Stephen Henderson (literary scholar)

'Stephen Evangelist Henderson (October 13, 1925 – January 7, 1997) was an American literary critic and professor of African-American literature and culture whose work was closely associated with HBCUs. He taught at Virginia Union University, Morehouse College, the Institute of the Black World (IBW) and Howard University, where he directed the Institute for the Arts and the Humanities.

His anthology and critical study Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic References (1973) is widely regarded as a foundational work of Black Arts Movement criticism and Black aesthetics, combining an extended theoretical introduction with an influential selection of contemporary Black poetry.

Henderson was a co-founder of the IBW in Atlanta, a black intellectual “think tank” created with Vincent Harding and William Strickland that linked scholarship to Black political activism in the 1970s.