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James Hudson: Forgotten Forerunner in the Crusade for Civil Rights

Online ISBN:
9780813071213
Print ISBN:
9780813079103
Publisher:
University Press of Florida
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James Hudson: Forgotten Forerunner in the Crusade for Civil Rights

Larry Omar Rivers
Larry Omar Rivers
University of West Georgia
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Published online:
23 January 2025
Published in print:
20 August 2024
Online ISBN:
9780813071213
Print ISBN:
9780813079103
Publisher:
University Press of Florida

Abstract

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, James Hudson (1903–1980) was a philosopher, theologian, Baptist minister, pastor, college chaplain, academic administrator, and civil rights activist. During his early childhood, medical injustice wrought by racial segregation cost him his lower right arm. His subsequent education at Morehouse College, Colgate-Rochester Divinity School, and Boston University shaped his approach to activism and his decision to become a philosopher in Personalism. Shortly after the end of World War II, Hudson, his wife, and son moved to Tallahassee, Florida. There, Hudson served on the faculty of Florida Agricultural and Mechanical College (which became a university in 1953); he held appointments as the institution’s chaplain and as a department chair. He soon after joined the “Rankin network,” a national group of African American religious intellectuals based at Howard University, where the Andrew Rankin Memorial Chapel served as the principal venue for devotional activities. Insights from his studies, life experiences, and Rankin network dialogues prepared him for his greatest intellectual challenge—crafting a philosophy of life that meshed Socratic inquiry, moral imagination, African American spirituality, and Gandhian nonviolence. The final product, which he shared across the United States through the Sunday School lessons he wrote for the National Baptist Convention, USA, became part of the foundation for the rise of Martin Luther King Jr., another Personalist philosopher. Hudson also played a key role in establishing the Inter-Civic Council that coordinated the 1956 Tallahassee Bus Boycott and served as a building block for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference that King would lead.

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