Winson Hudson, one of civil rights' 'heroes,' dies at 87

By Douglas Martin
The New York Times

E-mail this article Print this article Search archive Most e-mailed articles

Her grandson, Kempton Horton, said she died at a hospital in Jackson, Miss., that she had fought to desegregate.

In 1963, Mrs. Hudson brought the first suit to desegregate schools in a rural Mississippi county and won the case the next year. In 1965, a black child attended a previously all-white school.

She began trying to register to vote at the Leake County courthouse in 1937 and finally succeeded in 1962, but not before repeatedly having to write out and then explain a lengthy passage from the state Constitution. (White registrants merely had to explain this clause: "All elections shall be by ballot.")

In Mrs. Hudson's failed attempt to register in 1961, someone slipped a small card to her. It read: "The Eyes of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan Are Upon You."

The next year, she dispensed with yet another abstruse constitutional passage, this time under the eyes of Robert Kennedy's Justice Department.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed literacy tests and poll taxes. Mrs. Hudson soon signed up 500 new voters.

She became chairwoman of the county chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1961 at the urging of her friend Medgar Evers, the NAACP leader who was murdered in 1963. She kept the post for 38 years, fighting and winning battles to stop banks from prejudicial lending practices and bringing phones and paved roads to her poor county.

From inviting civil-rights workers to sleep on her floor, to bringing Head Start to the community center she created, Mrs. Hudson achieved much — but not national fame. Most histories of the civil-rights movement do not mention her.

"Mrs. Hudson was one of the unsung, unheralded heroes of the civil-rights movement," Vernon Jordan Jr., who knew her as director of the Voting Education Project of the Southern Regional Council in the 1960s, said in an interview.

"Her work represents the essence of what took place," he said. "There's a lot written about the leaders but not much about the contributions of the Mrs. Hudsons of the world."
 
Bob Moses, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's Mississippi field secretary in the 1960s, talked in an interview about the reign of terror of white supremacists whom he said wanted to eliminate the leadership of the NACCP. He called Mrs. Hudson "a part of that very small network of people who not only survived but actually found ways to struggle.

"It is inconceivable that the movement could have happened the way it did in Mississippi without these people."

Last year, Hudson said in an interview with The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss., that it had been "a lonely walk." But her fierce, righteous attitude was her armor. This was a woman who wrote her own funeral service.

"The more they did to us, the meaner we got," she said in an interview for John Dittmer's 1994 book, "Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi."

Winson Gates was born in Harmony, in central Mississippi, on Nov. 17, 1916, the 10th of 13 children born to John Wesley Gates and Emma Kirkland, neither of whom ever tried to register to vote. This family history was reported in the book "Mississippi Harmony, Memoirs of a Freedom Fighter" (Macmillan, 2002), written by Hudson and Constance Curry.

She was 8 when her mother died, and she and her siblings were reared by her father on a 105-acre farm until the land was seized by a white doctor to whom the family owed money.

A more sinister family memory, mentioned in an oral history by the Southern Regional Council, was her father's mentally ill brother being lynched by a white mob.

In 1936, Winson Gates married Cleo Hudson, whose family owned 500 acres in Harmony, a center of black property owners since Reconstruction, and she went to work as a teacher at Harmony School and took on the additional chore of managing the lunchroom. The principal reprimanded her for giving free bread to hungry children.

Mrs. Hudson is survived by her daughter, Annie Maude Horton of Carthage, Miss.; her brother, Osly Gates of Portland; two grandsons and three great-grandchildren.

Her legacy is also marked by Hudson Road, which runs near her house. In 1976, she mobilized the newly powerful black vote to at last pave the streets of Harmony. Before that, paving stopped at the town line.