What Happens Live that her first experience with racism came at age six when Ku Klux Klan protestors chased her and threw rocks at her during a civil rights march
‘For me, being the granddaughter of a Civil Rights leader, you would think that I would have been aware of [racism]. I was about six years old when I went to my first march, and it was here in Georgia,’ she said.
Porsha remembered being excited to finally accompany her grandfather, the civil rights activist Hosea Williams, to a protest match when she was just a little girl.
‘We get out there and I’m excited — again, innocent, singing the songs, We Shall Overcome, etc. — and I was smacked in the face with racism,’ she said.
The uplifting moment took a chilling turn when her family and other marchers were confronted by members of the Ku Klux Klan looking to inflict violence.
‘We came across the Ku Klux Klan, who decided they were going to protest our protest, and they threw rocks at us. I actually got hit with one,’ she admitted, adding that the KKK members chased them all the way back to the buses they had rented for the march.
Joining her family: Porsha remembered being excited to go to her first march with her father and her grandfather, the civil rights activist Hosea Williams
Danger: ‘We came across the Ku Klux Klan, who decided they were going to protest our protest, and they threw rocks at us. I actually got hit with one,’ she admitted
Porsha added that they shouted the N-word at the marchers and ‘any other thing you can imagine the KKK would be calling us.’
‘I was out there at such a young age with my grandfather, because Forsyth County is really racist, they had actually driven out all the African Americans who lived there over the years.’
She referenced events from 1912, when the reported rapes of two white women (one of whom was murdered) were blamed on multiple black men.
Two young black men were convicted of rape and murder and sentenced to death by all-white juries, and another black suspect was lynched outside of the county jail.
Following the verdicts, armed groups of men associated with the KKK drove out the vast majority of the county’s black residents, and white residents proceeded to steal their property.
In flight: She said the KKK members shouted the N-word and other slurs while chasing the marchers back to their buses
Dark history: She was protesting in Georgia’s Forsyth County, where white gangs ran black residents out of the county and stole their land following a lynching and sham rape trials against black men in 1912; shown in October
‘I didn’t understand it,’ Porsha said of her experience at the march, ‘so of course it was a conversation with my dad when I got home to let me know that some people do hate you, even though you may be trying to do a good thing.’
‘What I got out of that is to keep going regardless. I never saw my grandfather stop, I never saw my dad stop, and the movement is still continuing on, and I think that is a part of what’s inside of me that’s not going to stop,’ she said proudly.
‘I know that people are protesting now, and I know a lot of times when the media stops covering it it kind of dies down again, but it’s not going to stop.’
More recently, Porsha has been joining protests inspired by the killing of George Floyd on May 25 by a white Minneapolis police officer.
Never stopping: ‘I never saw my grandfather stop , I never saw my dad stop, and the movement is still continuing on, and I think that is a part of what’s inside of me that’s not going to stop,’ she said