1Born into a Georgia sharecropper family in 1898, Hosea Hudson moved to Birmingham, Alabama, to work in the steel mills in the turbulent 1930s and 1940s and became a member of the Communist Party as well as president of a CIO union local. It was a hard, dangerous life, to be black and communist and pro-union, and Hudson talked about that life to Nell painter, who brilliantly recreates it in this collaborative oral autobiography.