In the summer of 1968, it was necessary for Gail McHenry to tell an Associated Press reporter that she wanted to be called a black woman, not a Negro, in a story about her selection as a Kentucky delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Many aspects of American life were being questioned and debated. Not the least of which was racial identity for a young woman from Hopkinsville.
The 1966 graduate of Christian County High School was home for the summer break between her sophomore and junior years at Indiana University in Bloomington. She was 19 years old and one of the youngest delegates headed to the convention. Just five years earlier, she had been among the first wave of black students leaving Attucks High School to integrate the two local all-white high schools.
Newspapers and magazines around the country carried stories about her selection as a delegate.
As she told the AP reporter for one story, her political interests were sparked, in part, by working with the Head Start program in Hopkinsville. That experience exposed her to “poverty and conditions that I didn’t know existed,” she said.
It was a volatile time politically — both for the country and for the McHenry family of Hopkinsville.
“As students, we were very active and looking for change,” Gail McHenry Walters told Hoptown Chronicle in a recent telephone interview.
“When I came home for the summer, I was a Robert Kennedy supporter, and then he was assassinated,” she said.
Her Hopkinsville friend David Thurmond, a white college student also home for the summer, encouraged her to go to the local Democratic meeting as a backer of Eugene McCarthy, the U.S. senator from Minnesota. She did and that led to the state convention in Louisville, where she was selected as a delegate at-large. (Thurmond describes politics and race relations during their youth in Hopkinsville for this oral history interview.)
Kennedy’s death, the assassination the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. months earlier, and ongoing protests over the Vietnam War, all fueled clashes and rioting in Chicago during the convention.
Ebony magazine carried a three-page feature on Gail, who traveled to Chicago with her sister Linda and their mother, Eleanor McHenry.
The year before the convention, Gail’s father, Hopkinsville civil rights attorney Louis P. Henry, had died. His burial at Green Hill Memorial Gardens caused conflict in Hopkinsville. He was the first black person buried at the local cemetery, and the McHenry family was harassed by people calling their home on the day of the funeral. It traumatized them, Walters recalls more than 50 years later.
Violence surrounded the 1968 convention, but the delegates “were sheltered” from harm.
“We had our hotel and we were bused to the convention site,” she said.
A steel fence topped with barbed wire provided a barrier around the convention hall at the International Amphitheatre, and the main doors to the hall were bullet-proofed, a 2008 story in Smithsonian Magazine described.
Photos published by Ebony showed Gail and her mother and sister walking near armed troops and protestors. The package also included photos of the teen delegate inside the convention hall. Then-Lt. Gov. Wendell Ford posed with her in a photograph.
“We all cast our votes to the delegates we were pledged to and then to Hubert Humphrey in the end,” Walters said.
Immediately following the convention, she told Ebony: “I’ll remember everything, including the treatment of people both inside and outside the convention hall — a treatment, a brutality that wasn’t much different from what black people have gone through for so many years in the South.”
The story was published in the magazine’s October 1968 edition.
A month later, Richard Nixon won the presidential election with 301 electoral votes to 191 for Humphrey and 46 for independent George Wallace, who campaigned on racial segregation. Less than 1 percentage point separated Nixon and Humphrey in the popular vote.
Reflecting on a lifetime of political engagement, Walters said she has not decided which of the 2020 Democratic candidates she will support. But she sees similarities between 1968 and today.
“I think Bernie Sanders probably represents what Eugene McCarthy did back then, and I understand the optimism of the millennials,” she said.
Walters, who earned her bachelor’s degree in sociology at Indiana and her master’s in social work at the University of Louisville, is retired now and lives near Fort Worth, Texas, with her husband, Trent Walters. He is a retired college and professional football coach. Her sister Linda lives in Indianapolis. Their mother, who continued to live in Hopkinsville after her children were grown, died in 2012.
(Editor’s Note: This story is the last installment in a four-part series for Black History Month.)
Jennifer P. Brown is co-founder, publisher and editor of Hoptown Chronicle. You can reach her at editor@hoptownchronicle.org. Brown was a reporter and editor at the Kentucky New Era, where she worked for 30 years. She is a co-chair of the national advisory board to the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, governing board past president for the Kentucky Historical Society, and co-founder of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition. She serves on the Hopkinsville History Foundation's board.
