First rural NAACP a response to threat of residential segregation in Falls Church
By Barbara L. Micale, Virginia Tech National Capital Region
The NAACP celebrates its 100th anniversary with more than 1,700 branches worldwide. But when the NAACP was 9 years old, the first rural chapter was in Falls Church, Va., when the now-metropolitan area was considered the rural South. On Tinner Hill, just a few miles away from Virginia Tech’s Northern Virginia Center (NVC) in Falls Church, stands a 15-foot pink granite archway. Erected in 1999 by the Tinner Hill Heritage Foundation, the memorial honors two men who, in June 1918, helped found the first rural branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP): Edwin Bancroft “E.B.” Henderson and Joseph B. Tinner.
According to the Tinner Hill Heritage Foundation, “The history of Tinner Hill is about civil rights, location, and a few brave people who defended the U.S. Bill of Rights. It is about hard work and perseverance. E.B. Henderson, Joseph Tinner, and numerous others who lived on or around Tinner Hill had to outsmart and outflank the leaders of this rural area and they did. Today, we all reap the benefits of this almost-forgotten battle, and up to the eighth generation of these families still live on the hill (in Falls Church).”
A nonprofit organization founded in 1997 by Edwin B. Henderson II, the grandson of E.B. Henderson, the foundation often relies on community involvement to sponsor a variety of annual activities that continue to honor the civil rights heroes of Tinner Hill and further the ideals for which they stood.
In 2002, officers of the Tinner Hill Heritage Foundation contacted Jim Bohland, vice president and executive director of Virginia Tech National Capital Region operations, suggesting a possible partnership between the foundation and the university. Beverly Bunch-Lyons, associate professor of history, was among those from Virginia Tech who met initially with foundation representatives to outline the goals of the organization and determine what assistance the university could best provide. Bunch-Lyons, whose research interests include African-American history, public history, oral history, women’s history, and historical fiction, had recently relocated to the National Capital Region from the Blacksburg campus.
“The group decided that the most pressing need the Virginia Tech team could fill was to conduct oral history interviews with members of the Falls Church community regarding the issue of civil rights,” says Bunch-Lyons. Assisted by Nakeina Douglas, a Ph.D. student studying race and social policy, Bunch-Lyons began interviewing senior members of the Falls Church community. Interviewees, most between the ages of 65 and 90, “shared stories of life, triumph, tribulations, perseverance, and perhaps most importantly, a love of their community,” says Bunch-Lyons.
More than 50 oral histories help depict what life was like for African Americans in Falls Church, basically a farming community in the early 1900s. The histories include family remembrances like these: “My father taught me to treat people like you want to be treated; don’t let anyone put you down” and “My brother was a paperboy. He got his first new bike by delivering papers.”
And they include stories about segregation and fighting for basic civil rights. Some tell about the first members of their families to attend a desegregated school. And there are still a few who can recall how E.B. Henderson’s father, William Henderson, was forcibly removed from a Falls Church railroad car on its way to Washington, D.C., when a white segregationist wanted his seat. E.B. Henderson secured the legal services of Jacob DuPutron, a prominent white Falls Church lawyer, who had been present at the time of the incident. The younger Henderson and DuPutron successfully won the court case, and the lawyer was later hung in effigy from an east Falls Church light pole.
According to Bunch-Lyons, there are some apparent conclusions that can be drawn from the oral histories. Because of its proximity to Washington, D.C., the African-American community in Falls Church was unique and diverse. While there was a significant population of blue- collar workers and tradesmen, including masons (like Tinner), carpenters, and ditch diggers, Falls Church was also home to an affluent, educated middle class (like Henderson and his wife), that included teachers, preachers, and physicians who tended to be less tolerant of racial disparities. It is not surprising then, said Bunch-Lyons, that civil rights is at the forefront of Tinner Hill history and that Tinner Hill is the site of the first rural chapter of the NAACP.
Virginia Tech National Capital Region operations provided seed money to get the oral history project underway in 2002, and in 2008, provided additional funds to complete the project. The Department of History also provided funds to support the Tinner Hill project.
In 2005, Bunch-Lyons and Douglas were recipients of the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences Summer Graduate Diversity Fellowship and presented their work at the Annual Service Learning Conference on “The University and Community Engagement” at the Blacksburg campus during the summer of 2006.
In September 2008, Bunch-Lyons delivered the completed oral histories on digital media to the Tinner Hill Heritage Foundation. Preserving the interviews in this format will help ensure that the personal accounts from those who resided in the Tinner Hill for generations will be available for many generations to come, says Bunch-Lyons.
“In the course of conducting these oral histories, I spoke to many descendants who expressed great pride in the activism of their ancestors,” she says. “I was drawn to the stories of Tinner and Henderson and, like their living relatives, recognized the historical significance of these stories, both locally and nationally.”
Tinner and Henderson
Tinner was a respected stone mason who built many homes and businesses in Falls Church. His specialty was the Gothic arch. He was a deeply religious man and known for his powerful oratory. Tinner often represented the African-American community, speaking tirelessly before the Falls Church Town Council, church groups, and other organizations throughout Northern Virginia. His leadership in civil rights, which continued until his early death in 1928, made him a target for both the Ku Klux Klan and the segregationists in the ruling town council. The granite used for building the archway on Tinner Hill was taken from the Tinner family quarry at the bottom of the hill.
Henderson, an educator and civil rights leader working in Washington, D.C., lived in the Falls Church community for more than 50 years. The first African-American male certified to teach physical education in public schools, Henderson’s first foray into fighting for equal rights was in the field of athletics. Until his death in 1977, he worked tirelessly to establish equal rights and opportunities for black athletes. He was the first to introduce basketball to African Americans on a wide-scale, organized basis in the Washington, D.C. — and then the East Coast — area, and later wrote the first scholarly book on African-American athletes. He also initiated the Inter-Scholastic Athletic Association of Middle Atlantic States, the Pubic School Athletic League, and the Eastern Board of Officials for Black Athletics, all organizing bodies for African-American sports.
More than 3,000 of Henderson’s letters to the editor on civil rights issues as they related to African Americans — from voting rights to school integration — were published in The Washington Post, providing a rich resource to historians and, now, an inspiration to students. Virginia Tech faculty members and staff have served as judges for an annual “Dear Editor” contest open to middle- and high-school students. Students respond in letter-to-the-editor form to a published article of their choice that describes either a denial of civil rights to a minority ethnic group or an acceptance of multicultural differences and how this has improved life in a community. The contest is sponsored by the Tinner Hill Heritage Foundation, The Washington Post, and Diener and Associates CPAs, as a tribute to E.B. Henderson.
Nikki Graves Henderson, Tinner Hill Heritage Foundation acting director, relates that Mary Ellen Henderson, the wife of E.B. Henderson and daughter of early Washington, D.C. racial activists, also used logic and publicity to have the first new school built for African Americans in the Fairfax County area.
In 1919, Mary Ellen Henderson became teacher and principal at an overcrowded two-room school house that lacked central heat, running water, and indoor toilets. Nearby, white students enjoyed a brick building with running water, indoor toilets, central heat, and first-class school materials. For almost 20 years, she constantly appealed to the school administration to build a new school for her students. In 1938, she changed her tactics. She did a disparity study revealing that 97.3 cents of each taxpayer education dollar went to educate white students while 2.7 cents went toward educating black students. After the study was widely published, Henderson was able to mobilize an interracial group of parents and supporters. Finally, in 1948, a new school, the James Lee School (built on land donated by an African-American landowner) was opened for African-American students. In recognition of her accomplishments, in 2005, the first new school built in Falls Church in more than 50 years was named the Mary Ellen Henderson Middle School.
As Bunch-Lyons learned more about Tinner and Henderson, she decided, with research assistance from Nakeina Douglas, “to produce an essay that would recognize these leaders’ contributions to civil rights history at the local, state, and national levels.”
In researching the paper, she found that the history of how this branch was established, and its multiple contributions to civil rights, was largely undocumented. Relying on old newspapers, the oral history interviews, and a few archival records, Bunch-Lyons was able to document how, in 1915, elected officials in Falls Church passed an ordinance that relegated blacks to a small section in town. Faced with the threat of the segregation ordinance, Tinner and Henderson called a meeting of the Falls Church Colored Citizens Protective League (CCPL) and led the struggle against residential segregation by filing a lawsuit that eventually led to the demise of the ordinance in 1917. In June 1918, the Falls Church and Vicinity Branch of the NAACP was formally chartered, becoming the first rural branch of the NAACP in the United States. Tinner and Henderson retained their titles of president and secretary (respectively) that they had held in the CCPL.
“Until the Falls Church branch was chartered, the NAACP organized exclusively in urban areas,” Bunch-Lyons says. “The Falls Church and Vicinity Branch paved the way for NAACP branches across the rural south.”
Bunch-Lyons presented the paper she and Douglas wrote, “Remembering Tinner Hill: Site of the First Rural Chapter of the NAACP,” in 2005 at the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, in Buffalo, N.Y. After presenting the paper, Bunch-Lyons accepted a request from Kevern J. Verney, professor of American history, and Lee Sartain, post-doctoral fellow at that time, both at Edge Hill College of Higher Education, Lancashire, U.K, to author a chapter for a collection of essays they were editing on the history of the NAACP by leading scholars in the field. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP): A Centenary Assessment (University of Arkansas Press) will be published in the fall of 2009 to coincide with the Centennial NAACP celebration, which began in January 2009. Bunch-Lyons asked Douglas, now an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, to be the second author on the chapter, “The Falls Church, Virginia, Colored Citizens Protective League and the Establishment of Virginia’s First Rural Branch of the NAACP.” The book is divided into two sections. The first part examines the work of the NAACP at the national level from 1910 through the end of the 1960s. The second part is made up of studies on the work of the association at state and local levels. The two sections complement each other by showing how national initiatives impacted on local activists and by examining the complicated, and at times difficult, relationships between the NAACP headquarters in New York and its grassroots organization.
Bunch-Lyons and Douglas did research for the book chapter for about a year and a half, using figures from the U.S. Census Bureau; news clippings, letters, flyers, and other information related to the CCPL in Falls Church and the NAACP compiled by the Tinner Hill Heritage Foundation; documents in the National Archives; and a number of books pertaining to African-American migration and civil rights issues.
“The NAACP centennial reminds us of the strides made by civil rights organizations, leaders, and just common folk who pressed their communities, government, and country to live up to the promises of equality for all citizens,” says Bunch-Lyons. “The refusal of a small African-American community in Tinner Hill in the city of Falls Church to accept second-class citizenship is an important part of the civil rights legacy that evolved into the paper-and-pen protests of the NAACP.”
