Who He Was
As a young man from Washington, D.C., training to become a physical education teacher, Edwin Bancroft Henderson spent several summers at Harvard studying physical education and, in 1904, learned a fairly new game called basketball. Back home, schools and many public places were segregated by race, and Henderson was once turned away from a basketball game at Washington’s Central YMCA. He organized basketball for young Black players anyway, including a team at the 12th Street YMCA. That team went undefeated in the 1909 to 1910 season and earned the unofficial title of world champions of Black basketball.
Why He Matters
For about 25 years, until he retired in 1954, Henderson directed physical education for Washington’s segregated Black schools. He helped start the Interscholastic Athletic Association, an all-Black sports conference that gave Black students in and around Washington a chance to compete, and in 1939 he wrote The Negro in Sports, a book about the achievements of Black athletes. Off the court, he worked for civil rights and helped found what became the NAACP’s first rural branch, in Falls Church, Virginia. In 2013, he was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, and the gym at the Falls Church Community Center is named the E.B. Henderson Gymnasium.
