In the spring of 1967, Louis Porter McHenry was living in Hopkinsville — he and his family very much in the thick of the Civil Rights Movement sweeping through the nation.
Among many things, he was a well-respected lawyer — an uncommon profession, then, for Black men — and was co-founder alongside Hal and Bettye Thurmond of what would eventually become the Hopkinsville-Christian County Human Rights Commission.
But a week after being appointed to the state’s Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, he died from startling health complications following a surgery — and was laid to rest in the Green Hill Memorial Gardens.
He was 52 years old.
Friday afternoon at The Bruce Convention Center, 57 years after his premature end, his daughter Linda Faye and grandson, named for his grandfather, accepted an induction into the Class of 2024 Kentucky Civil Rights Hall of Fame on his behalf.
A member of Koffman Junior High School at the time of her father’s passing, Linda Faye said the family was nothing but honored by the selection, but also called the nod “long overdue.”
And legacy, she noted, matters.
Sadly, Linda noted her father didn’t get to see all of the change he worked so hard to set forth — leaving behind so much unfinished business.
Ten months before his death, she remembered that Kentucky had enacted the 1966 Civil Rights Act under then-Governor Ned Breathitt — another fellow Christian Countian.
A native of Owensboro, McHenry organized a group known then as “The Progressive Citizens,” which brought about boycotts of Christian County businesses that would not allow Blacks to eat lunch at counters, nor hire them.
On June 18, 1963, it was McHenry who brought forward an ordinance to the Hopkinsville City Council — asking for the creation of a local Human Rights Commission. It was ratified and enacted one month later.
Dedicated to voter registration and education, he was the first Black candidate to run for national office in Kentucky’s 1st Congressional District — where he lost to Murray’s Frank Stubblefield, who would go on to serve eight terms.
McHenry was joined by four other inductees, in a ceremony that had not taken place since 2019: the late Helen Danser, of Berea, Amber Duke, of Louisville, the late Virginia Moore, of Willisburg, and William Davis, of Lexington.
