Civil rights leader, politician, and head of the NAACP Aaron Henry was born July 2, 1922, in Dublin, Mississippi. Born in the age of segregation in the Mississippi Delta, Aaron was the son of the sharecropper family of Ed and Mattie Henry. After high school, Aaron enlisted in the Army and was stationed in Hawaii. He attended Xavier University in New Orleans on the GI Bill, becoming president of his junior and senior class and graduating with a degree in pharmacy. In 1954, Henry joined the Mississippi branch of the NAACP, becoming state president of the NAACP in 1959. He was able, more than any previous leader, to unite Mississippi Blacks, despite diversities of age, ideology, and class.He spearheaded the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) and the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO). Some activists criticized him for urging protesters to take the middle ground between the NAACP's conservative position and SNCC's militant activism. Facing recurring death threats, thirty-three stints in jail, and Klan violence to his home and drug store, Henry remained stalwart and courageous. In 1961, Henry put together a boycott of stores in the Clarksdale, Mississippi, area that refused to hire Black workers and discriminated against Black customers. He and six others were arrested for “conspiring to withhold trade.”
These charges were eventually reversed on appeal; while he was fighting another case, which he eventually won, his pharmacy was firebombed and his wife, Nicole, was terminated from her position as a public school teacher. Medgar Evers was assassinated in 1963 after taking Henry to the airport; Henry later said, “I have been making sure he didn’t die in vain.” The MFDP in 1964 chose 68 delegates to attend the state Democratic Convention. President Lyndon B. Johnson declared that they would not be allowed to attend, and the Mississippi state attorney general issued an injunction threatening to jail any of the MFDP delegates who tried to attend. After a three-day standoff, a compromise measure was accepted, giving only Henry and Edwin King the opportunity to vote.
Henry ran for Congress later that year, but was thwarted by state election officials for an insufficient number of ballot signatures. Soon, due to a dislike of the radical direction of the MFDP, he left the organization, creating the Loyalist Democrats and chairing their delegations to the 1968 and 1972 Democratic National Conventions. He eventually initiated a unification program with the national Democratic Party. Henry was elected to the Mississippi House of Representatives in 1982, holding the seat until 1996. He has been described as a "conservative militant," willing not only to risk his life, but also to compromise on issues of strategy even when doing so led to alienation from outspoken activists. Aaron Henry died in 1997.
Reference:
The Encyclopedia of African-American Heritage
by Susan Altman
Facts on File, Inc., New York, 1997