Aaron Henry qualified as a pharmacist at Xavier University in New Orleans in 1950 and opened the Fourth Street Drug Store in Clarksdale in partnership with a white Mississippian, K. W. Walker. By his own account the shop became the gathering place and the hub for political and civil rights planning for three decades. He founded a Clarksdale branch of the NAACP in 1953 and was president of the state conference by 1959, led the Council of Federated Organizations from 1962 to 1965, the umbrella that ran the Freedom Summer voter registration drive, and in August 1964 headed the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation that challenged the seating of the all white state delegation in Atlantic City. In November 1963 he stood for governor in the Freedom Vote, a parallel election run to prove Black Mississippians would vote if allowed, with Ed King of Tougaloo College for lieutenant governor. More than eighty thousand ballots were cast in churches, shops and front rooms. The reprisals were thorough and they reached past him. He was arrested more than thirty times, once chained to a garbage truck and walked to the jail. His home was firebombed and the pharmacy was vandalised and firebombed. His wife Noelle was sacked from her teaching job, and five Coahoma County NAACP officers were convicted of running an illegal boycott and given six months and six hundred dollar fines. Freedom Summer volunteers arriving in 1964 were met at the counter with a Coca-Cola and encouragement, under photographs of King, the Kennedys, and Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman. Henry sat in the Mississippi House from 1980 until 1996 and died in 1997. The drugstore burned in 1993 and the lot is empty.
Getting there
34.1986, -90.5716
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