Neal Henderson couldn’t find a place to teach his son to play hockey. A native of St. Croix who fell in love with the sport while growing up in Canada, he relocated to the suburbs of Washington, D.C., early in the 1970s, when the city didn’t have a public hockey rink. So the former minor leaguer resorted to a makeshift setup in his driveway. Before long, boys from around the neighborhood joined in. They were an odd crew then. The NHL was still lily-white. Henderson, who is black, was teaching the sport to a mixture of young African-Americans, Latinos, Africans, and Indians. One day in 1976, Henderson’s son came to his father with a question. “Dad, why don’t you...
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