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. native.
Durant is one of many Washington 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 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.”
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.
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