A Hand In Victory It's been 50 years since the most important civil-rights decision of the 20th century — and Delaware played an important part in the ruling. Delaware Today, May 2004 Delaware civil-rights lawyer Louis Redding did not single-handedly bring about racial desegregation in Delaware schools. Rather, as befits the nature of such a landmark social change, it came about many-handedly, with the help of other lawyers, activists, parents and community members. Still, the part Redding played cannot be ignored. As Delaware's only civil-rights lawyer at the time, his challenge of the "separate but equal" dictum that justified segregation led him to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954, where his cases became part of the pivotal decision Brown v. the Board of Education. Arguably the best known civil-rights ruling in the 20th century, Brown v. the Board of Education, which effectively ended segregation in public schools, was not just one case but six cases consolidated under a common heading. It applied to a suit by Oliver Brown and 12 other parents against the Board of Education of Topeka, Kan., as well as one case from Washington, D.C.; one from South Carolina; one from Virginia; and two from Delaware. Each case was carefully cultivated and advised by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, says Leland Ware, a University of Delaware professor who in 2000 was appointed the first Louis L. Redding Chair for the Study of Law and Public Policy. "Those cases were not happenstance," he says. "They were carefully coordinated in accordance with the NAACP's blueprint." The NAACP didn't move from a cold start with this plan. In the years preceding these six cases, it led a number of successful challenges to the "separate but equal" precedent at the university and post-graduate level, which helped bolster the case against the precedent at the public school level. "Because [Brown] involved public schools," Ware points out, "it sort of touched everybody." A team of NAACP lawyers, led by civil-rights leader Thurgood Marshall, specifically chose border states — those practicing segregation but outside of the Deep South — as the optimal places to bring suits. Delaware, which at the time was decidedly segregationalist but North enough to feel peer pressure from neighboring states, fit the profile the NAACP wanted. At the time, Ware says, Redding was the only black lawyer in Delaware and, not surprisingly at the time, the only lawyer who would take cases that challenged segregation. Marshall sent one of his staff lawyers, Jack Greenberg, to assist Redding in preparing the two cases to be tried in Delaware, Belton v. Gebhart and Bulah v. Gebhart. (Each case named individual state Board of Education members as defendants, and member Francis Gebhart's name came first in alphabetical order.) Redding was no stranger to groundbreaking civil-rights cases. Annette Woolard-Provine, author of "Integrating Delaware: The Reddings of Wilmington" (University of Delaware Press, 2003), says Redding had a history of representing fellow outcasts: hobos, hunger marchers, even Communists. In 1950 he had won a case desegregating the University of Delaware, Ware says, and as luck would have it, the judge who presided over that case, Chancellor Collins Seitz, also tried the Belton and Bulah cases. These two Delaware cases were the only ones of the six consolidated into Brown that won at the state level. In fact, even when the state appealed to the Delaware Supreme Court, the ruling was upheld, making the Delaware cases the only ones that won on every level, right up to the U.S. Supreme Court. Interestingly, Woolard-Provine says, Redding and his legal team appealed the Delaware Supreme Court decision, even though it ruled in their favor, because it stopped short of overturning the "separate but equal" part of the law. Appealing this decision was a huge gamble, she says, because if the U.S. Supreme Court had sided with the Board of Education, the earlier victories could have been voided. "All of the lawyers that took these cases were taking great risks," Ware says. At the time, taking on a case like this was a threat not only to the lawyers' professional reputation and financial stability, but also to their personal safety and even their lives. In fact, after the Supreme Court released its decision, the climate in Southern Delaware was so hostile that a riot broke out in Milford, "much like the confrontation in Little Rock," Ware says. Redding's efforts were not immediately received as heroic, Ware says, but isolation from his peers was hardly new to him. "He had a really lonely professional life," Woolard-Provine says. Few of the white lawyers in Wilmington would associate with him, and when he traveled downstate, the ostracization grew even worse, she says. For her doctoral dissertation, which she later expanded into a book, Woolard-Provine had the chance to interview Redding, who died in 1999. "He did talk about going into some of the smaller courtrooms downstate, where particularly the bailiffs would be very rude to him," she says. "They'd shoo him out of the courtroom like they'd shoo a chicken." Redding was also indicted for tax evasion after the case, Ware says, but later acquitted. "He never received any honors until towards the end of his life," he says. But Redding's influence, and the influence of the lawyers and parents who participated in the cases has not been forgotten 50 years later. Ware's chairship bears his name, as does a symposium held late last month to commemorate the anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision. Greenberg, the NAACP lawyer who worked with Redding on the cases, was scheduled as the keynote speaker. A primary component of the symposium, attended by a host of political, social and academic leaders, was how to take the lessons learned from the past 50 years and apply them to the future. Woolard-Provine says Delaware has come a long way since the decision. "You will always have racists, but I think we've made amazing progress," she says. Ware, for his part, says the Brown decision may have desegregated schools on paper, but there's still plenty of work to be done to actuate that change. "It's like Thurgood [Marshall] and Redding got us to the 85 yard line, but we still have the 15 to go." Shaun Gallagher is Delaware Today's managing editor.