1

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