July/August 2003

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Mississippi Harmony

Mississippi Harmony, Memoirs of a Freedom Fighter, co-authored by Winson Hudson and Constance Curry, with a foreword by Derrick Bell, Palgrave MacMillan, 2002

Connie Curry is author of Silver Rights (Algonquin Books, Chapel Hill, 1995). Her present research interests are in the criminal justice field, with documentaries underway on public education and prisons.

In 1969, Alice Walker, who was living in Jackson, MS, wrote: “Mrs. Winson Hudson, I’ve come to know well. She is a large handsome woman with bright coppery skin and crisp dark hair. Her eyes are deeply brown and uncommonly alert. When she is speaking to you her eyes hold yours; at the same time they seem to be scanning the landscape. 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 fire bombs as well.”

I first met Winson Hudson in the summer of 1964 when I accompanied Jean Fairfax to Harmony, Mississippi, an all-black community, in Leake County, some sixty miles northeast of Jackson. We were both working for the American Friends Service Committee, with Jean encouraging black children to desegregate the schools in Jackson under court order and my working in the white community towards peaceful acceptance. Winson and her sister Dovie had both been born in Harmony, and had been responsible for filing a suit in 1963 to desegregate the schools there in Leake County. This was the first court suit to be brought in a rural Mississippi county. Harmony was and is an interesting place. Black farmers acquired land after the civil war from white owners and have kept it in their families over the years, creating an area of some 5000 acres. Harmony was insulated in many ways from the encroachment and harassment of surrounding white powers, including the Ku Klux Klan—a strong element in that part of the hill country.

Dovie and Winson’s fight for equality had actually begun many years before the school suit. Influenced by a grandmother and a father who taught them to be “fearless,” they started making trips in the thirties, to the court house in Carthage, to try and register to vote. Impeded by poll taxes, unfair literacy requirements, and a reign of fear in the black community, they were turned away time after time. Finally, in 1962, the Justice Department sent observers to the Leake County Court House. When Winson was asked to read and interpret the usual ridiculously long and complicated portion of the Mississippi State constitution, Winson uttered her notorious statement, “It said what it meant and it meant what it said,” and the registrar told her she had passed. This story was later told beside a photograph of her and Dovie in a book by Brian Lanker, “I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women That Changed America.”

Winson had been elected chair of the county NAACP in 1962, after field secretary, Medgar Evers, came up to help them organize around the school issue. They formed a vibrant chapter which gave Winson the backing for many struggles. Registering to vote and desegregating the Leake County schools were just the beginning of her many and sometimes lonely battles for justice. Leake County activists joined the efforts of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to unseat the all-white delegation to the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, and Winson remained a part of the regular Mississippi Democrat Party after it became integrated. By using her contacts in the federal government, she was able to pressure the Farmers Home Administration to give loans to black people and to bring a community health center to the area. The advocacy that touched her heart the most, however was bringing Head Start to the county, and the center in Carthage today is named after her.

Winson took on the telephone company, both locally and nationally until they finally put telephone lines into Harmony in 1967. It had been incredibly difficult to be without phones in emergencies over the years, including Freedom Summer, 1964 when young volunteers were coming into the community to do voter registration and run freedom schools for the residents. Two of the workers, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney, had stayed with the Hudsons just before they were murdered, along with Andrew Goodman, about fifteen miles away from Harmony, in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Winson’s house was almost bombed—their dogs scared the trucks away—but the perpetrators moved down the road and bombed Dovie’s house instead.

Winson became angry over the state of the often-muddy, unpaved roads in Harmony. She took on the county supervisors and pointed out that the paved roads all around the 5000 acres that comprise Harmony stopped at its borders. By 1976, she could use the power of the black vote to urge county candidates to do the right thing, and they did. One of those paved roads through the community that passes by Winson’s house is named Hudson Road. As Winson says “Fighting is an every day thing.”

Several people, including Alice Walker, have been encouraging Winson since the ’60s to tell her story, and she has accumulated many interviews and boxes of materials over the years. After several writers had been unable to finish a manuscript, Winson (now 86) called me and asked me to help her finish her book, so she could hold it in her hands before she died. She had suffered two strokes and her eyesight and hearing were failing. She had been friends with Mae Bertha Carter and knew that I had written her story (Silver Rights), and the three of us had stayed in touch over the years. I made several trips to Harmony and received tremendous support and input from her family and relatives scattered over many states. We relied heavily on the interviews of Jean Fairfax, done with Winson in the late ’80s, and the book was published in fall, 2002.

Winson has indeed “held the book” and has attended numerous book signings and celebrations in her own community as well as in surrounding areas. In February, 2003, she was present at the session of the Mississippi State Legislature which passed a resolution citing her record and honoring her life as a civil rights worker.

Winson is content with her life-time of struggles, in spite of the many lonely times as a younger, newer black leadership has emerged—without seemingly knowing the bases and history of the struggle. She does worry especially over whether the young people of Harmony place enough value on holding on to the land—and too much value on material things. She has also stayed alert to the changes in manifestations of racism and says that if she had more strength she would be down at the court-house trying to help the young black men who are being channeled into the criminal justice system. She knows of my interest in the failing public schools and the great numbers of expulsions, suspensions and drop-outs that feed into the burgeoning number of prison beds in Mississippi, public and private. We discuss this as one of the issues that must be addressed today. She is adamantly opposed to the death penalty and cries when she tells of the 1987 execution of Edward Johnson, one of her Head Start children in the early days.
Here is a poem Winson wrote in 1989.

O come my dear children and sit by my knee,
And let me tell you the cost to be free.
If I don’t tell you, you never will know,
Where you came from and where you should go.
You contributed more than any race in this nation,
Coming through hard trials and tribulation,
Fought in every war in America’s name,
You never have dragged her flag to shame.
You see I’m swiftly passing away,
You can’t afford to wait another day.
If I don’t tell you, you never will know,
Where you came from and where you should go.

Previous Article    Next Article