Why is Aaron Henry forgotten? Plog #6

 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.