The College of District of Columbia has honored the “Grandfather of Black Basketball” with a statue, stories WTOP Information.
On Saturday, June 24, 2023, a ceremony was held to unveil the statue of Edwin Bancroft “E.B.” Henderson—a former pupil on the college—which was positioned simply outdoors the newly renamed Dr. E.B. Henderson Sports activities Advanced on the faculty’s Van Ness campus. In February 2022, the campus was renamed to honor Henderson.
The statue was commissioned by Brian Hanlon, founding father of Hanlon Sculpture Studio in New Jersey, who has garnered important popularity of depicting African American figures akin to Harriett Tubman and Georgetown Basketball Coach John R. Thompson, Jr.
E.B. Henderson II spoke on the occasion and paid tribute to his grandfather’s legacy, noting he introduced the sport of basketball from Harvard College to his group when he “acknowledged that it was uniquely tailored to folks of the African American race.”
“He didn’t be taught it only for himself. He realized it to unfold to the technology after him and the technology after that,” Henderson stated. “And he wished to put a basis for spreading the sport of basketball to African American youth.”
Ronald Mason Jr., president of UDC, was additionally in attendance on the unveiling and spoke to Henderson’s vital accomplishments within the sport.
“In a standard world, this man may have been something. He may have been President of the USA. He may have been a Fortune 500 CEO, however he acquired kicked out of the YMCA for being Black, however like most Black leaders, that didn’t cease him,” Mason stated. “He went on to do nice issues to assist his folks but in addition to plant the seeds for what grew to become the fashionable Nationwide Basketball Affiliation, however there’s extra to the story.”
“Like most black leaders, he wasn’t simply combating to assist his folks. He was truly combating to assist make the concept we name America this unrealized imaginative and prescient, the place all had inalienable rights and are created equal—he was combating to make that concept a actuality,” he added.
Born in Washington, D.C.on November 24, 1883, Henderson graduated from Dunbar Excessive College in Washington, D.C. and the Miner Regular College which is now UDC in 1904. He grew to become one of many first Black bodily schooling academics within the nation.
In what is taken into account his best accomplishment, Henderson is credited with introducing basketball to Black People in Washington, D.C., in 1904, lower than 20 years after the sport was invented. Thus incomes him the nickname, Grandfather of Black Basketball. He first noticed the sport whereas taking summer season programs at Harvard College. All through his profession, he was accountable for spreading the game to Black People from Washington D.C. to Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York.
He was the creator of the landmark ebook Negro In Sports activities and co-authored an annual handbook Official Handbook of the Interscholastic Athletic Affiliation of Center Atlantic States, which chronicled the historical past of the group of African American sports activities alongside the Jap seaboard.
After passing away on the age of 93 in 1977, Henderson was honored with quite a few accolades posthumously. He was inducted posthumously by the Naismith Memorial Basketball Corridor of Fame in 2013. Dr. Henderson was inducted into UDC’s Athletics Corridor of Fame in 2018.
