The renowned 1910, 12th Street Colored YMCA team. Edwin Henderson is holding the basket ball.
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[b. 1884 – d. 1977]

He first learned basketball in 1904 at Harvard University while attending a summer physical training class for gym teachers. Upon returning to Washington, DC, Henderson promptly introduced the game to Negro students in the segregated public school system there. It was the first time African Americans had played basketball on a wide scale basis, earning Henderson the distinction as the “Father of Black Basketball” and DC as the “Birthplace of Black Basketball.”

Henderson later formed the first all-black athletic conference, the Interscholastic Athletic Association (ISAA) and soon organized a basketball team for the local Twelfth Street Colored YMCA, which he led to an undefeated season and the 1909-10 black national title.

A year later, seeking more fans, Henderson successfully petitioned nearby Howard University to adopt his squad as it’s first varsity basketball team, which promptly won the Colored Basketball Championship, again going undefeated.

His life is the topic of numerous noteworthy books, papers and proceedings, as well as a doctoral dissertation. Henderson himself was the author of several seminal books about African American participation in sports, including his landmark work, The Negro In Sports (Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, Inc., 1939), as well as a regular contributor in the National Negro Press Association with pioneering magazines such as The Messenger and Crisis.

From the 1910s through the 1950s, Henderson played and coached basketball, and taught and influenced perhaps hundreds of thousands of Washington area schoolchildren in basketball, including many later luminaries such as Duke Ellington and Charles Drew. In 1973, Henderson was elected Honorary President of the North American Society for Sport History. In 1974, along with Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, Jesse Owens, Bill Russell and Althea Gibson, he became an inaugural member of the Black Athletes Hall of Fame.

Beyond athletics, Henderson and his wife, Mary Ellen, also an educator, were also determined and successful civil rights activists, fighting against housing discrimination in Falls Church, Virginia, and against segregated sports facilities in the greater Washington, D.C. area. Where at one time Falls Church tried to prevent the Hendersons from owning land in certain parts of town because of their race, now the local recreation center bears a plaque dedicated to Edwin Henderson’s legacy, and, in 2005, a local middle school was named after Henderson’s wife.

Scurlock Studios, Photography