Winson Hudson, 87; Civil Rights Pioneer in Mississippi Helped Register Black Voters

Winson Hudson, a Mississippi civil rights pioneer who braved bombings, gun-toting nightriders and ostracism by fellow blacks as well as whites in a fight for racial justice that she waged mostly in obscurity, has died. She was 87.

Her death Saturday in a Jackson, Miss., hospital came after a long illness, grandson Kempton Horton said this week.

Hudson, along with her sister Dovie, was a pillar of Harmony, a tiny pocket of civil rights activism in Mississippi, the state long considered the most repressive in the nation for blacks.

She instigated a Justice Department investigation in 1962 that toppled the state literacy requirement that had effectively barred blacks from the polling booth for decades.

Hudson helped her sister file the first school desegregation lawsuit in a rural Mississippi county. She also served as president of the local chapter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People for nearly 40 years, beginning at a time when mere membership in the group could cost a person her livelihood, her home or her life.

At 85, she realized a lifelong dream of publishing her memoir. Co-written with attorney and activist Constance Curry, “Mississippi Harmony” won high praise from critics, such as The Times’ Kay Mills, who called Hudson’s story “history [that] cannot be told too often.”

The sisters, who had the same last name because they both married men named Hudson, were known as the “Big Women from Leake County,” because of their stout build and formidable will.

In a portrait by Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Brian Lanker that was included in a 1989 show at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., the sisters are seated side by side on straight-back chairs, wearing their Sunday finest. Winson, smiling slightly, stares steadily at the camera with eyes that hint of her unflinching nature.

“When she is speaking to you, her eyes hold you; at the same time, they seem to be scanning the landscape,” novelist Alice Walker, who met Hudson in the 1960s, once wrote. “Her eyes tell a great deal about Mrs. Hudson, for she is one of the ‘sleepless ones’ found in embattled Mississippi towns whose fight has been not only against unjust laws and verbal harassment, but against guns and firebombs as well.”

Hudson was born Anger Winson Gates, the 10th of 13 children of John Wesley Gates and Emma Kirkland. The mother died when Winson was 8, leaving her father to raise the large brood on the family’s 105-acre farm.

It was not unusual for blacks to own so much land in Harmony, a tight-knit community near Carthage that sprang up in the years after the Civil War and gradually became an enclave of black landowners.

Nonetheless, Hudson’s family remained vulnerable to deeply entrenched bigotry. They lost the farm when a white doctor called in a bank note he held on the land.

In 1936, Winson married Cleo Hudson, whose family owned 500 acres in Harmony. She went to work as a teacher and later as a lunchroom manager at Harmony School, the pride of the community. She ran afoul of the principal for giving free bread to hungry children but ignored his admonishments, the first of many acts of civil disobedience that, Hudson wrote years later, “helped prepare me for the good chances coming in the freedom movement of the 1960s.”

Hudson had tried repeatedly to become a registered voter since 1937, when she turned 21. It would become a 25-year struggle.

The registrar always had an excuse -- the books were missing, the deadline had passed for the day. But the biggest barrier was the literacy test, which required applicants to copy and interpret a section of the state constitution. Whites were given a simple line, such as “All elections shall be by ballot.” Blacks, on the other hand, were given the most convoluted passage -- a 206-word section drenched in legalese -- so their failure was ensured.

One time in 1961, Winson and Dovie went to the courthouse in another attempt to register. The entrance to the registrar’s office was blocked by a dozen burly white men. Unsure what to do, the women went to the basement and prayed, until Dovie said, “Let’s go. God’s got a shield over us, so they can’t touch us.” They walked back upstairs and squeezed past the men, who muttered insults at them.

As they filled out papers, someone slipped them a little card with two red eyes on it and a sinister message: “The eyes of the Klan’s upon you. You have been identified by the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.”

They left the courthouse unscathed, but without achieving their goal.

Winson Hudson and others complained until, in 1962, the Justice Department sent two lawyers to Harmony. They told her to try to register again.

This time, she didn’t fret over the troublesome passage of the constitution she was asked to explain. “It said what it meant, and it meant what it said,” she wrote.

This time, she passed.

When the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which suspended literacy tests and provided federal registrars, was signed into law, Hudson led a massive registration drive in Leake County, signing up 500 new voters in one year. She made herself a beacon in a red dress who personally escorted scores of recruits to the courthouse to become voters.

During the early 1960s, she also was heavily engaged in school politics. Local authorities had been trying for years to shut down the successful, all-black Harmony School. Town leaders appealed for help to Medgar Evers, NAACP field secretary in Mississippi. Instead of focusing on saving the community school, he urged them to fight for desegregation.

In 1961, a lawsuit calling for integration of schools countywide was filed, with Hudson’s niece as plaintiff.

Over the next three years, Hudson’s and her sister’s houses were bombed. But victory came in 1964, when the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the county to prepare for desegregation.

Tensions were extremely high. Evers had been murdered by a white racist the year before in Jackson. Now Mississippi was entering Freedom Summer, when civil rights workers from the North flocked to the state.

That summer, three activists -- Michael Schwerner, James Earl Chaney and Andrew Goodman -- were murdered not far from Harmony. Two of them had boarded for a time with the Hudsons.

The father of the first Harmony student chosen to attend a white school that fall was beaten and his home burned. Teachers with ties to the NAACP were threatened with dismissal.

“We’d walk down the street in Carthage, and you’d meet a black person going to borrow money, or especially a teacher -- they’d see you coming, they’d turn back. Some of them even ran from us,” Hudson recalled. “It was a lonesome time, I tell you, a lonesome time.”

But Hudson kept on fighting. She brought the Head Start preschool program to Leake County in the 1960s and directed it until her retirement in the 1980s. She founded a sorely needed community health center with funds from the Nixon administration so the sick no longer had to travel 75 miles to the nearest hospital.

Harmony even lacked telephone service until 1967, when Hudson began complaining to the president of the phone company in Jackson. “I called him, every time collect,” she said, until Harmony had an eight-party line. Now there are telephones in nearly every home.

“She wouldn’t back down from anything,” said Horton, one of two grandsons who survive her, along with a daughter and a brother. “When she went around to get people to join the NAACP, a lot turned their backs. They told her she was headed for trouble. That only gave her more power. ‘If I don’t do it,’ she said, ‘who will?’ ”