Robert C. Henderson

As Secretary-General of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá'ís of the United States, Dr. Henderson is Chief Executive Officer of the Bahá'í Faith’s senior national administrative institution, which governs the interests and activities of Bahá'ís residing in over 15,000 localities nationwide.

Concurrent with his service in this post, to which he has been annually elected for more than 20 years, Dr. Henderson continues to be active professionally — as Principal Consultant for Henderson Zorich Consulting — in the fields of management consulting, leadership, and diversity. His clients have included such Fortune 100 companies as Amoco, AT&T, General Electric, Hallmark, Mobil, United Technologies, and Xerox, as well as the Chicago White Sox. His design and implementation of the “Wegmans Way to Manage” Program was instrumental in Wegmans Food Markets being named #1 of the “100 Best Companies to Work For” by Fortune magazine. In addition, Dr. Henderson serves on the Boards of Directors of the American Dental Association Foundation and of First Bank & Trust of Evanston, Illinois. He is former Chairman of the Phelps Stokes Fund, the oldest continuously operating foundation serving the needs of African Americans, Native Americans, Africans, and the urban and rural poor.

His professional qualifications and enduring commitment to remedying America’s legacy of racial inequality and injustice have earned Dr. Henderson leadership positions in a number of significant federal, state, and local government initiatives to better race relations. He has served as a Federal Commissioner on the Martin Luther King, Jr., Federal Holiday Commission and was invited by the Advisory Board of President Bill Clinton’s Initiative on Race to participate in a series of forums for religious leaders held at the White House. He was a witness in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Convention on Discrimination and has served as a consultant to the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Fair Housing Commission. He designed and led meetings of California Supreme Court members, judges, and lawyers to establish a California State Supreme Court Commission on Race and Ethnic Bias. At the request of the Diversity and Racism Organizing Committee of the Western Justice Foundation — following passage of California’s Proposition 187 — Dr. Henderson conducted an assessment and designed a plan of action to address racial conflict in Pasadena that was adopted as a city mission. His initiation and direction of the study, “Models of Unity — Racial, Ethnic and Religious,” on behalf of the National Spiritual Assembly and in collaboration with the Chicago Human Relations Foundation, resulted in a landmark analysis of intergroup unity in the Chicago metropolitan area that has stimulated similar studies across the country from Portland to Atlanta.

Dr. Henderson’s public speaking engagements are numerous; highlights include a plenary address given at the invitation of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to the international conference, “Educating Girls: A Development Imperative,” and an address to an “Education Against Hatred” Seminar at Haifa University sponsored by the Eli Wiesel Foundation for Humanity.   

Prior to coming to the Midwest to take up his current post, Dr. Henderson was Executive Vice President and a founding member of Air Atlanta, the first commercial airline in aviation history owned by African Americans, and served for five years as Managing Director of Tarkenton and Company, an international management consulting firm.

Dr. Henderson completed his doctoral studies in Education at the University of Massachusetts. He resides in the Chicago suburb of Wilmette with his wife, Paula, a professional artist. The Hendersons have three adult children—two daughters and a son.