Edwin Bancroft Henderson (November 24, 1883 – February 3, 1977), was an American educator and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) pioneer.

[1] He often reminisced about Al Jolson having been one of his playmates, as well as how he watched racial segregation grow in Washington after the turn of the century, particularly during the Woodrow Wilson administration.

[1] Henderson became the first black man to receive a National Honor Fellowship in the American Association for Health, Physical Education and Recreation.

Shortly before his retirement from the D.C. Schools at age 70, Henderson also received an Alumni Achievement Award from his alma mater, Howard University.

[2] He married Mary Ellen (Nellie) Meriwether Henderson (1886–1976), also a teacher and civil rights advocate, as well as active with the Girl Scouts and League of Women Voters.

There, Henderson also learned the then-new game of basketball, which he introduced to other young black men at the 12th Street (Colored) YMCA upon returning to Washington, D.C.[6] Soon, they were playing teams from Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York.

[2][7] From those early years through the 1950s, Henderson also played and coached basketball, as well as refereed football and baseball contests and occasionally sparred in the boxing ring.

Henderson taught and influenced perhaps hundreds of thousands of Washington area schoolchildren in basketball, including Duke Ellington and Charles Drew.

After hearing the AAU Golden Gloves Boxing competitions were to be held at the Uline, Henderson encouraged picketing until Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post, withdraw his support for holding the event there.

Henderson also contributed regularly through the National Negro Press Association, including such pioneering magazines as The Messenger and Crisis.

Dr. Henderson, Joseph Tinner and seven other community members, formed the Colored Citizens Protective League, and started a letter writing campaign to address the council and this ordinance.

[9] Ironically, although the Hendersons won that initial town council ordinance spat, the council then ceded the Seven Corners area back to Fairfax County (because, Henderson said, "in those days Negroes were Republican"), but decades later unsuccessfully tried to annex it back, after it had become Fairfax County's largest single source of revenue.

[8] The majority of the letters concerned race relations and sought equality for African Americans in the United States as well as the local Washington, D.C., metropolitan area.

Today, the Tinner Hill Heritage Foundation and The Washington Post co-sponsor a "Dear Editor" contest to secondary school aged students in Northern Virginia in his honor.

[2] 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.

[15] In 1999, the Tinner Hill Heritage Foundation erected a pink granite (trondhjemite) archway memorializing the founders of the Colored Citizens Protective League (CCPL) which eventually became the NAACP's first rural branch.