Mississippi Harmony: Memoirs of a Freedom Fighter

This book makes me so proud because Mrs. Winson Hudson is my cousin. She was such a courageous woman in the Civil Rights Movement.

With popular focus on Martin Luther King Thurgood Marshall, and the other "heroes" of the civil rights movement, we tend to ignore the fact that the success of the movement ultimately depended not on these national figures, but on thousands of individuals who decided that freedom was worth laying down their lives and the lives of their children.Winson Hudson was one of those women. Born in 1916 in the geographic center of Mississippi, she began trying to register to vote in the 1940's, her niece was the one and only Black child who decided to "integrate" the all white school system after Brown, she founded the County chapter of the NAACP, she housed two civil rights workers during Freedom Summer (1964), her uncle was lynched, her sister's house was bombed (several times), and her life was at risk virtually daily for over 20 years.This remarkable book gives a quick summary (the book is less than 150 pages) of these struggles, and provides a window into the heart of Ms. Hudson (and by analogy the thousands of others like her) which gave her the courage and commitment to stand up to oppression and injustice.The book closes with Ms. Hudson's question, and challenge: where will young people today find this courage and dedication? Reading about the day to day decisions Ms. Hudson made leads one to examine one's own life. Is there any cause for which you would be willing to risk being beaten and your house bombed; would you send your 1st grader into the face of a howling mob to prove a principle? Most would say no. We need to remember that, but for some very courageous people who said yes to these questions, this country would be a much worse place.

Winsom Hudson's story about her struggle for racial justice in the cradle of segregated Mississippi is inspiring and riveting. Constance Curry, the highly respected civil rights era author allows Hudson to speak in her own voice and to take center stage. With her sister Dovie as her partner in the struggle, these two African American women defied the racial rules and charted their own half century fight against the Ku Klux Klan, the voting registrar who refused to certify Hudson as literate to vote, and all other obstacles that stood in their paths. Curry edited the book in such a way that Hudson's life becomes a template for the broad scale social change in the deep South. There were countless Winsom and Dovie Hudson's who never sought nor shared the national spotlight. However, it was through women like these that the day to day, incremental change was achieved. If you want to learn more about the lonely battle for equal rights that blacks waged before the 1960's, then Mississippi Harmony is a "must read." Fearless, compassionate, funny, and unrelenting are only a few of the traits that one sees in this extraordinary woman who can teach us a lot about endurance and running the marathon to the finish.

Apparently, Senator Trent Lott had never read "Mississippi Harmony," otherwise he would have known what the fuss over his "poorly chosen words" was all about. This book tells us real stories about how the segregationist policies of Strom Thurmond and Jim Crow were more than a set of annoying rules--like "Deliveries and Colored People at the Back Entrance"-that even the senator can easily disparage. The book shows us that segregation is a pernicious smog that chokes the most mundane of human efforts: feeding your family, educating your children and worshipping your God. For the black community of Harmony, Mississippi, to simply survive these noxious injustices would be an admirable story in itself. However, two courageous residents of that community, Winson and Dovie Hudson are able to rise above and end many of the wrongs. These women are some of the unheralded heroes who literally risked lives, jobs, and homesto fight the national civil-rights effort at a local level. They are the common soldiers in a frightening war. They are survivors with an amazing story.Though co-written by the famed civil-rights-era author, Constance Curry, "Mississippi Harmony" is told in first person as Winson Hudson talks directly to us. Reading the book was like listening to the best of storytellers.