Praise Day for David Henderson

David Henderson

David Henderson was born September 19, 1942 in Harlem, New York City, New York, and was raised in Harlem and the Bronx. He will turn 84 on his “Praise Day,” when we will celebrate his life and art. 

As a teenager, he visited Langston Hughes; his first poem was published in 1960 in the weekly African-American newspaper The Black American.  In 1963, Henderson co-founded Umbra, both a literary collective and literary magazine with other Black writers and artists in New York’s Lower East Side, including Calvin Hernton, Tom Dent, Lorenzo Thomas, Rashidah Ismaili, Askia Touré, and Steve Cannon. Henderson began as co-editor of the journal, and later became the general editor. The last issue, published while he was living in Berkeley, was Umbra Latin/Soul, which he co-edited with his wife, the activist scholar Barbara Christian, and Victor Hernandez Cruz, the celebrated Nuyorican poet. The year was 1974. 

Henderson’s first collection of poetry, Felix of the Silent Forest, was published in 1967 by Poets Press run by Diane di Prima under the Kriya Press imprint, with an introduction by Amiri Baraka. Other books include: De Mayor of Harlem in 1970, Jimi Hendrix : Voodoo Child of the Aquarian Age in 1978, The Low East in 1980, a 2nd, revised Hendrix biography,  ’Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky in 1981, and Neo-California in 1998. Rolling Stone called his Hendrix books the “best rock’n’roll biography ever written.”  He also produced a 4-hour radio portrait of Bob Kaufman.  

David was an activist throughout his life, on both coasts, teaching and establishing programs at City College and Berkeley that espoused free education for all, mentoring programs as needed, and paved the way for the equal opportunity movement.  One of the great performers, you can hear him on the title track of Ornette Coleman’s “Science Fiction,”  and that’s his mellifluous voice singing on Sun Ra’s “Love In Outer Space.” David Hendrson became the first fellow of Lost and Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative from the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center and continued as a mentor for students, and a long-time collaborator, friend and presence. 

His children, Najuma Henderson and Imetai Henderson, will be present at the Praise Day.

David was a central  member of the Lower East Side community of artists. You’d find him walking the neighborhood at any time, day, night, morning, dusk, midnight. He said that his poems come from those streets. In fact, those streets are hallowed ground, paved by his poems.