Hello, Neighbors!
This week, I’m offering a “Tale of Two Bancrofts” – one to provide important updates regarding the Bancroft Redevelopment site, and one to commemorate Black History Month.
DEMOLITION
As many of you are aware, demolition of non-historic buildings at the Bancroft Redevelopment site is going to be underway soon.
Below is the tentative timeline:
- Fencing installed around the property on Feb. 14 by the demolition contractor
- Demolition contractor is currently awaiting disconnects of utilities
- Estimated start date for demolition is mid-March
- Demolition should be finished in late summer.
LULLWORTH HALL
After years of Lullworth Hall sitting vacant, the Board of Commissioners is proactively soliciting Request for Qualifications and Proposals or RFQ/P to redevelop the site.
Details are available on the Borough website (www.haddonfieldnj.org). Sealed proposals must be delivered to Borough Hall by 4 p.m. on March 24, 2022.
Built-in 1886 by Charles Mann, Lullworth Hall sits on 1.06 acres and is protected by an historic easement, is part of the Borough’s historic district, and is listed on the NJ Register of Historic Places and the National Register of Historic Places.
BLACK HISTORY MONTH
This week, while doing more research into the history of Margaret Bancroft, I ended up learning about another Bancroft: Dr. Edwin Bancroft Henderson, also known as “The Grandfather of Black Basketball.” Sports historian, educator, administrator, coach, athlete, and civil rights activist, Dr. Edwin Bancroft Henderson was a pioneer promoter of African-American involvement in sports and physical education.
Born on November 24, 1883, Henderson was an honor roll student at M Street High School in Washington, DC, and a 1904 graduate of Miner Teachers College. He received an M.A. degree at Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in athletic training from Central Chiropractic College in Kansas City, Missouri.
Dr. Henderson had a long & distinguished teaching career in the black public schools of Washington, D.C. He studied physical education by attending the Harvard Summer School of Physical Education, where he was introduced to the new discipline of physical education and basketball. Thereafter, Henderson brought basketball to African-American communities along the entire East Coast.
Henderson established the first African-American athletic leagues (ISAA, 1906) and the first organization of African-American referees and officials (Eastern Board of Officials, 1905). Henderson became a player himself in 1908 by forming the “Washington Twelfth Streeters” at the 12th Street YMCA in Washington, DC and dominated competitive basketball on the East coast, going undefeated and claiming the 1909-1910 “Colored Basketball World Championship.”
For 25 years, Henderson served as the director of the Department of Physical Education for the District of Columbia’s segregated black schools. Among the many students that Henderson coached, taught, and mentored were Charles R. Drew, Montague Cobb, and Duke Ellington.
A prolific writer, Henderson wrote more than 3,000 Letters to the Editor for the Washington Post & other periodicals on civil rights and race relations. Between 1910 and 1913, he co-edited the Spaulding sports equipment company’s Official Handbook of the Interscholastic Athletic Association of the Middle Atlantic States, which chronicled the birth of organized sports among African Americans on the East Coast. He also wrote the first scholarly documentation of African-American participation in sports with his seminal work, The Negro in Sports, which was the first major study of black athletes and athletics, published in 1939 and revised in 1949.
Prompted by historian Charles H. Wesley, Henderson published The Black Athlete: Emergence and Arrival in 1968. In 1976, Henderson wrote The Black American in Sports, which was included in Mabel M. Smythe’s, The Black American Reference Book. This article was his last publication before his death in 1977.
Over the course of his lifetime, Henderson established a branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Falls Church, Va., and led the fight to end the segregationist seating policy of Uline Arena in Washington, DC.
Dr. Edwin Bancroft Henderson died on February 3, 1977, at the age of 93. Just three years before his death, he was inducted as a founding member of the Black Athletes Hall of Fame in New York City, which counts Jackie Robinson, Jesse Owens, Bill Russell, and Althea Gibson among its honorees. In 2013, he was also posthumously inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts.
Given the excitement surrounding James Harden joining the 76ers, and with March Madness nearly upon us, I hope you find the story of Dr. Edwin Bancroft Henderson as important to tell as I do.
