Edwin Bancroft Henderson, 'father of Black basketball,' transformed sport
When the Brooklyn Nets take on the Cleveland Cavaliers in the NBA play-in tournament Tuesday, they will be riding on the wide shoulders of forward Kevin Durant, the league’s most prominent D.C.-area native.
Durant, who grew up in Prince George’s County, is one of many Washington-area basketball stars who have followed a path blazed by another District legend, Edwin Bancroft Henderson, known as the “father of Black basketball” (or sometimes the “grandfather”). Henderson, the first Black certified instructor of physical education in the United States, brought the White-dominated sport to Black America in 1907, a century before Durant made his 2007 NBA debut.
“Henderson and his contemporaries envisioned basketball — and sports in general — as providing a rare opportunity to combat Jim Crow,” wrote Bob Kuska in “Hot Potato: How Washington and New York Gave Birth to Black Basketball and Changed America’s Game Forever.”
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Henderson, who was born in Southwest Washington, went on to become a teacher, coach, civil rights activist and author. He learned basketball while studying physical education at Harvard University’s Dudley Sargent School of Physical Training. The school was affiliated with the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Mass., where James Naismith had invented the sport just a decade earlier. When Henderson returned to Washington, he organized a basketball league for Black players, in a city where only Whites had access to basketball courts or clubs.
“What’s sad is that more people don’t know the story of E.B. Henderson, who was a pioneer, a trailblazer, someone who was a direct protégé of Dr. Naismith,” said John Thompson III, the former head men’s basketball coach at Georgetown University, now vice president of player engagement at Monumental Basketball.
Today, community leaders are taking steps to raise Henderson’s profile. In February, the University of the District of Columbia renamed its athletic complex the Dr. Edwin Bancroft Henderson Sports Complex. The school also launched the Dr. Edwin Bancroft Henderson Memorial Fund, which will help pay for the renaming, a scholarship endowment and the creation of a permanent Henderson memorial on campus. The fund received a $200,000 gift from the Leonsis Foundation and Monumental Sports & Entertainment, the ownership group of the Wizards, Mystics, Capitals and Capital One Arena.
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On April 1, the Wizards named forward Anthony Gill the inaugural winner of the team’s E.B. Henderson Award, which recognizes the Wizards player most philanthropically active in the D.C. community.
And last year, Virginia honored Henderson with a state historical marker in Falls Church, where he lived from 1910 to 1965 and helped organize the NAACP’s first rural branch. Henderson also served as president of the Virginia NAACP.
After completing his studies at Harvard, Henderson tried to attend a basketball game at a Whites-only YMCA in D.C. in 1907 along with his future brother-in-law, but they were shown the door by the athletic director. Undeterred, Henderson started the D.C.-based Basket Ball League, where his 12th Street YMCA team went undefeated in 1909-10 in competition with local rivals and teams from other cities and won the unofficial title of Colored Basketball World Champions.
His playing days came to an end in 1910 when he was 27, at the urging of his new wife, who was concerned about his safety. Henderson’s work continued off the court, as he formed the Public Schools Athletic League, the country’s first public school sports league for Black students, which included basketball, track and field, soccer and baseball.
In 1912, Henderson moved to Falls Church, and soon he was taking on racial discrimination there, helping to challenge a local ordinance that restricted where Black residents could live. After a court ruled the ordinance unconstitutional, the Town Council rescinded it.
Henderson continued to challenge discriminatory treatment of African Americans, often through the many newspaper articles and letters to the editor he wrote over the years. In a September 1936 letter to The Post titled “The Negro in Sports,” for example, he touted the success of Black athletes such as track star Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin.
“Right here in Washington, it ought to be possible for a Jesse Owens, or a city-wide marble champion, or a Joe Louis to come up through the lists and tournaments,” he wrote. “When will the Capital of the Nation meet this challenge?”
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In 1939, he wrote a book with the same title, “The Negro in Sports,” which he updated in 1950. In the intervening decade, Jackie Robinson had broken baseball’s color barrier, and Black players had returned to the NFL after being shut out of the league for a dozen years.
“Henderson resists what might have been the high temptation to gloat at the sensational success of the Negro boys when finally they got their chance to play in the big leagues,” Shirley Povich wrote in a Washington Post review of the revised edition. “Instead, he pays tribute to the American sportsmanship that sufficed, finally, to provide equal opportunity.”
Henderson and his wife, Mary Ellen (Nellie) Henderson, moved to Tuskegee, Ala., in 1965 to live with a son, James H. M. Henderson, who was director of the Carver Research Foundation at Tuskegee Institute.
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“I never consciously did anything to be first. I just happened to be on the spot and lived in those days when few people were doing the things I was doing,” Henderson said a few years before his death in 1977, at the age of 93. “But sports was my vehicle. I always claimed sports ranked with music and the theater as a medium for recognition of the colored people, as we termed ourselves in my day. I think the most encouraging thing, living down here in Alabama, is to see how the Black athlete has been integrated in the South.”
Henderson was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2013, following a campaign waged by his grandson, Edwin B. Henderson II, a retired educator and local historian.
Thompson, the former Georgetown coach, said he recently talked to the Wizards about Henderson, and only one player, center Thomas Bryant, had heard of him. Kids today don’t know about his legacy, he added.
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“And I say that, being quite honest, I didn’t know about him until a couple of years ago,” Thompson said. “It’s one of these stories in American history that have been lost. We’re trying to shed light on his story and create an environment where more people can learn about his legacy.”
He noted that Henderson had coached Charles Drew, who went to become one of the nation’s most celebrated doctors, and mentored Duke Ellington, the famed jazz composer and bandleader, in the District.
“I owe you and a few other men like you for setting most of the standards that I have felt were worthwhile, the things I have lived by and for and wherever possible have attempted to pass on,” Drew wrote in a letter to Henderson, according to Kuska in “Hot Potato.”
“The thing about him that I hope will be inspiring to young people as they learn about him is just how wide of a net he cast,” Thompson said. “We’re talking about someone who brought basketball to D.C., but he was also a civil rights activist, an accomplished author.”
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Penny Greene, a D.C. basketball historian and founder of the website DCBasketball.com, said that when it comes to the tradition of the sport here — from D.C. native and Los Angeles Lakers Hall-of-Famer Elgin Baylor to Durant — “it all started with E.B. Henderson. He fell in love with the game because it was a mix of brains, brawn and teamwork.”
“He had swag,” added Greene, who played basketball at Parkdale High School in Riverdale in the early ‘70s. “It was something that intrigued him. E.B. got Washington, D.C., on fire at the turn of the century — got young people in love with the game of basketball.”
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