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President Joe Biden bestowed three Delawareans with the nation’s second highest honor Thursday. Two of those recipients were integral to the desegregation of the nation’s schools.
Biden said the medals and the story of the United States is about the heart and hard work of the American people.
“The most important title in America is not president, but citizen,” he said. “It’s ‘We the People.’ These are the words that are the rock upon which this entire nation has been built.”
Louis Lorenzo Redding — Delaware’s first Black attorney and Wilmington federal appeals Judge Collins J. Seitz were both honored with the Presidential Citizens Medal posthumously. Earlier this year, Delaware celebrated its role in the 70-year-old U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned the principle of “separate but equal” in the nation’s schools.
The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court appeal stemmed from four cases in Delaware and other states. The challenges by Redding and others were part of a coordinated effort by the NAACP to prove segregation was unconstitutional.
Black families asked the states to allow their children to attend white schools — only to be told no. Redding, who was also a lawyer for the NAACP legal defense, argued the two Delaware school segregation lawsuits. His arguments were the only ones of all the cases that were successful.
Then Chancery Court Chancellor Seitz heard the combined Delaware case in 1951. He visited the Black and white schools and ruled that they were not equal.
After the Delaware Supreme Court upheld Seitz’s ruling, the state appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, becoming part of the Brown case. In 1954, the court ruled “separate but equal” was unconstitutional, drawing heavily from the arguments and language from the First State’s case.
Rev. J.B. Redding, Redding’s daughter, told WHYY News at the state’s celebration in May commemorating its contribution to the Brown case that her father was motivated to pursue justice when he witnessed the disparity between Black and white Delawaeans.
“He saw that things were not fair. They were not equal,” she said. “He just was an extraordinarily courageous man. [It] made him want to give the same opportunities to all the people in the area.”
