Henry was born in 1878 to a poor religious family. He obtained a fifth
grade education before he began working on his family farm. By age 21, he
married his step-sister Mollie, and they had two daughters. In the summer of
1910 while working as a sharecropper, Henry was involved in a racially
motivated fight with several white men. Fearing for his life as well as the
life of his family, he fled to a small rural
area in Georgia. He changed his identity, and later married a young woman
named Patsy, and they had eight children.