Speech- "Aaron Henry Commemoration", 1999

Aaron Henry Commemoration July 2, 1999 @ by Julian Bond, 1999 Speech #3

AARON HENRY COMMEMORATION

It was a pleasure to receive this invitation; it is a pleasure to speak to you now.

I am particulary pleased to be here to remember and honor Aaron Henry - a son of Mississippi and a stalwart of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

A story is told about Aaron Henry and Ross Barnett, Mississippi's sorry segregationist governor. It seems that one day Doc Henry ran into former Governor Barnett at the airport in Washington. Doc took the Governor, who was by then quite old, to his hotel and escorted him to the registration desk. He explained to the clerk that this guest should be treated with particular deference because he was the former Governor of Mississippi. The unimpressed clerk look at Doc, and said "And I suppose you are the head of the head of the Mississippi NAACP!"

That, of course, is who Aaron Henry was - or at least a large part of who Aaron Henry was. They say that outside family and people, Aaron Henry had two loves- the Democratic Party and the NAACP, even if those two organizations didn't always love him back.

Since February of last year, I have been Chairman of the Board of the NAACP, the oldest and largest grass roots civil rights organization in the United States, overwhelmingly endorsed by Black Americans as the most effective organization working in their interest.¹

Next week, the NAACP will celebrate its 90th anniversay at our convention in New York. We could not be celebrating our successes over these many years were it not for the likes of Aaron Henry.

Aaron Henry joined the NAACP in 1941 when he was 19 years old

2 and a student at Coahoma County Agricultural High School, when a youth membership cost 50 cents. He remained a member until he died, becoming State Conference President forty years ago - in 1959.

Along the way he made choices that were not always popular but were always principled. He showed great courage, commitment and conviction. He also demonstrated great loyalty. We know that people close to him spied on the movement and set Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwarner and James Cheney up for death.

Mississippi produced Aaron Henry, one of the greatest freedom fighters ever, anywhere. It also produced and still produces today some of the most dangerous and dedicated opponents of justice and equality.

We now know, thanks to the opening of the files of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission funneled what was then Ross Barnett and the Sovereignty Commission funneled what was then hundreds of thousands of dollars - what today would be over a million dollars - to Washington, DC, to try to derail the 1964 Civil Rights Act.²

The money came from the same Yankee aristocrat who founded the Pioneer Fund, which gave us The Bell Curve, the most recent example of racism masquerading as science.

Some of you will remember another notorious Mississippi segregationist - Yazoo City lawyer John C. Satterfield. Within days of President Kennedy's June, 1963 speech calling for what would become the 1964 Civil Rights Law, Satterfield went to Mississippi to marshal opposition. The Director of the Sovereignty Commission wrote, "It was a thrill to see how the gentlemen at those meetings looked to Mississippi for leadership!"

Fast forward thirty-plus years to today - when some Americans still look to Mississippi for leadership - in the person of the Majority Leader of the United States Senate, Trent Lott. You know Trent Lott - who regularly fraternizes with the leadership of a white supremacist and anti-semitic organization, the Council of Conservative Citizens, which traces its bloodline directly to the White Citizens Council. Lott speaks to their meetings, praises

3 their goals and values, and hosts their leadership in his Senate office in Washington.³

Among his many gifts, Aaron Henry knew people. He loved people, and when he could, he forgave them their weaknesses. He was known for overlooking a person's bad traits in favor of that person's good ones. But, as Sam Simmons tells us, "The one person who I heard [Aaron] say was 'just no good' was Trent Lott."

Simmons said Doc Henry "could talk about all those Republicans and Conservatives, but the only one I heard him describe as just an excuse for a human being was Trent Lottt."

Aaron Henry - what a great judge of people you were!

We know the story Sam Simmons told because Connie Curry has interviewed him and many others for her forthcoming book on Aaron Henry - it will be called The Fire Ever Burning. Her book, together with others by historians John Dittmer and Charles Payne about the Mississippi movement, will help tell Aaron Henry's story.⁴

Even here in Mississippi, he is not as well known as other freedom fighters.

He may not be as famous, but Aaron Henry was just as formidable - we need to acknowledge his importance, not just to Clarksdale, not just to Mississippi, but to the United States.

John Dittmer writes, "Aaron Henry was among the last of that generation of black leaders who came out of World War II dedicated to cracking open Mississippi's 'closed society' ".

A few days ago, my mother sent me a Christmas letter my parents had received from a friend in the army in 1944. He wrote:

"... The recent elections posed a problem in the cases of men who couldn't understand how the election laws of their states kept them from voting. As one soldier expressed himself, "A man feel pretty bad getting ready to go across the water to fight to give the folks something his own wife don't have in Mississippi."

The letter ends by saying, " ... many of us have had built into us an understanding and feeling about democracy we never had before. That understanding is essential to the making of a good

4 soldier. The attitudes and outlook demanded of a soldier on the battlefronts far away must be expected in that man in his community when the fighting is finished."⁵

Aaron Henry was a good soldier, and for him, Mississippi was as much a battlefield as any foreign soil. Here in Mississippi, he was part of a nonviolent army which not only ended legal segregation but challenged segregation's morality as well.

'Army' is a good way to describe that cadre of women and men because they were at war, and as in every war, they suffered real casualties. But they also won real victories - at lunch counters, movie theaters, bus stations and polling places.

Eventually, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the army thought it had finally won the war.

But many, like Aaron Henry, soldiered on, understanding that the fight for freedom is a constant battle.

He was right, of course, as was the great scholar and activist W. E. B. DuBois when he predicted that "the problem of the 20th Century will be the problem of the color line." Now short months away from the century's end, one may easily conclude that it will also be the problem of the century yet to come.

We meet here at a time when the leadership of the House and Senate have become the running dogs of the wacky radical right, and are more hostile to civil rights than at any time in recent memory.

The signals are clear.

The new Speaker of the House of Representatives was a co-sponsor of a Resolution in the last Congress which would have eliminated all federal equal opportunity programs in education, employment and contracting.

The last Speaker of the House filed a lawsuit to keep racial minorities from being fairly counted in the next Census.

The Majority Leader of the United States Senate is that son of Mississippi, whom I've mentioned before, Trent Lott, whose segregationist roots are showing.

We meet in the dark shadow of Denny's and Texaco, of Hopwood

5 in Texas, California's Proposition 209 and Washington State' Initiative 200. Everywhere we see clear racial fault lines which divide American society as much now as at anytime in our past.

We meet in sad recollection of the murders of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming and James Byrd in Texas and Billy Jack Gaither in Alabama — innocents butchered because they were different. But their grieving families' response to this brutality gives us reason to be hopeful in the midst of all the horror. Matthew Shepard wanted to work for human rights; even as protestors spewed anti-gay venom at his funeral, his mother said, "We'll never forget the love the world has shared with this kind, loving son."

James Byrd's family has started a foundation in his memory to work "for more dialogue and more tolerance among the race."

Thus the picture we see is not without its brighter side. Taken over several decades rather than in snapshot moments, our portrait shows clear progress throughout this centruy. No more do signs read white and colored. The voters' booth and schoolhouse door now swing open for everyone, no longer closed to those whose skins are dark.

But for may, despite these successes, today's civil rights scene must seem like an echo of the past.

The removal of earlier legal barriers which underpinned apartheid in America consumed most of this century and consumed lives and passions too.

Many stand now in reflection of that earlier movement's successes, confused about what the next steps should be. The task ahead is enormous — equal to if not greater than the job already done.

Today we are three decades past the second Reconstruction, the modern movement for civil rights that eliminated legal segregation in the United States, and thirteen decades past the first Reconstruction, the single period in American history in which the national government repeatedly used armed might to enforce the civil rights of black Americans.

One hundred years ago, black Americans faced prospects eerily