What is the Hosea Hudson Club?

"On the morning of Tuesday, February 28, 1980, the city council chambers of Birmingham, Alabama were overflowing. Birmingham's then newly elected first African-American mayor, Richard Arrington, Jr., had just awarded the key to the city to Hosea Hudson, and the standing room only, mostly African-American audience had risen to its feet in thunderous, prolonged applause in response to Hosea's acceptance speech. Hosea-sharecropper, foundryman, union organizer, quartet singer, communist-introduced most of the audience, for the first time, to the struggles of the 1930s and 1940s that helped forge the unity and resolve of Birmingham's working class, African-American communities...Hosea had shared with them their own untold history of struggles, victories and setbacks. They had risen for themselves, as much as Hosea, in celebration of the roots of Birmingham's progress."

-Scott Douglas, from the introduction to Black Worker in the Deep South, the autobiography of Hosea Hudson.

The Hosea Hudson Club CPUSA is the local component of the Communist Party, USA. The CPUSA was organized in 1919, at Chicago. It was the first political party in the United States to support equality for all people, irrespective of race, gender, and nationality. It was the first party in the US to openly confront Jim Crow. Our club is proud to celebrate the name of Hosea Hudson, a workingclass hero ignored in America's history books.

Our platform today is elimination of Taft-Hartley, guaranteed well-paying jobs for all who can work and guaranteed annual income for anyone who can not, steeply progressive taxation of all concentrations of wealth to move the country toward economic democracy, universal free health care for anyone who is for any reason in the country, universal free and equal education from kindergarten through college and graduate school, guaranteed adequate housing for all, legal sanctions against all forms of discrimination, aggressive affirmative action policies to correct historical inequities to include the equivalent of a Marshall Plan for our cities, absolute equality for immigrants, profound cuts in military spending and the elimination of all nuclear weapons, environmental justice and immediate measures to correct environmentally unsound and unsustainable practices, and Bill of Rights Socialism.

The CPUSA has been the object of the most intensive disinformation campaign in this country, in which, to their shame, many groups on the left have naively participated. Our program is arrived at through a democratic process, and when it is arrived at, we set aside our disagreements (yes, we are free and encouraged to debate) and get to work. Coming up with a well defined position is only a first step for Communists. We agitate, organize, and work hard for real change. We are despised by the ruling class not because of our ideas but because we have a track record of being effective with those ideas. We work enthusiastically with any other individuals or organizations whose aims are consistent with our own, and who will work to achieve those aims in a responsible, credible way.

Our ultimate aim is the creation of a society devoid of domination and exploitation in which all people are treated with respect and dignity, and where all people are capable of reaching their full potential. We call this idea socialism.

Anyone who would like more information on CPUSA or on the Hosea Hudson Club CPUSA can write to Hosea Hudson Club, PO Box 671, Carrboro, NC 27510-0671. Sherry Long-Goff Chair Hosea Hudson Club CPUSA