She was the tenth child of thirteen children born to John Wesely Gates and Emma Laura Kirkland Turner.
[1] Winson quit school in eleventh grade when she married Leroy Cleo Hudson (died 1971)at the age of eighteen in 1936.
[3] In 1961, with assistance from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and Derrick Bell, the Hudson sisters started a lawsuit to desegregate Leake County schools.
[6] Hudson continued to be involved in lawsuits against Mississippi authorities in her fight to keep black schools open.
In February 1965 Winson appeared before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights to speak about harassment of blacks attempting to register to vote.
Winson started paying poll taxes in 1937 until it was no longer required after the passing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson.
[9] Winson began trying to obtain a voter registration card in 1937 and it was not until 1962 when she and her sister, Dovie Hudson, passed a required literacy test and were granted voting privileges.
U.S Justice Department sent Frank Schwelb to Carthage to investigate Leake County's voter registration procedures which also allow the sister to register to vote.
[11] Winson served in a variety of roles when Leake County's first Head Start Program which was established in Harmony in 1965.
In October 1978 Winson was selected as one of three black leaders from southern states to have lunch with President Jimmy Carter.
Winson and her sister, Dovie were featured in I Dream A World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America, a photo essay book by Brian Lanker.
[15] In 1994 Winson testified on behalf of Mississippi's poor citizens before President Bill Clinton's Health Reform Task Force Committee in Washington, D.C. Hudson published her autobiography in 2002 as Mississippi Harmony: Memoirs of a Freedom Fighter (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
It gives Winson Hudson's story in her own words, supplemented with historical information at the start of each chapter by Constance W. Curry; it includes a foreword by Derrick Bell.
Winson recalls the struggle of her early days as an activist: "It was a lonely walk", due to open hostility from the white community, as well as opposition from black citizens.