Born 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.

The life story of a sharecropper's son who became an industrial worker, a Communist, and part of the union and civil rights struggles. Hudson was honored with presentation of the key to the city of Birmingham, AL by then Mayor Richard Arrington in 1980.