Milton Henry, 87, Lawyer Sought Slavery Reparations

BY Associated Press
September 18, 2006


The Reverend Milton Henry, a civil rights lawyer and black separatist who sought to create a provisional government of former slave states, including Mississippi, died September 9 of natural causes. He was 87.

Henry, of Bloomfield Hills, Miss., was a pallbearer at the 1965 funeral of Malcolm X.

He became the first vice president of the Republic of New Afrika, which sought $200 million in reparations from the federal government for the nation's history of slavery.

In the late 1960s, Henry and others tried to create their own black separatist country in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Louisiana.

A former Pontiac mayor, Walter Moore, said he spent nights on Henry's lawn waiting to protect him from death threats during the turbulent 1960s. Henry criticized Martin Luther King Jr.'s call for nonviolence.

He also fought for the rights of blacks who lived under apartheid in South Africa, according to friends.

Henry, who originally was from Philadelphia, graduated from the historically black Lincoln University in 1947, and earned a law degree from Yale University in 1950.

He was a Pontiac commissioner from 1954-60 and was a member of the Tuskegee Airmen during World War II along with the late Coleman Young, Detroit's first black mayor.
http://www.nysun.com/article/39818