Contact: Zack Plair
STARKVILLE, Miss.— A Mississippi State University faculty member and author is scheduled to speak in Jackson Wednesday [April 27] on his book highlighting one of Mississippi’s most influential civil rights figures.
K.C. Morrison, professor and head of MSU’s Department of Political Science and Public Administration as well as a senior associate in African American studies, will discuss his book “Aaron Henry of Mississippi: Inside Agitator” as part of the History Is Lunch series, sponsored by Mississippi Department of Archives and History. The one-hour event begins at noon in the William F. Winter Archives and History Building, located at 200 North St. The free event is open to the public.
Sales and signing of Morrison’s book will follow his speech. For more information, contact MDAH at 601-576-6998.
Morrison also is a core scholar on the advisory committees for both the Museum of Mississippi History and the Civil Rights Museum set to open in Jackson in 2017.
“I’m delighted to be doing this for the History Is Lunch series,” Morrison said. “It’s particularly fitting to be talking about one of the sources who has been so important to state history and civil rights history.”
Morrison’s biography of Aaron Henry covers the life of a longtime Mississippi civil rights leader, from his childhood in a sharecropping family in the 1920s to his election to the Mississippi House of Representatives in 1979.
A World War II veteran, Henry used the GI Bill to earn a pharmaceutical degree from Xavier College in New Orleans before returning to his native Clarksdale to start a pharmacy in 1950. He founded Clarksdale’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and helped create the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which earned recognition from the National Democratic Party in 1968. He served as a state legislator from 1979-96 and passed away in 1997.
History Is Lunch is a weekly brown bag lunch program that covers a variety of Mississippi historical topics, said MDAH historian and public information official Stephenie Morrisey. She said Morrison fits in well with the high-caliber speakers and programs MDAH seeks to provide.
“Certainly this is an important book about a key civil rights figure,” she said. “We are so happy to have Dr. Morrison come speak.”
For more information about MDAH, visit http://mdah.state.ms.us/new/.
MSU is Mississippi’s leading university, available online at www.msstate.edu.