Hudson understands some of what he hears, but not everything, not even the “biggest part.” Murphy’s words evoke something bigger that Hudson hears but doesn’t understand even as he gets that this bigger something connects with his life, his concerns. Hudson goes to the meeting expecting “a big something” which he doesn’t quite find for the biggest part remains what he doesn’t know. Important people don’t occupy that place. Instead, regular guys, like him, are, like him, there in the small house listening to Murphy and all signing up that night for the Party.
Hudson doesn’t describe a rousing, inspiring speech. He doesn’t say anything about revolution or the mission of the proletariat. Instead, he sees a pattern, a pattern that connects the conveyor in the foundry, unemployment, Jim Crow, and lynching to something bigger. Hudson doesn’t say that the Party knows what this something is, but he experiences it as the place of this something, this gap of more to and in the world than what he has already known. He mentions looking on Murphy and another comrade, Ted Horton, as “kind of special.” Unlike people who could only talk about what was happening around Birmingham, Horton and Murphy met different people, people coming through from New York and Chattanooga. “They could always talk about a certain meeting over yonder.”
The same night Hudson joins the Party he’s elected organizer of the Stockham unit. Murphy tells him that it will be his responsibility to meet on Friday nights with other unit organizers from around Birmingham. Hudson’s first unit organizers’ meeting was much like his first Party meeting. “I was somewhat surprised, to see such a small group of people,” he explains. “I was looking for a large group of people.”<sup>35</sup> He feels that the Party is something big; he expects it to be bigger. The seven people at that first organizers’ meeting—all black, Hudson doesn’t meet a white comrade until the next year are thrilled finally to have an actual industrial worker in their group. They were all from community units and the Party was trying to concentrate on industry, as Hudson would later learn. After he was fired five months later, members of his shop unit were afraid to meet, so he set up neighborhood units, organizing people around unemployment relief.
Leafleting was the primary activity of Hudson’s unit. The group would leave pamphlets setting out the Party program and updating readers on the Scottsboro boys’ case on porches, gates, and church steps. The units also held classes where they would read and discuss articles from the Liberator.
We would read this paper and this would give us great courage. We’d compare, we’d talk about the right of self-determination. We discussed the question of if we established a government, what role we comrades would play, then about the relationship of the white, of the poor white, of the farmers, etc. in this area.<sup>36</sup>
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