Major Works
- Mississippi Harmony: Memoirs of a Freedom Fighter (with Constance Curry) (2002)
Biography
Winson Hudson was born Anger Winson Gates in Carthage, Mississippi, on November 17, 1916. She was one of fourteen children of John Wesley Gates and Emma Kirkland. Hudson was heavily influenced by the experiences and stories shared with her by her grandmother, Angeline Gates Turner.
Hudson attended school up to the eleventh grade, when she married Leroy Cleo Hudson in 1936. They moved to Chicago for a brief period, returning to Mississippi where Hudson taught school from 1949 to 1951.
Hudson was an important civil rights leader. She established the Leake County chapter of the NAACP in 1961. She testified before the U.S. Civil Rights Commission in 1965. She continued to attempt to register to vote from age twenty-one (in 1937), and was finally successful in 1962.
Hudson was a community activist as well, working to better the community. She began a community center in Leake County and a Head Start Program in 1965.
Hudson had been co-chairman of the Leake County Democratic Party for over twenty years. She was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1976.
She was awarded the NAACP’s Freedom Award for Outstanding Community Service, the Governor’s Distinguished Service Award for Outstanding Community Service, and others. Her autobiography, Mississippi Harmony: Memoirs of a Freedom Fighter, was published in 2002. Hudson died in 2004.
Related Websites
- Winson Hudson: Grandmother of Mississippi civil rights. Barbara Harris, Jackson Advocate. 2003
- Wikipedia page on Winson Hudson