Tinner Hill

Tinner Hill is an historic area of Falls Church, Virginia, named after Charles and Mary Tinner, an African-American couple who bought land there in the late 19th century. Family members quarried stone used in many buildings nearby. Between 1910 and 1918, their descendant Joseph Tinner and Edwin Bancroft Henderson fought for civil rights and helped found the first rural branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

In 1915, Joseph Tinner and Dr. Edwin B. Henderson (already a NAACP member in Washington D.C. and who had spent summers with his grandmother in this area before moving there with his wife in 1910) organized the Colored Citizens Protective League (CCPL). This responded to a new Falls Church town mandating residential racial segregation, as allowed pursuant to legislation passed by the Virginia General Assembly in 1912. Falls Church wanted to restrict African-Americans to the area south of Fairfax Street, Liberty and Douglass Avenues, which according to a special survey had 53 colored and 8 white residents, while 1,212 white and 113 colored residents lived in the rest of the town. The CCPL filed a lawsuit to block enforcement, and were successful in the Supreme Court of Virginia. However, educational segregation persisted, and Henderson later recalled that Falls Church soon ceded the area to Fairfax County (according to him to eliminate them as potential Republican voters). In 1917 the U.S. Supreme Court decided Buchanan v. Warley, blocking similar state residential segregation laws.

In addition to engaging in a letter writing campaign against the ordinance, Dr. Henderson requested a charter for a local branch of the NAACP, although the first six branches since the NAACP's founding in 1909 were all in cities. The NAACP first allowed the CCPL to operate a standing committee. In 1918, the NAACP granted the CCPL a charter which allowed it to form the Falls Church and Vicinity NAACP. The first rural branch had about 40 members and 8 officers, including Tinner as the first president, and Henderson as secretary. In 1944 the NAACP issued the branch a new charter as the "Fairfax County Branch."

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