[4] Henderson was born in Fitzgerald, Georgia, beginning his media career at eleven years old as a paperboy for the Daily Tifton Gazette.
[1] In 1964, the campaign manager for the Lyndon Johnson-Hubert Humphrey presidential election heard from a Democratic Party official about fifteen-year-old Henderson's involvement in civil rights and contacted him to arrange a meeting with Humphrey in Tifton; this led to Henderson's selection as an inaugural staffer with the federal Project Head Start, which began in 1965.
[citation needed] In addition to his 1971 undergraduate BA in Journalism, Henderson holds a 2006 MFA in English (Creative and Professional Writing) from Western Connecticut State University, Danbury.
[6][12] While at TriStar, he was one of three PR professionals selected in 1979 by the News Analysis Institute to receive membership in the “Over-100 Club.”[13][14] Henderson was said to represent “outstanding accomplishment…and his leadership in the creation, preparation and communication of public relations news.”[14] Shortly before TriStar was sold to Columbia Pictures and Atlanta-based Coca-Cola in 1982, Henderson left to expand his own media company, Henderson-Crowe Communications, Inc., which founded and produced Video Concert Hall on November 1, 1979.
Record labels featured music videos as “promotional ventures” for new albums, and Henderson secured rights to air them on national cable television.
[19] After the sale of Pre-Awards Special TV programming to Metromedia, the remaining assets of Video Concert Hall were sold to Georgia Public Television, including the studio equipment at Henderson-Crowe Productions in Atlanta.
[citation needed] Some disagreed with Henderson’s claim that the TV special contained no violence and no offensive clips, even though it targeted a mature, audience, specifically 18- to 49-year-olds.
Henderson was criticized for starting the AIDS Weekly newsweekly because the non-governmental publication included policy, research, and statistics that some considered exclusive to the government.
[35] In 2010, Henderson's NewsRx branch, VerticalNews China was the subject of a denial of service cyber attack as a result of controversial news that had been reported in the publications.
[33] Henderson was press spokesman for Kalani Rosell and his family during a Hawaii school admissions policy controversy,[12] in which Hawaii's Kamehameha Schools, founded to provide education with preference to students of native Hawaiian ancestry, admitted a non-Hawaiian student (that being Kalani Rosell) in 2002 for the first time in 40 years.