
          Aaron Henry from Clarksdale
          By Long, WorthWorth Long
          Vol. 5, No. 5, 1983, pp. 9-12
          
          This is Aaron Henry and I'm from Clarksdale, have always lived
here. Born outside of the city limits on a plantation called Flowers'
Brothers. It's still out there. I grew up chopping cotton, picking
cotton, slopping hogs, milking cows, doing all the things that a
country boy does. No nostalgia, that's simply the area of my
beginning.
          When I was a youngster, going to school out in the country, white
kids were able to go to school seven months and black kids went
five. Now the rationale for that was the black kids had to help
cultivate and harvest the crops and do the work. Many of the white
kids were sons and daughters of the plantation owners.
          It was not right, from my earliest perception, that white kids
would go to school seven months, we couldn't go but five. That was one
of the things I worried my mother about. I also worried her about why
did I have to step back when a white person walked into a store
although I was there first and why couldn't I drink water out of
certain barrels which were marked for whites. But most of all I kept
on her case about the school months.
          One day my momma called me. She say, "Aaron, come here." She say,
"About this five months and seven months school deal. I want you to
know you my boy--and you don't need but five. The rest of them jokers
they go to have seven, but you my boy, you don't need but five." Hell,
I been cocky ever since.
          My mother was involved with the Methodist church as long as I can
remember. And the white and black women of the Woman's Society of
Christian Service--they were trying to Christianize Japan--often were
in our home. My parents were in their homes. When they came they
brought their children. I got to learn and to know their kids just
like their kids got to learn and to know me. In that way I developed
very early an understanding that white folks put on their pants one
leg at a time. I always had the feeling that there was no such thing
as white supremacy and black inferiority.
          Neighbors used to tell my momma, "This boy going to get his fool
self killed. I heard him talking to Mr. So-and-so and he wasn't being
mannerable. He says 'yes' and 'new' to white folks and he don't call
them Mr. and Mrs. He don't say 'yazzum' end 'nome.' You oughta teach
him better cause he's going to get hurt if you don't."
          I heard it often. Neighbors come into the house--and in those days,
grown people talked and they asked the 

children to leave. A lady'd
say, "Mattie, I got something I want to talk to you about." Momma'd
say, "Aaron, you; need to go outside for awhile." I'd listen and I'd
hear what they were saying.
          In my time when a child was growing up, every adult in the
neighborhood was his momma and his poppa. You messed up and they got a
hold of you. When your momma come home, they told her and you got
another whipping. So I was always anxious to know what they were
telling momma, cause I was kinda tough. I was doing what I felt came
natural being a boy: climbing trees, shooting birds, stealing
watermelons and plums, all those kinds of things.
          The major kind of resistance that blacks were engaged in as I grew
up had to do with the farm economy and the determination of blacks to
earn or to obtain what they'd earned. In many instances, the white
landlord at the end of the year had the habit of not dealing
fairly. Those blacks who stood up were often asked to move off the
plantation. They were singled out as troublemakers. And this is where
you heard the horror stories as I was a child, about how blacks were
misused by whites largely because of either their unwillingness to do
work that they felt was more and above the reward they would receive
for it, or their demands for pay for the work that they done.
          You remember the old black folksong, "When Do We Get Paid for the
Work That We've Done?" That's pretty much the basic reaction of blacks
toward white supremacy as I grew up.
          As an eleventh grade student at Coahoma County Agricultural High
School, we had a teacher, a young lady who had finished school at
Dillard and had done some work at Fisk. Her name was T.K. Shelby. She
was very much aware of the NAACP and black life. As extra reading
material she had our class engaged in stuff like The Soul of Black
Folk by W.E.B. Dubois, Black Boy by Richard Wright, and Strange Fruit
by Lillian Smith.
          Well, at the conclusion of our junior year, she encouraged us to
take out a membership in the NAACP Youth Convention--which at that
time was a quarter. And most of us did.
          Now that sort of ties into my further activity upon graduation from
high school and the next year going directly into the armed
service. The armed services in World War II, when I went in, was as
segregated and discriminated as any facet of American life. Black and
whites didn't live in the same areas, didn't eat in the same dining
room, didn't play on the same playground. We even went to the movies
on separate days. It was a completely apartheid situation.
          Those of us who had come into the armed services with at least a
smattering of a feeling that this was legally wrong often found
ourselves allying with the NAACP unit in the nearest big town. We did
basic training in Fort McClellan, Alabama. There was an NAACP chapter
in Anniston and one in Birmingham. That's where we participated in
trying to overcome segregation and discrimination in the armed
forces. We later were billeted in California. So I just can't remember
any time in my adult life when I was not involved in trying to
overcome the evils of segregation.
          Now ever since I can remember anything about black life, blacks
have always resented mistreatment at the hands of whites. Even during
slave ship days there were blacks who jumped overboard rather than be
slaves. And women who threw their children in the mouths of sharks in
the water rather than have them grow up as slaves. Any of us who think
that the phrases we are coining now, and the leaders that are on the
scene now, and the issues that we are dealing with now, that we are
the first persons of the black community to have the enlightenment to
do that, we are as stupid as the fourteen year old boy who thought he
discovered sex. It has been around a long time. Don't remember when
there was not a movement by the black community that said, this is
wrong and we are going to overcome it.
          But certainly the efforts of blacks in this state to have an equal
voice and a fair share of what it was, really goes back to an
organization known as the Black and Tan Republicans which was the
early voice for black freedom in this state. Before Roosevelt in '32,
I'm sure most of the blacks in this state considered themselves
Republican allies, because of the fact that the slave question had
ended during the time we had a Republican president in the White
House, Abraham Lincoln. The Republican party in the South continued to
permit blacks to participate, wherein the Democratic party became a
white exclusive club.
          On the event of the presidential election of 1876, which brought
together Samuel J. Tilden and Rutherford B. Hayes, when Hayes became
President of the United States, the end of the first effort at
participation began to erode because of the positions and the edicts
from the White House that he began to express. And all America became
energized about this segregation thing to the point where in 1896 you
remember that in Plessy vs. Ferguson, although
Plessy had ridden the Illinois Central Railroad train, every day when
he got ready to St. Louis and sat where he wanted to, in 1896 the
conductor came to Plessy and told him, "I'm sorry, but in this dining
room you've got to sit behind the curtain." Of course Plessy refused
to sit behind the curtain and was thrown in jail. And the Supreme
Court ruled in 1896 that segregation was the law of the land, when it
decided that as long as things are equal, they may be separate.
          Restaurants had an aisle generally down the center and whites went
on one side and blacks went on the other. Stores had a custom--if not
a law, to always serve all the white folks present before any of the
blacks were server! regardless to when who came into the store. There
were 

curtains on the buses which blacks sat behind and whites in front
as long as there were no whites standing. If there were whites
standing, the curtains were moved and the blacks who had been sitting
had to stand. Blacks rode in the front car on trains, right behind the
coal car with all its soot and debris. The whole system was geared
toward making things as comfortable as possible for whites, and as
difficult as possible for blacks.
          We lived with this damnable separate but equalness from 1896 until
1954 when another Supreme Court overturned Plessy
vs. Ferguson in Brown vs. Kansas. In the
school desegregation case which says when you educate children and you
separate them by race to do it, you commit an act that is "calculated
to warp their minds in a manner never likely to be undone." So then
America turned around to some degree in 1954, but it was around 1965,
'66 and some areas as late as 1970, before the integration orders from
courts and from the people themselves in the areas actually began to
take effect.
          White Citizens Councils were formed in response to the 1954
decision. The catalyst that ignited the White Citizen's Council was
the fact that in fourteen towns in Mississippi, immediately after the
Supreme Court decision, petitions were presented signed by more than a
hundred families in each area, calling upon the school boards to obey
the law and integrate the public school system. Well, the response to
that was that the names of the people who had signed the petitions
were made public. They were published in newspapers, put upon the
cages of banks and lending institutions. Most of these people became
victims of economic pressure, to the extent in some places like Yazoo
City, those who signed petitions Y were not able to even purchase food
although they had the money.
          Medgar Evers signed the petition for Jackson. Medgar was able to
maneuver in the Jackson area as he did because of the allies that were
there to give him encouragement and assist him in every way. Now you
might recall Medgar and I became involved in the Mississippi NAACP at
the same time. I was a part of a team that went to Alcorn College in
1952 to help encourage Medgar to come to work for an organization
known as the Magnolia Mutual Life Insurance Company, whose president
was Dr. T.R.M. Howard of Mound Bayou. I served as secretary of that
institution. Dr. Howard was also the- president of an organization
known as the Regional Council of Negro Leadership which was touted by
many newspapers as the home grown NAACP. And that was a pretty good
characterization of it.
          Upon graduation, Medgar agreed to come to Magnolia Mutual. He
worked for a year with us and the abilities of the young fellow were
so evident that anybody who came in contact with him immediately
recognized that there was something great in this particular
individual.
          The first NAACP unit in Mississippi was organized in Vicksburg in
1918, about nine years after the organization was founded in
Springfield, Missouri. In the early 1950's there was strong talk that
Mississippi needed someone to coordinate the efforts of fourteen or
fifteen NAACP branches in the state. Ruby Hurley, who had been invited
into Clarksdale in 1953 to help organize an NAACP here, had met
Medgar. Dr. Howard was very willing that Medgar go to the NAACP as
field secretary because this was a sort of
rising-tide-that-lifts-all-boats type of philosophy. Medgar understood
that every branch president must understand that you are to be enraged
and involved in those issues that make it possible for the progress of
the black community to come up to the standards that you yourself feel
that it ought.
          Medgar and I travelled over this state together a tremendous
amount. We had three real intimate years of working together, working
with each other, from the time I became president of the Mississippi
state conference in 1960 until Medgar was killed in June of 1963.
          We had gotten word that the Klan was determined to get both of
us. They were going to take us off one at a time. They were going to
flip a coin and see who went first. About fifteen, sixteen persons
were marked for extinction--Dr. Edward Stringer from Columbus,
Dr. Howard, Amzie Moore from Cleveland, Gilbert Mason from Gulfport,
Vernon Dahmer from Hattiesburg, Gus Courts who was shot in his grocery
store at Belzoni and after that he went to Chicago, and several
others. I guess that's the mark of effectiveness.
          You know I've made my peace with God a long time ago. By the time I
got involved in the NAACP, it had been my blessing to have finished
one of the major universities in this country and to have gone into
the pharmaceutical business in a way that I could give some comfort
and some relief to thousands of people who either had not had the
chance, that I had, or had not taken advantage of the chances that I
had. I have taken a position that I'm God's child, and I've never
really feared the difficulties of the movement. You know we've had
several things here. We've had the house bombed. The piece of tin you
see up there in the store now a result of the last bombing of the
drugstore. We do that to keep reminding ourselves as to what the
situation has been, and what it can be.
          To show you what justice can come to, I'll tell you a story that
begins in 1963. SNCC, CORE, NAACP and SCLC were determined to offset
the vituperation that was being expressed by Senator Stennis, Senator
Eastland, Jamie Whitten and other members of the Mississippi
congressional delegation on Capitol Hill. They said that if you give
blacks the right to vote, they won't use it. We decided that we would
put that lie to rest. We would run for governor.
          We organized the Freedom Vote Campaign which had as its main
instrument a little newspaper, The Free Press. Medgar
Evers, R.L.T. Smith, Bill Minor and several other people were involved
in the Free Press. It was the instrument that we used
to alert people throughout the state that the Freedom Vote was going
to take place.
          I also went down to WLBT television in Jackson and asked the
manager for the opportunity to buy time to run my campaign. He looked
at me and said, "Niggah, you know we ain't go'n sell you no time on TV
for no political campaign. We don't sell black folks no time."
          I said, "Well, I'm running and I came by to ask you."
          That night I went back to a mass meeting and reported the fact that
the man at the television station wouldn't sell me no time, and what
he had said to me. The National Council of Churches had a cadre of
folks in the state at 

that time from all branches and religions. Their
communications director told me, "I know you don't like to be called a
niggah, but I would like for you to go back down there with me
tomorrow. If this is the answer we get again, the United Church of
Christ will move to divest the station of its license. This is blatant
racism and is against the rules and regulations of the FCC."
          So we walked in the next morning. The cat looked over the room and
saw me and said, "Look niggah, I told you yesterday," he said yestiddy, "we wadn't gotn sell you any damn time, and
here you are back today with a damn yankee."
          I said, "Well, all right. I just come back to try."
          We walked out. The suit was filed. We fought it from 1963, won the
revoking of the license and finally the privilege to operate the
station in 1979—that's fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years of
fighting. The niggah that they wouldn't sell time to in 1963 today
sits as the chairman of the board of directors of that damn television
station.
          But anyway, when we decided to do the Freedom Vote Campaign in
1963, we set a date and put ballot boxes in churches and stores. There
was one here in this drug store. In all the places where black folks
congregated. And out of that effort we garnered the participation of
better than ninety-thousand blacks, who registered before God and
everybody, that if they had the right to vote then they would. And
this was one of the very strong pieces of evidence that we used in
arguing for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Ninety-thousand blacks in
Mississippi who knew that their votes couldn't count but who were
willing to cast them to demonstrate their concern for the right to
vote.
          
            The following autobiographical recollections of Aaron
Henry (born 1922 in Coahoma County, Mississippi) sketch his
involvement in the movement for black civil rights up to the formation
of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the Democratic
National Convention of 1964. Presented here in an excerpted and edited
form, this interview, conducted earlier this year by Worth Long, is
one in a series documenting the modern civil rights movement in the
Deep South. Worth Long is director of the SRC's Civil Rights Radio
Project.
          
        