Elliott Blaine Henderson

Born in Springfield, Ohio, Elliott Blaine Henderson was an African American poet who later spent much of his life in Columbus. His books were often self-published, and surviving records show a steady run of poetry collections in the early 1900s, including Plantation Echoes (1904/1905), The Soliloquy of Satan (1907), Dis, Dat an' Tutter (1908), Humble Folks (1909), Darky Meditations (1910), Uneddeekayted Fo'ks (1911), and Old Fashioned Black Fo'ks (1913).

Henderson is remembered mainly for poems written in Black vernacular English, though his titles suggest a wider range of interests as well, from satire to history and character sketches. A bookseller's description of Uneddeekayted Fo'ks notes that the book originally included a photographic frontispiece portrait, which hints at how carefully he presented his work as an author.

In the 1920s, he also entered journalism and published The Columbus Recorder, an early African American newspaper in Ohio. He died in 1944, leaving behind a small but notable record as both a poet and a figure in Black literary and newspaper culture in Ohio.