Hudson, Hosea

HUDSON, HOSEA (1898–1989). Retired iron molder, Communist, and former official of the United Steel Workers of America (USW) in Birmingham, Alabama, Hosea Hudson represents the hundreds of working-class, urban black southerners who joined the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) between the two world wars. A labor leader in the late 1930s and early 1940s and also a prominent local Communist, he belongs to the generation forced early in the Cold War to choose between the CPUSA and the labor movement. Hudson chose the CPUSA, although he continued to be active in organized labor through the Coalition of Black Trades Unionists. Like many southerners in his generation, Hudson was born in a rural area (Wilkes County, Georgia) and left sharecropping in 1923 for wage work after the boll weevil and a family crisis aggravated the oppressive social and economic system that he had long resented. In Atlanta he worked as a laborer at a railroad roundhouse, in the hazardous working conditions common at the time. He and his family moved to Birmingham in 1924, attracted by the prospect of high wages.

In Birmingham, Hudson became a skilled iron molder and continued with his passion for singing in quartets, distinguishing himself in both roles and hoping that his vocal talent would lead to a singing career on the radio. In early 1931, however, the Scottsboro case attracted his attention. Hudson saw this as another barely legal lynching that blacks were afraid to protest. The CPUSA’s civil rights division, the International Labor Defense, defended the “Scottsboro Boys,” kept them from being executed, made the case internationally known, and brought many American blacks like Hudson into the Party. After Al Murphy, a fellow black ironworker, invited him to a Party meeting in 1931, Hudson joined immediately. Until he encountered the CPUSA, Hudson had angrily questioned the southern status quo—economic and racial—without discovering any remedies available to working-class blacks who felt uncomfortable in the Interracial Commission or the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

One of Hudson’s activities as a Communist entailed organizing the Right to Vote Club in 1938 that attempted to teach literate blacks how to qualify to register to vote. Hudson himself had only recently learned to read at a CPUSA National Training School near Ossining, New York. Between 1938 and 1940 Hudson worked in the Works Progress Administration (WPA) serving as vice president of the Birmingham and Jefferson County locals of the Workers Alliance, the WPA workers’ union that was heavily Communist Party-influenced.

When the need for war matériel brought him back into iron molding, Hudson became active in the USW, serving first as recording secretary of Local 1489 and then as founder and president of Local 2815. He was also chairman of 2815’s grievance committee and delegate to the Birmingham Industrial Union Council. During 1944–1945, while the CPUSA was reorganized nationally as the Communist Political Association, Hudson was vice president of the Alabama section, known as the Alabama People’s Educational Association.

The Cold War years inflicted a series of injuries on Hudson from which he never completely recovered. Weakened by his immersion in the Party and many absences from home, his marriage of thirty years to Lucy Goosby ended in 1946. In 1947 he was expelled from the Birmingham Industrial Union Council, fired from his job, stripped of his offices in Local 2815, and blacklisted for being a Communist. In 1950 he went underground and worked for the CPUSA as a southern liaison until he moved to New York City in 1954. He remained in the North, working on two autobiographies, and moved to Gainesville, Florida, in 1985.

He saw recognition by the city of Birmingham as vindication; Mayor Richard Arrington proclaimed 26 February 1980 as Hosea Hudson Day, honoring Hudson as a civil rights pioneer and founder of the Right to Vote Club.

Hudson, Hosea. Black Worker in the Deep South. New York: International Publishers, 1972.

Painter, Nell Irvin. The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: His Life as a Communist in the South. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979.

Painter, Nell Irvin. “Hosea Hudson and the Progressive Party in Birmingham.” In Perspectives on the American South, edited by Merle Black and John Shelton Reed, vol. 1. London: Gordon and Breach, 1981.

Hosea Hudson Papers, 1941-1980. Overview. Archives and Manuscripts. New York Public Library. http://archives.nypl.org/scm/20655