Aaron
Henry is one of the neglected figures of the human rights struggle, but one of
the longest engaged and most effective soldiers in the fight. He was willing to
spend his life hacking away until the barriers to a free Mississippi came
tumbling down, and Mignon K.C. Morrison showed how he did it and how much it
cost him. In Aaron
Henry of Mississippi: Inside Agitator, Professor Morrison gives us all the details of the endless
fights as the forces against him and the Mississippians writhed and struggled
to counter his and his cohorts every move.
To quote John
Dittmer, Morrison’s book represents a major contribution to the historiography
of the Civil Rights Movement. Professor Morrison has brought Aaron Henry to the
notice and understanding of a broader audience which has been in long need of a
counter-narrative to the widespread notion that one person cannot make a
difference. Dr. Morrison has shone the light of his intellect on this hero of
the human rights struggle who brought about such a profound change.
In
accepting a Lillian Smith Book Award, Professor Morrison observed as follows:
I
wish to express my appreciation to the University of Georgia Libraries, the
Southern Regional Council, Piedmont College, and the Georgia Center for the
Book, who organized this event, and, to the judges who selected this work for
recognition. I am particularly pleased to have Aaron Henry's life and work
associated with the profound contribution of Lillian Smith, a woman who
exhibited Henry's leadership and courage, in a time and place that was almost
boundless in its denial of voice to African Americans and women. So I am happy
to have an award that seems so appropriate in the way the lives of these two
resonate. Thank you very much for the honor, which owes everything to Aaron
Henry for providing a story worth the telling, and for composing a compelling life
that offers continuing lessons for a path to fundamental social change.
For
me as a political scientist, perhaps it was foolish to undertake this task that
might have been best left to an historian. Yet it was Henry's engagement with
politics and his vision for political change that seemed right. It fit with my
scholarly work in comparative politics, mostly identified with the struggles by
repressed ordinary citizens in Africa, Latin America and Asia to mobilize for
political voice. But what I learned along the way in the 15-year life span of
this project was that I had to employ a good deal of the craft of historians to
pull this off. In the end,
however, this project was an effort to center Henry's extraordinary
contribution in the historiography of social change movements among African
descendants in the Americas. Your
recognition gives me some confidence that the effort has been worthwhile.
The
story is there for your reading, so let me say just a word about the man and
the actual work. Henry was that rare individual who successfully combined
social movement commitments and formal political leadership. In the latter role
he nevertheless maintained integrity to the dictates of challenge and struggle
inherent in social movement activism. His success seemed inherent in his
original and enduring vision and method. He never separated social movement
requirements from political activism and, seeing no disjuncture between the two
was able to carry them both along from the start. Even as his NAACP chapter in Clarksdale
challenged segregated bus stations in the early 1960s, he simultaneously
managed a campaign that challenged the lily white Mississippi congressional
delegation. No candidate had run for such a seat since Reconstruction, when
Blacks were stripped of the franchise. He never wavered in that combined method
and vision in seeking citizenship regularity for African Americans.
This
product is first and foremost a biographical treatment of a man whose
contributions changed the trajectory of Mississippi, a state so long associated
with the most abject efforts to deny the human and citizenship rights of
African Americans. Aaron Henry, born in 1922 in the heart of the Mississippi
Delta, set a vision as a social movement and political leader to alter that structure
of exclusion and its accompanying disparities. Perhaps more than most others
who set out to bring such change, his vantage point in the core "Black
belt" gave him a better reading of the scope of the challenge. That
clear-eyed view resulted from the residual of plantation enslavement reflected
in the daily life of his sharecropping family in the Mississippi Delta. As a
precocious, sensitive boy he learned the lessons of racial caste and committed
to changing them. After high school he did a tour of military service, which
provided support for his later training as a pharmacist. With that training he
launched a successful business and commenced the social change work that
consumed him the rest of his life. This biography traces his mature life as an
activist, becoming the first among equals in the ensemble that wrought the
greatest change in the regularization of African Americans as citizens in
Mississippi history. For all that Mississippi was, is, and will be, the changes
he wrought offer a template well worth holding onto. His role in the national
scene also gave him significant influence in the broader civil rights movement
in the United States.
The
final point I would make about his life and contribution is about its longevity
and the broad achievement that made for. Now, in some ways his longevity may
have been accidental. Many people like him were murdered, harassed and/or
intimidated into silence. In his case, he escaped that fate to live a long
life, notwithstanding monumental efforts to harass or kill him. It afforded him
the opportunity to maintain the good fight until a natural death. No one with
such a progressive social change project had his amount of time in place or
endurance.
During this work my own personal story underwent
the most profound changes imaginable. The life of my wife, Johnetta, ended just
as a project, with which she also lived for 15 years, was about to appear. My
daughter, Dr. Iyabo Morrison, who joins me here today, and I have picked up
what is left following that monumental loss and move along. I do so, in
addition, with the most remarkable family, classmates, friends and scholarly
associates, several of whom are here today. It would take a long time to
communicate the depth of support these and the classes of 1964 (Utica, MS), and
1968 (Tougaloo) provide me. I thank them as I thank you
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