Letters from Tomis

My Socialist Hall of Fame

During this chaotic era of vile rhetoric and manipulative tactics from our so-called bourgeois leaders, I am invigorated by the opportunity to reflect on Socialists, Revolutionaries, Philosophers, Guerrilla Leaders, Partisans, and Critical Theory titans, champions, and martyrs who paved the way for us—my own audacious “Socialism’s Hall of Fame.” These are my heroes and fore-bearers. Not all are perfect, or even fully admirable, but all contributed in some way to our future–either as icons to emulate, or as warnings to avoid in the future.

Introduction

Hosea Hudson (1898–1988) was a pivotal figure in the American labor and civil rights movements during the mid-20th century. As an African American Communist organizer, union leader, and grassroots intellectual operating primarily in the Deep South, Hudson’s life challenges dominant narratives of labor history, race, and radical politics in the United States. His career offers a unique lens through which to understand the convergence of Black working-class struggle, Marxist ideology, and the surveillance state during the height of Jim Crow and Cold War repression.

Early Life and Political Awakening

Born in Wilkes County, Georgia, in 1898, Hudson grew up in a sharecropping family during the nadir of American race relations. He had little formal education but became literate through self-directed learning and informal community schooling. Hudson moved to Birmingham, Alabama in the 1920s, where he found work in the city’s steel mills—a center of Black proletarian life in the segregated South.

His political radicalization began during the Great Depression, catalyzed by the economic devastation facing Black workers and inspired by the Communist Party’s anti-racist and pro-labor orientation. In 1931, Hudson joined the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), drawn by its staunch opposition to lynching, its advocacy for Black self-determination in the South, and its commitment to industrial unionism through the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).

Labor Organizing and Communist Militancy

Hudson’s most prominent activism occurred in the 1930s and 1940s, when he helped organize Black steelworkers into the CIO-affiliated United Steelworkers of America (USWA) Local 2815. His work challenged both the overt racism of the Southern industrial elite and the covert racism of white-led unions. He emphasized the necessity of building multiracial working-class unity, grounded in the material demands of wages, safety, and job security, but also in political education.

As a union steward and Party cadre, Hudson led political education classes on Marxism-Leninism for Black workers, stressing the dialectical interconnection between race and class oppression. He famously declared that “Communism made me a man,” underscoring the profound transformation he underwent as a result of political consciousness-raising. He was a rare voice connecting the Black Freedom Struggle to international proletarian revolution, and saw in Marxism not only economic analysis but moral clarity.

Repression and Exile from the Union

Hudson’s political militancy placed him under constant surveillance. By the late 1940s, with the rise of McCarthyism and anti-Communist hysteria, he was purged from his union leadership and blacklisted from industrial employment. The CPUSA’s Southern organizing efforts, including Hudson’s, were targeted by the FBI and local law enforcement as subversive threats.

Despite these setbacks, Hudson continued to write, teach, and agitate for racial and economic justice. He worked closely with the Southern Negro Youth Congress and remained a committed Communist well into the Cold War era, even as the Party’s influence waned. His steadfastness in the face of political persecution remains emblematic of the unyielding radicalism found among segments of the Black working class.

Autobiography and Historical Legacy

In the 1970s, Hudson collaborated with historian Nell Irvin Painter to produce Black Worker in the Deep South: A Personal Record (1972), a compelling autobiography that functions both as a historical document and political testament. The book offers rare insight into the intersection of Black labor, grassroots communism, and Southern resistance. It remains a seminal work in African American history, labor studies, and the historiography of the American Left.

Hudson’s life challenges liberal narratives that sever civil rights from socialist politics. He represents a suppressed lineage of Black radicalism that centers the working class as a revolutionary agent. His activism laid critical groundwork for later movements, including the civil rights and Black Power eras, and he stands as a forerunner to contemporary anti-capitalist Black organizing.

Conclusion

Hosea Hudson was not merely a labor activist or political radical—he was a theorist of liberation from below, whose life straddled some of the most tumultuous political transformations of the 20th century. He remains an underappreciated figure in mainstream historical discourse, yet central to any serious analysis of Black labor, communism in the South, and the lived dialectic of race and class. His biography exemplifies the ways in which subaltern voices can theorize and enact revolutionary change.

Select Bibliography

• Hudson, Hosea. Black Worker in the Deep South: A Personal Record. Edited by Nell Irvin Painter. New York: International Publishers, 1972.

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

• Kelley, Robin D.G. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

• Solomon, Mark. The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917–1936. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998.

• Tyson, Timothy B. Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

• Naison, Mark. Communists in Harlem During the Depression. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983.

• Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd. “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past.” The Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (2005): 1233–1263.