The first Black travel agency flourished, overcoming immense challenges

06.03.2024 - 14:03 / travelweekly.com / Christian Dior / Airlines

In the 1950s, it was far from easy for a Black woman in the American South to get the proper accreditations to issue airline tickets and operate a travel agency.

But based on the late Freddye Scarborough Henderson's handwritten notes, kept by her daughter Gaynelle, a bit of luck was on her side. Thanks to a more masculine sounding first name, and the English-sounding Scarborough, Freddye believed that issuing authorities thought she was a white man. She and her husband, Jacob Robert Henderson, opened Henderson Travel Service in Atlanta in 1955, the first Black-owned travel agency in the U.S.

Born from Freddye's innate talent for organizing and planning group trips, Henderson Travel Service would go on to pioneer travel to Africa, sending hundreds of thousands of Americans to the continent, and serve a variety of national professional associations and historically Black colleges and universities.

Gaynelle, now semiretired, keeps the Henderson Travel Service name alive, planning several trips to Africa each year.

"It makes me very proud to have continued the travel agency for another 30-something years, only because I had been able to build on that history, that legacy," she said. "Every time I tell the story, people are fascinated by it."

How Henderson Travel began

Freddye was accomplished before opening the travel agency: She'd earned a degree in fashion merchandising and ran a custom dress store, taught at Spelman College and was the fashion editor for the Associated Negro Press.

In the late 1940s, civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune contacted her about organizing Black women involved in fashion design: The National Association of Black Fashion Designers was born, and Freddye would be elected its second president.

In the early 1950s, the association was planning its first big conference, at the Waldorf Astoria in New York. But the hotel refused their business because they were Black, Gaynelle said. Bethune got her friend and fellow activist Eleanor Roosevelt involved, and they were eventually permitted to hold the conference there but could not stay in the hotel's rooms.

While there, Freddye met Helle Bonnet, the wife of the French ambassador Henri Bonnet, who saw how successful the conference was and Freddye's talents in event planning. She encouraged her to plan a group trip to Paris for Christian Dior's spring fashion show in 1954.