HUDSON, Winson 1916-2004

PERSONAL: Born November 17, 1916, in Harmony, MS; died April 24, 2004, in MS; daughter of John Wesley Gates and Emma Kirkland; married Cleo Hudson; children: Annie Maude.

CAREER: Civil rights activist and educator. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, cofounder, Leake County, MS, chapter, 1961. Also worked as a teacher.

WRITINGS:

(With Constance Curry) Mississippi Harmony: Memoirs of a Freedom Fighter, Palgrave Macmillan (New York, NY), 2002.

SIDELIGHTS: Winson Hudson, a pioneering civil rights activist, recounted her experiences in Mississippi Harmony: Memoirs of a Freedom Fighter. Born in the rural town of Harmony, Hudson was the tenth of thirteen children of William Gates and Emma Kirkland. Raised on her father's farm, she married Cleo Hudson at the age of nineteen and worked as a schoolteacher. Hudson first attempted to register to vote at the Leake County Courthouse in 1937, and despite threats from the Ku Klux Klan and decades of bureaucratic opposition, she secured her right to vote in 1962. In 1961 she helped found the Leake County chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and served as its chair for thirty-eight years.

In 1963 Hudson brought the first lawsuit aiming to desegregate schools in a Mississippi county, and during the "Mississippi Freedom Summer" of 1964, when civil rights activists from the north arrived to register African-American voters, Hudson allowed the visitors to share her home. After the Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed literacy tests and poll taxes, Hudson registered 500 new voters; she was described by one colleague as "one of the unsung, unheralded heroes of the civil rights movement," according to New York Times contributor Douglas Martin.

In Mississippi Harmony, Hudson chronicles her efforts to establish voting rights for minorities and to improve health care and education. "This memoir is proof that one person can make a difference," observed Nola Theiss in Kliatt.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Curry, Constance, and Winson Hudson, Mississippi Harmony: Memoirs of a Freedom Fighter, Palgrave Macmillan (New York, NY), 2002.

PERIODICALS

Kliatt, May, 2004, Nola Theiss, review of Mississippi Harmony, p. 34.

Library Journal, November 1, 2002, Ann Burns, review of Mississippi Harmony, p. 110.

U.S. News & World Report, "Winson and Dovie Hudson," p. 59.

OBITUARIES:

PERIODICALS

Guardian (London, England), July 15, 2004, p. 29. Jet, May 31, 2004, p. 18.

New York Times, May 9, 2004, p. A34.