Boxer of the Year: Hudson Vgm

By Elmo Hudson

The benefits of this book is to inform the public how General Motors treat their black employees that files a Civil Rights complaint and lawsuit against them. They will commit fraud and conspiracy before the courts. This has been going on since August 19, 1983 to the present.

This book is about all the pain and hardship I have to go through as a result of this ordeal. This will inform the blacks of what to do and say. And how they can be victorious against a large Corporation. I have experience everything that I am talking about for twenty years and still trying to get some closure from this ordeal.

I have experience seeing a psychiatrist and psychologist since May 15, 1985. I was taken off work in July of 1992 and was placed on total and permanent disability with Social Security. This also tells about me leaving home and moving south to Arkansas and having to go to a all black school.

I also had to plow the white man field with two mules and a plow. I also won several titles in Golden Gloves Boxing and was the number one boxer at one hundred and twenty six pounds featherweight here and I was nominated for all Army boxing. I would say to pursue your goals until you get the justice you so deserve.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Dec 1, 2003
• ISBN: 9781410719409

Elmo Hudson

The author feels like he is capable of writing this manuscript because of being the main character in this book. He has been through hell in pursuing his complaints and two lawsuits since August 19, 1983 until the present. The author feels like he is still going through this as he writes he is reliving it. He is thoroughly convince, that you only get out of this, is what you put into it. The writer feels he is still capable of getting the justice that he deserves as a believer and a African American. He will not quit or throw in the towel until he has exhausted everything to get the serenity that he so deserves.

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© 2003 by Elmo Hudson. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,

or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,

recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the author.

ISBN: 978-1-4107-1941-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4107-1942-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4107-1940-9 (e)

1stBooks - rev. 12/15/2021

Contents

BOXER OF THE YEAR

General Motors Opposes this Interest Rate:

About the Author

Book

BOXER OF THE YEAR

HUDSON V. GENERAL MOTORS

I was born on October 8, 1943, in Springhill, Arkansas, to Lacy and Lizzie Mitchell Hudson. We moved to Lansing when I was three years old and lived on the east side of town, where I attended Allen Street School ’til I was about eight years old. We had to walk a mile to school, and my older brother, Rufus Hudson, and I ate lunch at a drugstore across the street from the school, since our parents were both working. My mom washed dishes at a Greek restaurant on Allegan Street in downtown Lansing, and my dad worked the night shift at the Fisher Body plant on the northwest side of town. My dad loved to work and as long as I can remember he has always held two jobs, working for himself during the day. We would help him on Saturdays and the days we were out of school.

One day when we came home from school our parents had moved to the new home my dad had built. My brother and I, alone with my puppy, caught the bus to the northwest side of town. We now lived on West Maple Street, where we attended Willow Street School. The kids in our new neighborhood weren’t very friendly; there were only a few black families living in our neighborhood. My brother and I got jobs selling the Lansing State Journal in downtown Lansing every day after school and on Saturdays. The papers cost only a nickel, and a couple of years later we started selling the more expensive Sunday papers. I used to make over twenty dollars a night, starting at seven o’clock Saturday night and working until four o’clock the next morning. In the winter it would get so cold in the night that I would sit on one of the stacks of papers and place my head inside my coat to keep warm in front of White Spot Grill on West Saginaw Street.

After about a year, the young white man who was in charge of the papers quit. Another white man took over, a racist, and saw that I was making too much money for a black boy, so he took my job away from me and placed a white boy in my location, and then gave me a job that made about six dollars a night, so I quit selling papers. I’ve always felt my dad should have said something to him. I used to go past a certain house on my way to sell the Lansing State Journal in downtown Lansing. I noticed when I would walk past, this boy about sixteen years old would look sternly at me. One day he opened the screen door and called me a nigger.

(Many years later while I was working for General Motors I had him for a foreman during the first lawsuit, for about a week. He called me into the office when I was placed on the Floor Inspection classification, after finding out that General Motors had discriminated against me and had transferred me to this job to keep me from claiming discrimination.

He asked in an upset voice how come I came in to work at four thirty in the morning. I told him I always work when the line works. He told me sternly he did not want me coming in to work at four thirty in the morning. Later I called the committeeman. When that foreman found out, he told me not to ever put my hands on that phone, that it was his job to call the committeeman, that I was to ask him to call the committeeman, and he didn’t care if it was ten times in one day. I told him I didn’t have to use his phone, that I could use the payphone. I told that man, Jack Pollitt, I wasn’t going to say this, but I will now. I was the young boy who used to walk past your house on my way downtown to sell papers, and you lived on Bluff Street, and you called me a nigger, because you didn’t like me walking past your house. He showed no remorse and looked at me as if to say, So what?

I told Judge Thomas Brown in my first lawsuit on May 30,1989, that Jack Pollitt called me a nigger for just walking past his house when I was about twelve years old. He laughed and said that was a long time ago, that people can change. Then a couple of weeks later in court General Motors attorney, William Schulz, asked Judge Brown to award his client attorney fees when he and the judge knew GM had lied. He awarded the company $9,624.60. Then he told me, This will teach you to go up against General Motors.)

After graduating from the sixth grade I attended West Junior High School and had to walk about seven miles to the school, which was located on the west side of town where most of the black families lived and went to school.

I didn’t have many friends, since my parents were of the Pentecostal faith and were very strict with us. I had to come home right after school unless I was out for sports. I had plenty of company at home, since there were seven of us children, five boys and two girls. After graduating from the ninth grade I attended Sexton High School, where most of the blacks gathered at a certain section called Coon Alley. I never did go to that area. I continued my wrestling all through high school, except for a brief period when I was a junior, just prior to going to the State Wrestling Tournament at Michigan State University.

I had a younger brother who would always start trouble with me, and then when I would respond he would call our mom. On this particular day I hit him and he yelled and my dad came running into the room and grabbed the antenna from the top of the television set. When I ran out the door he swung at me and broke the glass in the door.

I went to my mom’s sister’s house. Her nickname was Aunt Red. I explained to her what had happened. The next day, when my mom took my dad to work at the Fisher Body plant, I went home and gathered all my clothes and placed them in the suitcase then got my bankbook and withdrew all the money I had saved from selling papers and working with Dad, doing cement and carpentry work. He always paid us well for helping him. I went back to my Aunt Red’s house and told her I was moving down South to live with my grandparents. She wrote me a note and placed it in my suitcase and fixed me a lunch to take on the train. It was about February of 1961 when I took the train to Springhill, Arkansas. I remember I had to switch trains in St. Louis, Missouri. I arrived at my mom’s parents’ house at night. They lived out in the country about a mile from the closest house. It was pitch dark except for the light in front of the house and the stars and the moon.

I didn’t tell my grandparents why I had come back to my birthplace to live. One day I left the suitcase open so my grandmother could see the note my Aunt Red had sent with me, because I wanted to attend the school there. She saw the note and talked to me about it. My grandmother wanted me to stay with them and work, but my aunt, whom they called Sin, insisted I go to school, so Grandma let me go. The first day of school my aunt, whom they called Sis and who was the younger than I, drove the family car to the school bus pick up area. There we left the car and got on the school bus, which was full of all black kids from kindergarten to the twelfth grade, with a senior student driving the school bus.

The school was named Bell High School in Gurdon, Arkansas, about thirty miles from where we lived in Spring Hill. The girls were attracted to me, being from the city, up North in Lansing, Michigan, which made the boys jealous and envious of me. I realize it was strange: when most of the blacks were leaving the South after high school to find good jobs in the North, I had moved down South. I never told anybody why I had moved and nobody asked. I really liked going to an all black school with all black teachers, who were really smart and really nice to me. The school was named after Professor Bell who was the Principal and who had a son they called Junior Bell. Junior Bell taught at the school, and I had him for a teacher. The school building was made of brick and sat just off a country road. Inside it was just common, unlike the elaborate white schools.

A couple of times on the playground I had to prove myself in wrestling matches to get the respect of the boys. I was very impressive and was challenged on other occasions in wrestling matches where the boys would grab my back pockets and try to throw me, but none succeeded. I started eating lunch in a rundown cafeteria in back of the school. After I discovered there were rats in there, I did without lunch. After school was over for the day we would board the bus. It made numerous stops to let the kids off to walk home in the country before it got to our parking spot, from where Aunt Sis would drive the narrow red clay road the approximately eight blocks home. The road was all grown up with trees and brush where the old folks had once lived and died.

My grandparents, Johnny and Sally (Winfield) Mitchell, on my mom’s side of the family, were farmers. My grandfather was in World War I, so he got a check from the army every month. He farmed a well-off white man’s farm land in the bottom with two mules and a plow, and the owner would give him a portion of the corn and hay to feed the livestock, which consisted of two mules, several cows for milk and butter, a couple of hogs for ham and bacon, and plenty of chickens for eggs. They had a vegetable garden in the back of the house for food, and a well and a bucket for water, and an outhouse for the restroom, and a large tub in which to take baths. I remember my Grandma Sally wanted me to learn how to milk the cows, but my Aunt Sin said, No! Don’t make him do that. After that nothing else was said about it.

I remember every Saturday we would drive into town in the car that my mother’s Uncle Fred Winfield gave to my grandmother and his sister when he became ill and his mind would come and go. We would just visit with the sharecroppers who gathered in town to talk about their everyday lives. We had to say Yes, sir and No, sir to the white men and Yes, ma’am and No, ma’am to the white women. When I wanted to use the bathroom, my grandfather would take me to the train station where they had a special dirty, rundown bathroom for the blacks and a real nice, clean restroom for the whites, and an old, dirty drinking fountain for the blacks and a real nice, clean drinking fountain for the whites. I remember my grandfather asked me if I wanted a hamburger. I said yeah. He took me to a restaurant where we went in the back door into the kitchen and ordered a hamburger.

I noticed the cook was black. The whites were sitting down in the front of the restaurant being served and eating. The white folks would use the word, nigger, like they would talk to an animal. I remember there was a parade in town in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, and the pageant queen was riding in the back of a convertible car just smiling and waving at all the white folks but avoiding the black folks. I remember we went to a black owned store in Burtsell, Arkansas, and this white man who was wasting away with cancer and had an oxygen tank with tubes sticking out of his body came in. He was talking to my grandfather about niggers, and then he said something about my aunt’s father-in-law, who owned the grocery store. He said his folks helped raise those Buford niggers. My grandfather didn’t think anything of it. It was devastating to me how we, as blacks, were treated in the South. I started staying home when my grandparents and Aunt Sis went into town on Saturdays.

Every Saturday they would bring back a pack of hot dog buns and wieners and a half gallon of ice cream, which we would then eat. Every Wednesday I would get off the school bus at Smithon, Arkansas, in front of my dad’s parents’ house. They were Isom and Sarah (Alexander) Hudson. Every Thursday before I left them to catch the school bus in front of their house by the highway, Grandma Sarah would go back into the first bedroom and open the closet door and would reach into a suit coat pocket to get three dollars out to give me. Many Wednesday evenings when my Grandpa Isom would come in from the fields from plowing cotton with the mule and plow, he would take off his shoes, sit on a old wooden chair, spit snuff between his fingers and ask me about the different cars that went by their house and farm and I would say that’s a Ford, that’s an Oldsmobile, that’s a Chevy, etc…

I remember one Sunday my Mitchell grandparents with their daughter, my Aunt Sis, and I were going to church in another part of the county when they pulled the car into my Hudson grandparents’ driveway. I got out of the car and opened the gate. They drove past it, and I closed the gate again. My grandparents came out of the house and got into the car. On the way to church my Grandma Sally told my Grandma Sarah that she could help take care of Elmo some. She said, Your daughter is the mother of Elmo. My heart felt apart. I was hurt that neither of my grandparents wanted me to stay with them. During the church service I stayed outside as many of the menfolk do to talk with each other.

After school was out for the summer I was taught by my Grandpa Johnny Mitchell how to get the two mules from the pasture or corral where there was a running spring, from which they got the name for the county, Springhill, with its hills and red clay.

I was taught to back the mules up to the wagon with their bridles on and to place the harness on their backs and hook them up to the tongue and single trees on the wagon. Grandma Sally would fix our lunch after breakfast, biscuits and eggs or bacon and jelly sandwiches, and Grandpa Johnny would fill a jug of well water filled with ice and covered with a cloth potato sack to help keep it cool. Then we would hop in the wagon and I would drive the team of mules to plow the white man’s field from sun-up to sundown with a hour off for lunch when we would eat our lunch and drink the cool spring well water that tasted so good. Grandpa had six girls and no boys, so I did all the plowing while he watched me.

I didn’t mind the plowing. As a matter of fact I enjoyed working with the two mules and the plow with the straps tied together and placed around my waist where I could control the mules down in the bottomland. During lunch we would unhook the mules and walk them over to the creek so they could drink. Many times I saw Grandpa put his hands together and drink from the cool fresh stream of water. After lunch we would hook them back up to the plow and I would start back plowing the ground up to plant the corn. On the way home from the field the mules would walk really fast and most the time I had to pull hard on the reins to keep them from running. On Sundays after eating breakfast and doing the chores, we would sit on the front porch on the chairs and swings and watch the people go by in their cars on their way to the church next to the graveyard, and wave them. Grandpa and Grandma Mitchell both smoked pipes, but she also chewed tobacco.

I remember close to the end of the school year our eleventh grade class was going to an old lake to swim. I told my grandparents, and on the day we were leaving Grandpa Johnny came outside, reached in his pocket, gave me a five-dollar bill for the Junior Picnic, and told me not to tell Grandma. And that was all the money I received from them (except for those three dollar gifts my grandparents Hudson gave me. I found out my folks were coming down South in July, so I decided to go back home with them. When they came to visit their folks and my Dad saw me he just smiled and started talking to me. I went back to Lansing, Michigan, with the family. In September I started attending Sexton High School as a senior. Some of the girls thought I was a new kid in school and took a liking to me, but I really never got involved. I remember this one girl liking me in my geography class but I wasn’t paying her any attention so one day she turned around in her seat and looked me straight in the eyes and said, It really hurts when you’re in love with someone and they’re not in love with you. I was stunned.

I remember I tried to act so cool after coming back to Sexton. I used to go to the football games with a friend of mine named Roland Mcfadden who was real cool and was raised down the street from me. At this particular football game I drove my folks’ station wagon to the football game with Roland where we picked up this white boy then went to a drugstore. He stole a bottle of wine and we went back to the game. We all took turns drinking the wine. This was my first time drinking liquor and about an hour into the game I became intoxicated. After the game was over Roland and I got into the station wagon (an Oldsmobile) with some girls. I kept speeding and the girls were crying, Stop and let us out of here. We ended up at an all black elementary school named Lincoln Center where they had all kinds of sports and dances for teenagers and young adults. I was inside of the building, at that dance drunk. My first cousin, Barbara, was there and told my folks I was drunk.

I threw up all over the car and they wanted to take me down to Grand River to sober me up, but a friend of Roland’s told me he told them not to do it. When I arrived home that morning and knocked on the door, Dad opened the door with my mother and asked me, Boy what’s wrong with you? I said, I am drunk. He said, Don’t you ever come home like that again. I was seventeen years old at that time. My folks wouldn’t let me drive the car for several months. I was so embarrassed when I went back to school and all the kids were talking about it. What happened to you last Friday? You was feeling no pain. In my geography class the girl who liked me turned around in her seat and looked me straight in the eyes again and asked what were those bad reports she had been hearing about me.

Her friend touched her and she turned back around in her seat. After football season, it was wrestling season so I went out for it and made the varsity wrestling team. I wanted to wrestle at the one hundred and twenty-seven pound class, but the white coach wanted me to wrestle at the hundred and twenty pound. He said this would make our team stronger. I had a hard time making the weigh in. Many nights after practice I would go up the hill to West Maple Street where I lived, and would be so weak and tired from wrestling that I would go straight to bed. The coach had a white wrestler challenge me for my spot. He knew he couldn’t beat me, so when I pinned the wrestler the coach said in a stern voice, Lets see how you do Thursday night. After that I qualified, as I mentioned earlier, for the State Wrestling Tournament at Michigan State University.

My dad and my brothers, Rufus, Bradley and Edward, were there to watch me wrestle. I should have taken a State Championship, but I got beat by a wrestler I had beaten four to nothing during the regular season. The referee didn’t count the three points when I had him on his back at the bell. So I placed in the top four wrestlers in the state. I heard one of the judges say, Hudson is good, after I had picked up a wrestler and placed him in a pin hold.

After graduating from high school I attended Lansing Business University for a year. Then I filled out an application for a job at the Board of Water and Light doing manual labor. There was only one black man working there at that time and the white people were very prejudiced. One day I went home for lunch and found a letter from Oldsmobile asking me to come in and take an exam.

When I arrived back at work the truck was gone out to the jobsite. They had left early to get me in trouble. When I came to work the next morning the big wheels were waiting for me in the office and wanted to know about me not showing up for work. I told them I had arrived at the usual time but the truck had left. One of them said, How come you didn’t drive out to the job site?

I said Oldsmobile had called me to work for them, so I would be quitting there. They looked at one another and I walked out the door. That following Monday, August 28, 1964, I went for the exam. I was hired and was placed on the V8 assembly line in the Kettering engine plant. During the Thanksgiving season, in November 1964, I went down to the Capital Caravan Youth Center. I noticed there this young Mexican boxer named Rudy Gurreo who was a real good tough boxer. He wanted someone to box him; he leaned over the ropes in the ring with his gloves on. He boxed a hundred and eighteen pounds. I looked up at him and said, I will box you, so Dave Shaw, a boxer trainer, put a pair of gloves on my hands. After I pulled off my shirt and stepped between the ropes and into