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 Aaron Henry of Mississippi is the unsung political revolutionary of the Civil Rights Movement. Henry’s story is that of a young man reared in the methodology of Booker T. Washington who grows into an activist, one who upends the assumed dynamic-paralysis of White supremacist Mississippi. Henry does so as a political innovator who develops paradigmatic-solutions through parallel structure subversion. President of the Mississippi NAACP, Henry also helped found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). The MFDP organized voter drives, parallel mock elections, rival convention delegations, and subverted the official Democratic Party of Mississippi – the most totalitarian White supremacist political organization in America – until it was forced to yield to Black inclusion and power sharing. The French radical theorist of insurgency Bernard Fall argued that “When a country is being subverted it is not being outfought; it is being out-administered.” Henry translated his agitation into a machine that out-politicked the segregationist political machine. White supremacists said Blacks were bad citizens and wouldn’t vote, whereas the MFDP showed that the most oppressed Black population in American would turn up to even mock elections if given the chance. Henry was a complex man who could be difficult to work with as in his disagreements with Fannie Lou Harmer. His sexuality has been studied by scholars of Black Southern down-low and queer history; this highlights Henry’s uniqueness as he faced the dangers of violent hyper-masculine and chauvinist racism when red-baiting was joined by gay-baiting as an anti-Civil Rights tactic. Sexual mores were far more restrictive than in the twenty-first century, and yet Henry survived politically. Eventually Henry was elected to Mississippi House Representatives and served fourteen years. Aaron Henry’s is an intriguing, messy, complicated, story worthy of greater inclusion in Civil Rights history discourse.

In Turkey and Bolivia, long-serving leaders who should have been term-limited have used the extension of their reigns to construct new executive mansions. Why? It seems an odd thing considering that the greatest republic in history, the United States, has had the same presidential palace since 1800, only enlarging it as necessary. But Evo Morales saw fit to build a huge presidential skyscraper that violated the height ordinances of Nuestra Señora de La Paz, the Bolivian capital. He had to hold a vote to overrule the height restrictions to build the 29-level Casa Grande del Pueblo. But what was the purpose, why did the Bolivian presidency require it? The same could be asked of Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, whose palace of 1100 rooms opened in 2014, in the capital of Ankara. The Cumhurbaşkanlığı Külliyesi or Presidential Complex cost over half-a-billion dollars. Is it odd that long-ruling leaders of republics are building great palaces like the monarchs of the past? In neither case is it a response to an apparent deficiency with the old residence. While both presidents trumpeted themselves as the herald of a new era, the projects appear to differ in historical direction. In Bolivia, Morales demolished the historic 1821 Casa Alencastre, an old residence of the Catholic archbishop, breaking with the past and pushing toward a secular Bolivian modernity. In Turkey, however, the use of the term Külliyesi is a curious one because it means a “complex” which is centered on a mosque, a clear nod to the Ottoman past and a break with the secular history of modern Turkey. Again, like old hereditary monarchs, these long-ruling authoritarian presidents have used palaces to cement their legacies. But should we be surprised? Vanity of vanities. 

I find that often a good idea can be explained in a paragraph. Problems with being a succinct thinker and explainer. However that does not make for good essays of blogs. Or could it? I’ll find out by starting new section called Plogs: paragraph blogs. Plogs sounds better the short blogs or “slogs”, either way this is the first one. I will write short blogs about topics of interests. There, that’s the message.