An Era Dies With Dr. Hudson : He Was Dentist, Lawyer, Banker--and Hope

Marcine Shaw was 14 when she left behind the rural poverty of Beaumont, Tex., for the projects of South-Central Los Angeles.

It was February, 1946, and she and her mother gave up their backwoods home for a unit in the Pueblo del Rio housing development at 55th Street and Holmes Avenue. There was no shame in being a poor black woman in a segregated housing project; Dr. H. Claude Hudson told her so.

“Leaders like him helped us keep our self-esteem, our dignity. We knew one day all this would come to pass,” said Shaw, 58, a senior deputy to Los Angeles County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn.

“We didn’t know the word role model,” she remembered Friday. “We just knew he was going to stand up for us. We just knew he was there.”

In one way or another, he was there for an entire community. He was their dentist, their lawyer, their banker, their mentor, their symbol of hope.

Hudson, who fought for civil rights in Los Angeles through six decades, died in his sleep Thursday at the age of 102. His death, many say, marks the end of an era.

“It leaves a heck of a void,” Shaw said. “Those pioneers have made their stand and gone, and there’s no one else there made of the same cloth.”

The son of Louisiana sharecroppers, Hudson founded the Los Angeles branch of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People and initiated movements that led to the integration of beaches, the provision of health-care facilities in Watts and the outlawing of restrictive covenants that prevented blacks from buying homes in white neighborhoods.

If it were not for Hudson, Ruth Washington recalled, her husband Leon might never have gotten out of jail, an especially dangerous place for a black man in 1934.

“I was really scared at the time,” said Washington, whose husband, founder of the Los Angeles Sentinel, was jailed for picketing outside a Woolworths store that would not hire blacks. “Up until the time he died, Leon was always grateful to Dr. Hudson. I can’t believe he’s gone.”

The day Hudson died, Washington added, was the 55th anniversary of the day he bailed her husband out of jail.

He never had to bail Rep. Augustus F. Hawkins out of jail but, the congressman said, he often kept him out of trouble.

“He was almost like a second father,” said Hawkins, 81, whose father was a close friend of Hudson. “I was the younger guy who wanted to do things hastily. He was the voice of reason that often kept me, as a young Turk, from going out and raising hell.”

Hudson didn’t even raise his voice, according to many.

“He always used to say, ‘You can’t win a war by yelling,’ ” said Joan Goward, 52, an assistant vice president at Broadway Federal Savings, which Hudson founded in 1946. “I never saw him yell at anyone.”

His dental patients said he never hurt anyone either.

“He was my doctor for 51 years. He pulled my first tooth,” said Armelda Jackson, 71. “Everytime he’d see me, he’d smile and kiss me on the jaw,” said Jackson, giggling at the memory.

She is one of many with lasting memories of Hudson.

Leon Aubry, 72, a barber who participated in several of Hudson’s protests, said: “Every time a white or black Democrat came to town, old man Hudson was on the program. Every time something happened in the schools or the colleges, Dr. Hudson was there. Every time something happened in the projects, Dr. Hudson was there.

“He was our leader, our strength.”