Tom Houck

Tom Houck was born in 1947 in Massachusetts. Rough Draft Atlanta and his LifeStories oral history biography say he was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while The Atlanta Journal-Constitution describes him as born into a struggling blue-collar family in Boston. His exact birth date has not been made public.

He traced his political awakening to 1954, when his Black second grade teacher told the class about segregation in the wake of the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling. At 12 he took part in his first protest, holding a sign at a Woolworth's in Cambridge. He later recalled thinking at 13, "I'm going to help change the world."

After his mother died, he moved as a teenager to live with an aunt in Jacksonville, Florida.

In Jacksonville, Houck attended a segregated white high school named after Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest. As an editor of the school newspaper he spoke up for integration and gathered about 100 students to petition for changing the school's name, which brought a two-week suspension.

In March 1965, after Bloody Sunday, he left to join the Selma to Montgomery march and was expelled. He told SaportaReport he was determined to stay in the movement rather than finish high school or go to college, and he never completed a formal degree. His education came from the movement itself.

Houck joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference under Hosea Williams and was listed among the field staff of its 1965 SCOPE voter registration project. Between 1965 and 1971 he worked with the NAACP, SCLC and the Voter Education Project in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Washington, New York and Chicago. He was arrested about 20 times in nonviolent protests and was part of the challenge to segregated Alabama jails that ended in the 1968 Supreme Court decision Lee v. Washington.

In 1966, waiting outside SCLC headquarters on Auburn Avenue for a ride that never came, the 19-year-old was invited by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Sunday lunch at the King home. Coretta Scott King mentioned the family needed a driver, and for about nine months he drove the four King children to Spring Street Elementary and took Dr. and Mrs. King around town, usually in the family's green 1966 Pontiac Bonneville or blue Chevrolet Impala, while listening to WAOK. He also travelled with King, answered mail, and remained an aide until King's assassination in 1968.

As the youngest member of the SCLC executive staff he helped create an SCLC peace department opposing the Vietnam War and organised for the Poor People's Campaign, speaking for poor whites at its Memphis kickoff and helping bring diverse poor communities to Resurrection City in Washington. In 1968 and 1969 he worked on antiwar campaigns, voter drives in New York and Georgia, and the Charleston hospital workers' strike.

From 1970 to 1972 Houck was field director of the Voter Education Project, working alongside John Lewis and Julian Bond to register and mobilise minority voters across 11 Southern states. He lobbied for the 26th Amendment lowering the voting age to 18, and in 1972 became deputy director of the Washington-based Youth Citizenship Fund, which worked on first-time voter registration in 26 states.

Returning to Georgia in 1973, he worked on Andrew Young's successful campaign for Congress, Maynard Jackson's election as Atlanta's first Black mayor, and the campaigns of John Lewis and Zell Miller. The same year he was a candidate for the Atlanta City Council in District 6, a seat won by Nick Lambros. He also ran a political consulting group with Julian Bond.

In 1977 Houck turned to journalism. He wrote "The Tattler" columns for Atlanta Magazine and the Atlanta Gazette, then did political reporting and commentary for 640 WGST. Former news director Eric Seidel said, "He gave us credibility in City Hall. He knew everybody there."

From 1980 he hosted talk radio on WGST, going head to head with conservative Atlanta Journal editorial writer Dick Williams and later hosting his own nighttime show, which ended around 1990 to 1991 after WGST added Rush Limbaugh's syndicated program. From 1981 until 2001 he was a regular panelist on "Sunday News Conference" and "The Georgia Gang," serving as the program's liberal voice as it moved from WSB-TV to Fox 5. He also wrote for Atlanta Magazine and was a Creative Loafing columnist from 1986 to 2001.

After leaving journalism in the early 2000s, Houck ran a public affairs business, then in 2015 founded Civil Rights Tours Atlanta. The three-hour bus tour took visitors to King's birthplace and final home, Ebenezer Baptist Church, the Atlanta University Center, Ralph Abernathy's church, Alonzo Herndon's home and South-View Cemetery, mixing history with his own memories. He told VOA in 2015 that much of Atlanta's civil rights history had not been portrayed in a way that people around the world would know how important the city was.

The tours ran for more than a decade, with a break during the pandemic, and served tourists, students and corporate groups. Isaac Farris and Michael Julian Bond sometimes helped him lead large groups. His last tour took place in September 2026.

Houck never married and had no children. He lived in Atlanta from 1966 for most of his life, and once noted that he lived on a street named after his former boss, Martin Luther King Jr. His circle included John Lewis, Julian Bond, former mayors Bill Campbell and Shirley Franklin, journalist Maria Saporta and council member Matt Westmoreland, with whom he met for quarterly meals; their last gathering was in August 2026.

Friends described him as gregarious, argumentative and occasionally cantankerous. Rick Allen of "The Georgia Gang" said friendship and conversation were his oxygen, and Saporta called him "a grumpy guy on the outside, and a marshmallow on the inside." The death of John Lewis in 2020 hit him especially hard, and Isaac Farris made a point of checking on him in later years.

Houck was a lifelong liberal and advocate of voting rights, nonviolent protest and racial and economic justice. He shared King's view that war and civil rights were connected, recalling that King "saw war and civil rights as being the same thing." He described the Poor People's Campaign as an effort to put on America's agenda that there was "no blank check for justice."

He also resisted turning King into a distant saint, telling interviewers that King was a regular human being who liked to have fun. In later years he spoke about how talk radio had come to be dominated by conservative voices, saying liberal hosts like him had been pushed aside.

The Atlanta City Council said Houck "helped shape Atlanta, committing his life to advocating for voting rights for communities that were historically denied their right to share in our democracy," and announced a moment of silence for its 2 November 2026 meeting. Isaac Farris called him "a true soldier, one who was dedicated to the cause through and through."

His legacy runs from the movement years, through the voter registration drives that helped multiply the number of Black elected officials in the South, to decades of Atlanta political commentary and a final chapter preserving the city's civil rights sites and memories for new generations. His recollections are preserved in interviews for the 2018 HBO documentary King in the Wilderness, the Russell Library oral history collection at the University of Georgia, and LifeStories.

No formal awards were documented in the sources reviewed. Public tributes after his death included a statement and a planned moment of silence from the Atlanta City Council.

Tom Houck died on Thursday, 22 October 2026, aged 79. His close friend Judie Kenna told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution the cause was pneumonia. Isaac Farris, King's nephew, spent much of his final days at his side. The place of death, burial and memorial arrangements had not been made public at the time of publication. Tributes came from the Atlanta City Council, Michael Julian Bond, Maria Saporta, Matt Westmoreland and many Atlanta journalists.