Black History Delaware > Louis L. Redding February 15, 2016

Reposted from http://www.aaregistry.org/

Louis L. Redding, prominent African American lawyer and civil rights pioneer, was born in 1901.

Born in Alexandria, VA, Louis Lorenzo Redding grew up in Wilmington, DE, and graduated from Howard High School in 1919. Lawyer Redding, as he was affectionately called, continued his education and graduated from Brown University in 1923 and from Harvard Law School in 1928. In 1929, Redding became the first Black lawyer in Delaware. He was a respected civil rights pioneer for Delaware and America. prominent lawyer and civil rights advocate from Wilmington, Delaware. Redding, the first African American to be admitted to the Delaware bar, was part of the NAACP legal team that challenged school segregation in the Brown v. Board of Education case in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 1950, Redding compiled a case against the University of Delaware, which barred black students. But the university’s chancellor, wanting to avoid a trial, decided to desegregate, becoming the first federally-funded institution to do so.

He also presented legal arguments that provided for the desegregation of schools in Claymont and Hockessin in 1952. In 1954, Mr. Redding assisted Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, legal counsel for the NAACP, in the Brown vs. Education case, which struck down the “separate but equal” system of public school segregation across the country. These are but a small portion of the many great deeds that Lawyer Redding accomplished in his lifetime.

He fought to open schools and housing for minorities. A school The Louis L. Redding Intermediate School in Middletown, DE, was renamed for him.

“What we were doing was not addressed to the purpose of singularly changing lives,” wrote Redding. “We were trying to change the status and experience of a minority of Americans who happened to be Black. We were not trying to change our lives; we were trying to change the opportunities of American citizens.”

Louis L. Redding died on September 28, 1998. In 2000, the University of Delaware established the Louis L. Redding Chair in their School of Education.