Beyond athletics, Henderson and his wife, Nellie Henderson, also an educator, fought against segregation discrimination in housing and education. Five years after they moved to Virginia, in 1915, the Falls Church town council passed an ordinance to create segregated districts within the town. Dr. Henderson, Joseph Tinner and seven other community members, formed the Colored Citizens Protective League, and started a letter writing campaign to address the council and this ordinance. Dr. Henderson and his wife, Mary Ellen, were members of the NAACP, in Washington, D.C., so, they also wrote a letter to W. E. B. Du Bois asking permission to start a NAACP chapter in Falls Church, Virginia. The NAACP headquarters advised that the organization had no rural branches. However, they were given permission to operate as a standing committee under the authority of the NAACP; thus formed the Fairfax County branch in 1918. Ironically, although the Hendersons won that initial town council ordinance spat, the council then ceded the Seven Corners area back to Fairfax County (because, Henderson said, "in those days Negroes were Republican"), but decades later unsuccessfully tried to annex it back, after it had become Fairfax County's largest single source of revenue.