He was only 14 years old, it was 1963. He was going to Junior High School for graduation and had saved up some money. For him this was a big deal, it was the first time in is his life he was about to buy a suit in one of the well known department stores in Washington, DC called Garthickles. His father had given him the measurements and sent him away with the words in his mind:”Try it first before you buy it because if you once have bought it, it is hard to return.” He went to the men’s department, feeling sophisticated, proud and older than his years because he had earned the money he was about to spend on the suit. Out of all the suits lined up neatly in the store, he immediately knew what he wanted to buy. He picked the blue suit with black buttons and went to the salesman to ask him where the fitting rooms were. “I want to try this on.” The salesman just looked at him and smiled:”You know Nigger’s can’t try clothes on in Garthickles?” And then he started laughing and with him all the other customers around him. “I felt embarrassed and humiliated, it made me feel less than a person. Even though you could try clothes on you could not try them on because somehow you would soil them. That was the implication of it,” says Wade Henderson, remembering the incident that most affected him in his childhood. “This experience haunted me for much of my young adult life. And it motivated to push for change.”
Today, Wade Henderson is sitting in his office as the president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “We are committed to build an America that is as good as its ideas. We do that by lobbying on legislation and policy that advances Human and Civil Rights.” His wall is filled up with pictures of recent presidents and him. On the cupboard right next to his desk is a letter by Nelson Mandela, dated February 7Thu, 2005. Mandela congratulates him in person for the work he has done on the occasion of a project called “Voices of Civil Rights“. A project by the Leadership Conference and the Library of Congress that collects thousands of personal stories of people related to the Civil Rights movement. The project won the PeaBody, an Emmy and several other awards. Just as Wade Henderson himself. He won several awards, the latest on Fri. March 26 by the American Immigration Council. He received an honorary Doctorate in Law from Queens College of Law, and is a professor at the David A. Clarke School of Law in DC.
“I was motivated as well by the injustice that I saw around me. I could see a contradiction how the US was viewed abroad and what they did at home, and this encouraged me to participate in changing the system,” says Henderson while he is looking at the letters and achievements hanging at his office. “Washington DC was actually a sheltered city. It did not have the violence that one normally associates with terms in Birmingham, Alabama. It operated under a strict code of social engagement that largely messed the brutality of racial segregation. And yet it sucked all the oxygen out of me. I found it hard to breathe in a city that did not respect my humanity.”
He remembers a hot summer day, August 27th 1963. A day that motivated him in his early years to begin the fight for Civil Rights. It was the day of the March on Washington where Dr. Martin Luther King hold his famous “I have a dream” speech.” My parents had not wanted me to go because they were fearful that there was going to be violence. The local newspapers had warned the African American community not to go.” He went anyway, took his bicycle, drove down to the Mall and became one of a quarter million people, dressed up nicely, protesting for their rights. Henderson describes the atmoshpere as intense, peaceful and with a spiritual quality to it. “This event had more impact on my life than anything else.”
1966 til 1970 he studied sociology at the Howard university, where he not only met his wife but was in the center of a cultural Black revolution. It was a period of great awakening among Black students across the united states. “I was steeped in the culture of the Black movement. I was there when some of the great changes happening in the 60s.” He was inspired by poets of the Harlem Renaissance, the biography of Malcom X and books by W.e.b. du Bois especially “because he knew how to use his scholarship on an intellectual level for social change.”
He was about to finish is undergraduate studies and continue his studies in sociology at Colombia university when something else changed his plans. One of his professors, Herbert O’Weed, was one of the lawyers to defend Adam Clayton Powell in the case Powell vs. McCormack in 1969. He had been dismissed from the House of Representatives because he refused to pay a judgment. The former minister of a Baptist Church in Harlem challenged his dismissal and the case came to the Supreme Court. There were two other lawyers representing Powell in this case. One of them was Arthur Carnoy. “A little Jewish lawyer who became my mentor – a law professor at Rutger’s law school who had the audacity to challenge the actions of the committee. An extraordinary gifted lawyer who uses his skills for social change.” After Henderson had joined the group of protestors in front of the Supreme Court and the case was over, he went to speak to Arthur Carnoy in person. This made him change his mind. He now wanted to study law at the Rutgers University of School of Law. “I did not feel comfortable with challenging it from the outside anymore. I wanted to challenge it from the insight using law as a tool.”
During the summers of his semesters at Rutgers he worked for legal services for several Civil rights organizations. “Civil Rights was the watchword of the day. I wanted to use my skills for change.” And that’s what he did. After his graduation, he worked for the Council on Legal Education Opportunity, became the director of the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) and then the Washington Bureau director of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) before he became the director for the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights in 1996.
Charles Kamasaki, the executive vice president of the largest Hispanic advocacy organization in DC, the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) worked with Henderson together on several Civil Rights cases over the last years. “When I first came to DC and work for the Immigration issues, Wade was a central player in a small group of people who were working for. All the people working on Civil Rights issues had something in common: they cared a lot about in acting a legal immigration program, they were working together to bring out thousands of people out of the shadows, etc. What Wade made stand out was that he was probably the only one of that group who understood the intricacies of the legislative group. Wade taught us every trick in the book. He has a spirit of generosity, ” describes Kamasaki Henderson. He also speaks about his audacity to do things that seem impossible. “I remember one meeting, when we were meeting with Chairman Miller, and the chairman was indicating that he planned to do a markup on a legislation more quickly than we wanted, Wade stood up and objected and said: But we have amendments. And I am thinking: We have amendments? And unbelievably Chairman Miller looked at Wade and said: OK, would a couple of weeks be good enough?”
His wife, Marsha Henderson met him during his years at Howard where she was impressed by his intellect and drive to change something. “He is addicted to justice. He always gets up for the fight. There is never victory for him because it is never enough. Unlike most of us who get tired and say enough, he just continuously gets up looking for more.”
“There were a lot of moments that were hard for our cause,” Henderson says and speaks about the Hate Crime Bill that Obama signed October 2009. “It is big achievement, but it took us 13 years. It takes persistence to fight for change. Every year we got knocked out. But you get knocked out, you get up and you do it again, you get knocked out and you do it again. Because that’s how changes are made.”
