Aaron Henry, born July 2, 1922, the son of a sharecropper, became a prominent Clarksdale pharmacist and a major early grassroots civil rights activist. He owned Fourth Street Drug Store with white Mississippian K. W. Walker, served as a local NAACP president, and in 1959 became president of the state NAACP, leading it for a third of a century and becoming a close friend of Medgar Evers. As an early Southern Christian Leadership Conference board member, he became closely allied with Martin Luther King, Jr. In the early 1960s, he led the Clarksdale boycott and direct action campaign, won national attention, was arrested, assigned demeaning work on a garbage truck, and saw his home and pharmacy firebombed and his wife fired from her teaching job. He worked to implement Head Start programs and improve housing and health service for black citizens, and he helped found COFO and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. In November 1963, he was the Freedom Democrats' candidate for governor in a symbolic election. In 1964, he led the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation to the National Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, challenging the seating of the all-white Mississippi delegation; when Lyndon Johnson proposed seating only Henry and co-chair Ed King, the party rejected the compromise, though Henry and King supported it. As a result of that challenge, an integrated Mississippi Democratic delegation was seated at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, with Henry and Hodding Carter as co-chairmen. Later he worked to build a strong interracial state Democratic Party, served in the Mississippi Legislature from 1979 to 1995, and as co-chair of the Democratic Party. A lawsuit he filed led to reapportionment and the 1980 election of a dozen more black representatives. As a state representative, he called for reopening the murder cases of Medgar Evers and Vernon Dahmer and protested proposals to close two historically black colleges. Aaron Henry died May 19, 1997.
