Stephen Henderson (literary scholar)

Stephen E. Henderson (October 13, 1925 – January 7, 1997) was an American professor of African-American literature and culture, whose 1973 book Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic Reference is regarded as a seminal work. He is noted for providing the first formal interpretation of militant Black poetry, and, with Vincent Harding and William Strickland, for founding the Institute of the Black World in Atlanta, Georgia.

Biography
Henderson was born in Key West, Florida. He served two years in the U.S. Army towards the end of the Second World War, and then enrolled at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, where he earned a bachelor's degree in English and sociology with high honors in 1949. He went on to pursue graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin, being awarded a master's degree in English in 1950.

In 1950, he became a professor of English at Virginia Union University, which post he held until 1962, meanwhile obtaining a PhD in English and Art History (1959). In 1962 he took an appointment as chair of the English department at Morehouse, and from 1969 for two years was as a senior research fellow at the Institute for the Black World in Atlanta, before in 1971 taking on professorship at Howard University in Washington, D.C., teaching in the departments of English and African American Studies. He was director of the Institute for the Arts and the Humanities at Howard (1973–85), and also lectured in the US and abroad.

Henderson's 1973 book Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic Reference is regarded as a seminal work that has been "heralded as the first formalized articulation of a theoretical understanding of African-American poetry and sparked new debate and dialogue in the world of African-American literature."

Henderson retired in 1992 and died aged 71 at his home in Langley Park, Maryland, on January 7, 1997.

Selected works

 * (With Mercer Cook) The Militant Black Writer in Africa and the United States, University of Wisconsin Press, 1969.
 * Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References, Morrow, 1973.