Poster for Aaron Henry, candidate for US Senator in the autumn election of 1964. In Mississippi in 1964 a second "freedom vote"—a previous one occurred in 1963—was held. For it, civil rights activists Aaron Henry, Fannie Lou Hamer, Annie Devine, and Victoria Gray ran for office. Campaigning under the banner of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, they challenged the power of the racist Democratic Party of Mississippi. The state's election commission declared the candidates ineligible to run partly because signers of petitions for putting them on the ballot had not paid the poll tax—an unconstitutional tax imposed on voting.[34] So, as was its predecessor, the '64 effort was a "mock" election. But, due to black voter turnout, the four candidates soundly defeated their opponents within the segregationist Mississippi Democratic party. (Aaron Henry received 61,004 votes compared to 139 votes cast for his rival in the Senate race.[35]) Gained was experience in, as one MFDP supporter noted, organizing "rallies to writing speeches, from debating political issues to using sound trucks, plastering the community with posters and bumper strips."[36]

Photograph capturing part of the context in which Aaron Henry and other African Americans fought for civil rights. Caption on reverse side of photo: "AP NEWSFEATURES PHOTO PLEASE CREDIT B-96596 (For use Sunday, May 17, with Relma Morin's APN story on integration) VIOLENT REACTION Violence has flared in South and North as the struggle for Negros' rights meets the resistance of laws and customs. Birmingham, Ala., stands out among cities in which the racial clash has been marked by violence and death. Starting in the spring of 1962, massive demonstrations by Negroes set a pattern which spread to other cities. In Birmingham, police dogs and fire hoses were turned on the demonstrators, and mass arrests left the jails overflowing. Here police dogs break up a demonstration in May, 1963 (AP FEATURES PHOTO) 1745-rw-5/8/64 fls sil 184." Photo credit: Associated Press Features Photo.

An action of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, with Aaron Henry as its chair, at the Democratic National Convention held in Atlantic City, August 1964. Caption on back of photograph: "(AC74) ATLANTIC CITY, [Tuesday] Aug. 25--NEGROES OCCUPY MISSISSIPPI SEATS--Four Negroes, apparently members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party, occupy Convention hall seats assigned to the Mississippi delegation to the Democratic national convention at tonight's session. They entered the hall with credentials provided by delegates from various nothern states and took the seats without authorization of convention officials. (AP Wirephoto) (see AP wire story) (rhs32200stf) 1964." Stamped on reverse side: "Sun Times Aug 26 1964." News service credit: The exhibitor believes the source to be the Sun-Times Media Group. Photo credit: Associated Press Wirephoto. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee chair John Lewis recalled, "That Tuesday night I watched from the convention hall gallery as the MFDP staged a sit-in on the convention floor. The white Mississippi regulars had already packed up and gone home rather than agree to a loyalty oath to Johnson. The MFDP's answer to Johnson's plan was to take the floor and fill those empty seats. It was a gesture of defiance, cut short by the security guards who arrived to remove them from the hall.[37]

 

Photo of Henry being prevented from entering the Democratic National Convention. Photo caption: "(AC80) ATLANTIC CITY, [Tuesday] Aug. 25—HENRY TURNED AWAY AT CONVENTION DOOR—Aaron Henry leader of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party delegation, seeks admittance to Atlantic City's Convention Hall for his group at tonight's session of the Democratic national convention. Maj. J. J. Harris, right, of the New Jersey state police denied entrance on grounds of failure to possess the proper credentials. Five Negroes carrying signs got in before the doors were closed and occupied seats assigned to the Mississippi delegation (AP Wirephoto) (rhs 32230stf) 1964." Photo credit: Associated Press Wirephoto.

Photograph capturing disappointment over the Democratic National Convention Creditials Committee's compromise regarding the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Photo caption on reserse side: "Although the convention accepted the committee recommendation neither delegation involved was satisfied by it. Aaron Henry, head of the Freedom delegation, is pictured glowering, as he walked to a caucus of his group in an Atlantic City church, where the delegation rejected the compromise offer. (AP)". Stamps on back: "Daily News [Wednesday] Aug 26 1964" and "Property of Newspaper division Field Enterprises, Inc." News source credit: The exhibitor believes the source to be the Sun-Times Media Group. Photo credit: The Associated Press.

"From the very beginning,” Aaron Henry commented, “I had been an 'uppity' [so-and-so]” in the minds of Mississippi whites.[1] But, “until 1962, most of the harassment and intimidation of me and my family had been . . . anonymous telephone calls and occasional verbal abuses on the streets.”[2]

Known affectionately as “Doc,” Henry was the son of sharecroppers. When he was growing up, he and his birth family labored in cotton fields.[3] (“As far back as I can remember, I have detested everything about growing cotton,” he subsequently remarked.[4]) After WWII, the US Army veteran trained as a pharmacist and opened his Clarksdale 4^th St. Drug Store. It became “the hub,” he remembered, “for political and civil rights planning.”[5] In 1959, he was elected president of the Mississippi chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Also, during that time period, as a member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he collaborated with Martin Luther King, Jr. After his pal Medgar Evers, the NAACP's field secretary in Mississippi, was gunned down in Jackson in '63, Henry became the state's lead vocalist and action figure for equality.[6]

His prominence brought danger. In 1961, when Clarksdale blacks were denied participation in the town's annual Christmas parade, Henry organized a boycott of downtown shops. It denied retailers crucial business. “If we can't parade downtown,” rally-cried protesters demanding voting rights and integration, “we won't trade downtown!”[7] In the midst of the lengthy boycott, his drug store was attacked and his house firebombed.

Henry was instrumental in politically empowering African Americans. During 1963, in a campaign called “freedom vote,” which he co-organized, he ran for governor.[8] (The following year, for a second "freedom vote," he ran again for office, this time for US Senator.[9]) The 1963 effort was a mock election held simultaneously with a gubernatorial election that excluded black voters. “Mock” it may have been, but it produced real results. When over 80,000 blacks turned out to cast their ballots, it evidenced that African Americans would vote if allowed to do so and helped pave the way to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.[10][11]

To break the stranglehold of racism on his state's political affairs, Henry, with other key players, formed the interracial Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which he chaired. In 1964, during what was called “Freedom Summer,” MFDP members worked to unseat Mississippi's “boll weevils,” the segregationist all-white delegation at the Democratic National Convention held in August.[12][13] Those delegation members, referred to as the "regulars," were picked through a process that illegally and systematically excluded blacks (and poor whites).[14][15][16] 

The effort to unseat the segregationists met with less-than-desired results. Democrat President Lyndon Johnson, who opposed seating the MFDP at the convention (and kept tabs on its members by illegally ordering their phones tapped and rooms bugged), feared alienating southern whites in the up-coming national election.[17] By mid-week of the convention, through pressure, which the President and his operatives applied, the convention's Credentials Committee produced a final compromise. Its purpose was to block a proposal to seat MFDP delegates and Mississippi regulars who would pledge to support Johnson, the party's presidential candidate. The committee's deal included seating the white regulars, while awarding the MFDP only two at-large seats—one to Henry, the other to white chaplain, Edwin King.[18] Others from the group would be allowed to attend the procedings as non-voting guests.

To gain compliance, enforcers of Democratic Party power coerced MFDP supporters. For instance, if they didn't go along with the compromise, one small business-owner was threatened with having a crucial bank loan canceled and another MFDP backer was informed that he would loose his government job.[19] Even Martin Luther King, Jr. was warned that funding for his civil rights activities was "on the line" if he didn't get on board.[20] Without consulting the MFDP, and before its delegates met formally to vote to reject Johnson's offer, a Democratic official falsely announced on-air that the civil rights group had accepted the compromise.[21]

On Wednesday, August 26, of convention week, MFDP members went to the convention floor, as they had on the previous day, but, this time, they found the chairs in the Mississippi section removed. (The racist Mississippi regulars had already gone home.) John Lewis, now a member of Congress, was then chair of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, one of the civil rights groups that supported the MFDP. About that day, he recalled, "And so they stood there in that vacant space, this tiny group of men and women, forlorn and abandoned, watching silently as Lyndon Johnson was nominated for president by acclamation."[22]

Regarding the compromise that shut out the MFDP delegates, one member, the renowned civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer succinctly declared, "We didn't come all this way for no two seats, 'cause all of us is tired."[23] Aaron Henry, who viewed the deal as a type of victory, nevertheless, later, explained why the MFDP spurned it: "Now Lyndon made the typical white man's mistake: Not only did he say, 'You've got two votes,' which was too little, but he told us to whom the two votes would go. He'd give me one and Ed King one; that would satisfy. But, you see, he didn't realize that sixty-four of us came up from Mississippi on a Greyhound bus, eating cheese and crackers and bologna all the way there; we didn't have no money. Suffering the same way. We got to Atlantic City; we put up in a little hotel, three or four of us in a bed, four or five of us on the floor. You know, we suffered a common kind of experience, the whole thing. But now, what kind of fool am I, or what kind of fool would Ed have been, to accept gratuities for ourselves? You say, Ed and Aaron can get in but the other sixty-two can't. This is typical white man picking black folks' leaders, and that day is just gone."[24] However, he felt that they “learned a great deal about the way things work up in the world of high-level politics—heartbreak and all.”[25]

By 1979 Mississippi's political winds blew more justly. That year Henry was elected to the State House of Representatives and served there until 1996.[26]

Because of his civil rights activism, Henry was arrested over thirty times.[27] But he felt that his arrest in 1962 premiered a different sort of scare tactic. He was apprehended and declared guilty of making homosexual advances toward a young white hitchhiker named Sterling Lee Eilert.[28] The verdict came at a time that, in Henry's words, “marked an interesting point in the history of intimidation of civil rights workers. No longer were bigoted officials satisfied with trying to brand us as communist,” a charge that was “getting old.”[29] “So they picked a new charge—one detested equally by whites and Negroes—homosexuality.”[30] Certainly, an ugly precedent had been set when, in 1961, risking life and limb to integrate Dixie-bound buses, freedom riders were gay-baited.[31]

Over the years, Henry would be arrested four times on charges of sexual involvement with men.[32] (This, even though he had a wife to whom he stayed committed.) While serving in the state legislature he lived with “Pedro” Erwin in a relationship that was hardly secret. The younger man often was noticed in the House gallery waiting for his legislator.[33]

Sources:

1. John Howard, Men Like That: A Southern Queer History (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1999), 158, http://books.google.com/books?id=q077jM9qDvwC&pg=PA161&lpg=PA161&dq=aaron+henry+arrested+homosexuality&source=bl&ots=SlyBxNXpce&sig=_WikrOaLXMy_7cSkf-ENfHhf_0U&hl=en&sa=X&ei=viHaUJnGDLLK0AHWqYCAAw&ved=0CDgQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=aaron%20henry%20arrested%20homosexuality&f=false.

2. Howard, 158.

3. Howard, 158.

4. Constance Curry, “Aaron Henry: A Civil Rights Leader of the 20^th Century,” Mississippi History Now, Mississippi Historical Society, http://mshistorynow.mdah.state.ms.us/articles/363/aaron-henry-a-civil-rights-leader-of-the-20th-century.

5. Aaron Henry and Constance Curry, Aaron Henry: The Fire Ever Burning (N.p.: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), 69, http://books.google.com/books?id=GXZM7oFIPxkC&pg=PA69&lpg=PA69&d.q=%22hub+for+political+and+civil+rights+planning%22+aaron+henry&source=bl&ots=F-XCeOw7Pb&sig=dfUlqWBOro8ixv2YrH8mNnQFs4s&hl=en&sa=X&ei=c_4PUYvJJ8Hw0gH7kYDYBA&ved=0CE0Q6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=%22hub%20for%20political%20and%20civil%20rights%20planning%22%20aaron%20henry&f=false.

6. Howard, 158.

7. “Aaron Henry,” Mississippi Civil Rights Project: History County by County, http://mscivilrightsproject.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=241:aaron-henry&catid=164:person&Itemid=22.

8. Mississippi History Now, n.p.

9. James P. Marshall, Student Activism and Civil Rights in Mississippi: Protest Politics and the Struggle for Racial Justice, 1960-1965 ([Baton Rouge]: Louisiana State University, 2013), [165], http://books.google.com/books?id=63tA6oI8_EYC&pg=PT152&lpg=PT152&dq=aaron+henry+senate+hamer+second+congressional+district++1964&source=bl&ots=-pmBBoDmT6&sig=Ng21R-y6UmO0msqKefANMIh6X2k&hl=en&sa=X&ei=gnN2UqDXJqa_sQSc-IDQBg&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=aaron%20henry%20senate%20hamer%20second%20congressional%20district%20%201964&f=false.

10. Mississippi History Now, n.p.

11. “Freedom Summer (1964),” Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Global Freedom Struggle, http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/encyclopedia/enc_freedom_summer_1964/.

12. Mississippi History Now, n.p.

13. Howard, 165.

14. "MFDP Challenge to the Democratic Convention," We'll Never Turn Back: History and Timeline of the Southern Freedom Movement 1951-1968, 9, PDF, http://www.crmvet.org/info/mfdp_atlantic.pdf.

15. "MFDP," 8.

16. "MFDP," 4.

17. "MFDP," 6.

18. "MFDP," 9.

19. "MFDP," 8.

20. "MFDP," 9.

21. "MFDP," 9.

22. "MFDP," 11.

23. "MFDP," 10.

24. [Aaron Henry] "Aaron Henry explaining why the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party refused the two seats offered at the 1964 Democratic National Convention," Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, in Ordinary People Leading Extraordinary Lives: The Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi, Mississippi Humanities Council and others, http://www.usm.edu/crdp/html/cd/mfdp.htm.

25. The Fire Ever Burning, 198.

26. Mississippi History Now, n.p.

27. Mississippi History Now, n.p.

28. Howard, 160. 

29. Howard, 161.

30. Howard, 161.

31. Howard, 161.

32. Howard, 165.

33. Howard, 164.

34. Marshall, [166].

35. Chana Kai Lee, For Freedom's Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (N.p.: University of Illinois, 2000), 109, http://books.google.com/books?id=gx2ZcDNUWAAC&pg=PA109&lpg=PA109&dq=freedom+vote+trounced+hamer+1964&source=bl&ots=duGtJPMco4&sig=2aGf3nhgV3VPKX5r1ECYdtEscvQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=iKh3UqK_K_fNsQSbj4CQBA&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=freedom%20vote%20trounced%20hamer%201964&f=false.

36. Lee, 109.

37. "MFDP," 10.