Louis Redding helped shape racial justice in Delaware

There are interludes in history when evil’s grip relaxes, and goodness emerges owing to a courageous few. Louis Lorenzo Redding (1901-1998) was one of those few.

“The trend of the time is against segregation.” – Louis L. Redding (March 22, 1956).

Even two years after Brown v. Board (the landmark 1954 desegregation case), the NAACP’s top Delaware lawyer was unsure how long real equality would take before it reached the First State. Given his remarkable court victories, he was hopeful. Still, opposition to racial equality remained a persistent evil. Despite his guarded optimism, White Citizens Councils worked hard to dismantle the NAACP. In 1956 alone, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia commenced court cases and enacted laws designed to abolish or cripple the NAACP. 

Louis Redding was born in Alexandria, Va. His family moved to Wilmington in his youth. The highly accomplished Redding family resided early on in Wilmington’s east side. Louis attended segregated public schools and graduated from Howard High School in 1919. “I was acutely aware,” he recalled in 1986, “of distinctions made in certain areas between Blacks and whites.” It troubled him deeply, but not enough to prevent him from being admitted to Brown University, from which he graduated with honors in 1923. Next, thanks to a scholarship, he was off to Harvard Law School, from which he received his J.D. in 1928 – he was the only African American in his class. A March 22, 1929, New York Times headline announced what came next: “Negro is Admitted to Delaware Bar.” Another first. Incredibly, Redding was the lone non-white lawyer in Delaware for over a quarter-century.

As his colleague Jack Greenberg (1924-2016) recalled in 2004: Louis, who was 5-foot-6, “spoke in cultured tones, slowly, considering every word.” He donned Brooks Brothers suits with silk neckties. Habitually, an expensive foreign cigarette dangled from his lips. He did not abide small talk; he was all business. 

Greenberg was rather young and untested when he was assigned to work with Redding. Even so, Thurgood Marshall viewed Greenberg (an Iwo Jima Navy veteran and Columbia Law School grad) as an astute lawyer with innovative ideas.  

The first case victory 

Initially, Redding’s practice largely involved divorce law, criminal defense and business mergers. Things changed in January 1950 when Brooks Parker and nine other African American plaintiffs challenged the University of Delaware’s segregationist undergraduate admissions policy. Redding and Greenberg agreed to represent the plaintiffs. They took their case (Parker v. University of Delaware) to Delaware’s Chancery Court. Happenstance explained the assignment to a 35-year-old vice chancellor named Collins J. Seitz, a brilliant jurist with a genuine commitment to racial equality.   

After visiting and comparing the University of Delaware (the all-white school) and Delaware State College (the Black school), the discriminatory issues Redding and Greenberg had identified resonated with Seitz. His trial court opinion contained a mixture of compare-and-contrast realism with judicial prudence. Seitz thus concluded that “the State of Delaware is not providing these plaintiffs and others similarly situated with educational opportunities at the [Delaware State] College which are equal to those provided at the University [of Delaware].” Even under the notorious Plessy v. Ferguson doctrine, Delaware’s colleges were separate but not equal. Seitz’s opinion was formidable; the government did not appeal it. 

Though it was a desegregation court victory, real and full integration would take time. While Plessy remained on the books, its racist staying power was waning. Change was in the air: By March of 1951, five Wilmington movie theaters admitted Blacks for the first time. Soon enough, the NAACP duo would return to the educational scene to contest yet another one of Delaware’s Jim Crow traditions.

New cases, more victories

As in Parker, separate was not equal when it came to high school education. In Claymont, eight Black parents of high school students (one of whom was Ethel Louise Belton) first sought and then secured Louis Redding’s help to integrate the all-white high school. 

In Hockessin, Sarah Bulah, her husband and their adopted daughter Shirley lived two miles from the one-room Black schoolhouse. Sarah wanted the school bus that went by her door to transport Shirley to the Black elementary school on the way to the white school. When pleas to state officials failed, Sarah sought out Redding. But he was uninterested in getting a Jim Crow bus to take her daughter to a Jim Crow school. Rather, Redding would take the case but only to integrate the white school. Case on!

Redding and Greenberg filed the Belton/Bulah suits against the Delaware Board of Education and others. After some jurisdictional wrangling, they found themselves back before none other than Judge Seitz.  

Seitz visited each school and, in 1952, ruled for the plaintiffs: the Black schools in both cases were separate, but they were not equal, especially when considering the contrast in educational facilities. “This [was] the first real victory,” said Thurgood Marshall, “in our campaign to destroy segregation of American pupils in elementary and high schools.”

The matter then went to the Delaware Supreme Court and after that to the U.S. Supreme Court as a companion case to Brown v. Board of Education. The substance of Seitz’s ruling was affirmed by both courts. Redding and Greenberg were again victorious. Nonetheless, Redding continued to fight for years thereafter to bring greater school equality to Delaware. 

“All we did was our duty, not only to the people who were discriminated against but to this so-called democratic country.” So he said in 1993. Of course, he did much more, and his extraordinary story remains to be told in full.