Aaron Henry

Aaron Henry was born on the second of July 1922 at Dublin, in Coahoma County, Mississippi, to sharecroppers on the Flowers plantation. The all-Black county agricultural high school schooled him; the Army took him through the Pacific as a staff sergeant; and the GI Bill carried him to Xavier University of Louisiana, where he took his pharmacy degree. In 1950 he opened the Fourth Street Drug Store in Clarksdale — the counter where a movement would be mixed — and the young organizers of SNCC would call him, simply, Doc.

He co-founded the Regional Council of Negro Leadership with T. R. M. Howard at Mound Bayou in 1951, built Clarksdale's NAACP branch, and from 1959 held the Mississippi NAACP presidency for a third of a century. He led the Clarksdale boycott and went to jail for it — once chained to a garbage truck and marched through town; his home and his drugstore were firebombed; he did not stop. As president of the united front COFO, he stood as the Freedom Vote's candidate for governor in 1963, eighty thousand mock ballots proving Black Mississippi would vote the moment it was allowed.

In 1964 he helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and led its delegation to the national convention at Atlantic City, demanding the seats of the all-white regulars. The party machinery offered two at-large seats — one for Henry, one for Ed King — and the delegation refused them; Fannie Lou Hamer's verdict, "we didn't come all this way for no two seats," entered the American language. Four years later he chaired the Loyal Democrats' return challenge, and this time Mississippi's rightful delegation was seated.

The state that had jailed him finally elected him: four terms in the Mississippi House, 1980 to 1996. He died at Clarksdale on the nineteenth of May 1997, at seventy-four, of heart failure after a stroke — his own account of the years titled The Fire Ever Burning. Honored be Aaron Henry, who filled prescriptions at the front counter and freedom at the back.