Although Aaron Henry (1922-1997) was one of the nation's major grassroots fighters in the freedom movement on local, state, and national levels, his name has not yet been accorded its full recognition. This book reveals why Aaron Henry should be acknowledged, in the ranks of Fannie Lou Hamer and Medgar Evers, as a truly influential crusader.

Long before many of his contemporaries, he was a civil rights activist, but he preferred to stay out of the limelight. A certified pharmacist and owner of Fourth Street Drug Store in Clarksdale, he considered himself a down-home businessman who must...

This book chronicles the successful struggle of Douglas Conner to escape poverty and to provide advancement not only for himself but also for impoverished and oppressed blacks in his home state of Mississippi. In this poignant autobiography Conner tells of having to overcome the code that taught that blackness and subordination were interchangeable, though he never accepted it. His goal of becoming a physician provided motivation for continued hope. When he later attended Alcorn State University and then traveled north to Connecticut and Detroit and still later when he attended the Army's...