The Hudson Sisters: Pillars of strength in war against segregation

Sisters Winson and Dovie Hudson, the trailblazing warriors in the fight for civil rights in Leake County, will soon have a Mississippi Freedom Trail Marker honoring them. The Mississippi Department of Archives and History announced to some of the key figures in the community that the unveiling of the marker is planned for August, according to Abby Woods, the newly installed president of the Leake County NAACP.

Winson Hudson was the co-founder of the first NAACP branch established in Leake County under the guidance of Medgar Evers in 1961. She served as vice-president in the first term and continued as president during the next 37 years. 

The two sisters, and a third sister, Alice, married three first cousins from the Hudson family. 

Dovie, two years older than Winson, was born in Carthage in 1914, and Winson was born in the Galilee community on November 17, 1916. Galilee’s name was changed to Harmony by the residents in 1922 after they built the school there – Harmony School – that became the center of community life. 

“Harmony was our whole world,” Winson wrote in her book “Mississippi Harmony: Memoirs of a Freedom Fighter” in collaboration with prize-winning author Constance Curry and with a foreword by the late NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorney Derrick Bell. It was published in January 2002. Her book title was a tribute to the place she had lived her entire life, except for several years when she and her husband, Cleo, had sought better living opportunities in Chicago, but returned home to Harmony for good.

Curry points out that when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was still only a toddler the Hudson sisters were already active in pursuit of their rights as citizens. Winson Hudson had tried to register to vote at the Leake County Circuit Clerk’s office in 1938. Besides paying poll taxes, she had to interpret a section of the Mississippi Constitution. She was given a failing grade. She continued her attempt to register to vote over the next 30 years until one day in 1963, with lawyers from the Justice Department present, she and Dovie were told they had passed the test. 

DESEGREGATING SCHOOLS

After organizing the Leake County NAACP branch, the Hudsons and their fellow members filed the first lawsuit in a rural Mississippi county to end segregated schools in 1961. 

 After the Brown vs. Board of Education school desegregation orders of 1954-55, the sisters faced hard choices of actively fighting against the rigid system of segregation or maintaining the Black school that the community had made into one of the best schools in Leake County. 

In 1959, the community invited Medgar Evers to Harmony to develop a plan. He said the best route to take was to desegregate the public schools. Harmony School might be sacrificed, but the effort moved forward. 

The county built three new public schools for Black students and closed Harmony.

In 1961, with the help of Evers, they filed the lawsuit, with Diane Hudson, Dovie’s daughter, as plaintiff. 

NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorney Derrick Bell, who was at work on the James Meredith case at Ole Miss, also had advised the community to pursue the desegregation case, even at the expense of having Harmony School remaining closed. 

In February 1964, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Diane Hudson, et al., v. Leake County et al ordered the county to submit a desegregation plan by July 1964.

The county agreed to comply and offered a plan to desegregate schools year-by-year beginning at first grade. Diane Hudson was in high school and couldn’t enroll in elementary school. So, first grader Debra Lewis (who died in 2001) desegregated the Leake County Grammar School in September 1964. Her father was fired from his job, was beaten up several times, and their house was bombed. But Debra and her parents stuck it out to the end of her school career with the support of the Hudson sisters every step along the way.

“My sister Dovie’s house was bombed twice in November 1967, because of that school mess and because we registered to vote,” Winson said. “They meant to bomb my house, but we heard the truck. I was night watching until twelve that night, and the Klan was backing into our driveway. My husband Cleo and I got to start shooting, but by this time, the German shepherd had forced the Klan to move on. I ran to the phone to call Dovie to be ready. When they answered, a bomb went off at her house.”

Dovie and her family survived that bombing incident along with another that followed in the same month.

HEAD START

The Head Start program was funded in 1966 and Winson Hudson helped organize at least five Head Start centers in Leake County. At first, she was center director and was eventually promoted to countywide education coordinator for Head Start. 

Winson worked as a certified elementary school teacher after she returned from Chicago. She was able to use this experience to great advantage as she entered the world of Head Start. 

Bulus LeFlore, retired postmaster of Madden, MS, was one of the first students to attend the Head Start program. “She would always get bomb threats during school hours,” he recalls. “They would take all the kids to the playground, and away from the school. Then Mrs. Hudson would go back into the building by herself and hunt for the bomb.

“The kids didn’t know what was going on, but we realized how courageous she was. And her sister, Dovie, was her right-hand man,” LeFlore said. 

HEALTH AWARENESS

Dr. Robert Smith of Jackson, the medical director of the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM), which in the mid-1960s was in charge of the state’s Head Start programs, helped to set up a health program for the entire community as an outgrowth of his work with Head Start.

“They got that program going initially for children, but when we would go up to examine kids, we would do a health fair. We checked blood pressure, urine, etc., and found that most people in the community had high blood pressure, diabetes, and whatever.

“Ms. Hudson, Dovie, and one of their in-laws, Brionna McDonald, would bring patients when I was closing my office down here in Jackson; they were bringing patients with chronic medical conditions, and I didn’t know what to do with them except to try to help them.

“Mrs. Hudson would speak with them, and she was from the health point of view kind of like a Fannie Lou Hamer from a political point of view,” Smith said. 

Their Head Start health program spurred the development of the tri-county MYL (Madison, Yazoo, and Leake) Health Center. The center is still in operation today as the G. A. Carmichael Family Medical Center in the Canton Community Health Center, said Smith.

“They founded the basics, not only for the political, but they brought the awareness of health as a human right,” said Smith. Along with Smith, the Leake County Head Start health program brought in Drs. Aaron Shirley, Robert Anderson, and William Truly, to conduct health education sessions and health fairs. 

“They were the first to organize along health lines,” Smith said.

HONORS

The Winson and Dovie Hudson Head Start Center in Carthage stands as a monument to the sisters. Dovie and Winson were included in Brian Lanker’s 1989 book, “I Dream A World: Portraits of Black Women That Changed America.” Winson was present at the Corcoran Gallery for the exhibit, where she met a number of famous contemporaries such as Oprah Winfrey and Alice Walker, among others. 

NAACP branch president Woods says she was awestruck by the examples and achievements of the Hudson sisters. 

“Being a woman stepping into this role as NAACP president for Leake County, I think that is supercool for me. It’s been a wonderful delight to experience their legacy.

“The fact that such a small town could have such impact. That’s where the excitement continues to build. Even within the NAACP here in Leake County, the legacy of Winson and Dovie Hudson still looms. And it gives me so much hope to know that,” Woods said.