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. Dr. Henderson also twice served as President of the NAACP's Virginia Council, from 1955 to 1958, the height of Massive Resistance declared by Virginia's political boss (and U.S. Senator) Harry F. Byrd, Sr. after the U.S. Supreme Court decisions in Brown v. Board of Education. In addition to the portions of the Stanley Plan that sought to maintain racial segregation in schools (and that were declared unconstitutional by a three-judge federal panel as well as by the Virginia Supreme Court on January 19, 1959), Virginia Governors Thomas B. Stanley and later J. Lindsay Almond and the Virginia Assembly attempted to harass and dismantle the NAACP in the Commonwealth during Henderson's presidency. E. B. Henderson also wrote many letters to the editor, especially after his retirement, to local newspapers in Washington, D.C. and Virginia. He claimed to have had more than 3,000 letters published in over a dozen newspapers. The majority of the letters concerned race relations and sought equality for African Americans in the United States as well as the local Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. Today, the Tinner Hill Heritage Foundation and The Washington Post co-sponsor a "Dear Editor" contest to secondary school aged students in Northern Virginia in his honor. Death and legacy Henderson died of cancer in 1977, at age 93, at his son's home in Tuskegee, Alabama. He survived his beloved wife of 63 years by one year. They were both cremated and their ashes interred in Woodlawn Cemetery. They were survived by their sons, five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, as well as by his sister, Mrs. Annie H. Briggs of Falls Church, Virginia. His papers are held at Howard University's Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. During his lifetime, Henderson received some recognition, apart from an elaborate sendoff from his Second Baptist Church of