Winson Hudson, rest in peace
Winson Hudson, 87, a civil-rights campaigner in rural Mississippi who flaunted her contempt for Ku Klux Klan intimidation by wearing a bright red dress the many times she marched up to the courthouse to try to register to vote, died on April 24.
Her grandson, Kempton Horton, said she died at a hospital in Jackson, Miss., that she had fought to desegregate.
In 1963, Mrs. Hudson brought the first suit to desegregate schools in a rural Mississippi county and won the case the next year. In 1965, a black child attended a previously all-white school.
She began trying to register to vote at the Leake County courthouse in 1937 and finally succeeded in 1962, but not before repeatedly having to write out and then explain a lengthy passage from the state Constitution. (White registrants merely had to explain this clause: "All elections shall be by ballot.")
In Mrs. Hudson's failed attempt to register in 1961, someone slipped a small card to her. It read: "The Eyes of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan Are Upon You." -- Winson Hudson, one of civil rights' 'heroes,' dies at 87 (New York Times via Seattle Times)