Integrating Delaware

"Integrating Delaware: The Reddings of Wilmington is a biography of twentieth-century Delaware's most intellectually and nationally influential African American family - and a story that reflects the black middle-class experience in America of the past century. Patriarch Lewis Redding and his young bride arrived in Wilmington, the northernmost city in the northernmost Jim Crow state, in 1900. He would earn a hard-won place among the city's small black middle class, but not before overcoming numerous hurdles presented by race. He would also see four children, Louis, Saunders, Gwendolyn, and Lillian, achieve professional success as a lawyer, an author, and two public schoolteachers. As middle-class African Americans - a minority within a minority - the Reddings often failed to connect to their own ethnic heritage and to the poor black majority. Nevertheless, the Reddings would take the lead in integrating Delaware and play a hand on the national stage as well." "A manuscript autobiography by the family patriarch and the voluminous published and unpublished writings of Saunders Redding fill in much of the early story. Oral interviews by the author served to supply much of the family's history, as well as some notion of its heart and soul." "The personal stories of lesser-known leaders in the civil rights movement remain unwritten. Moreover, the peculiar situation of the black middle class, which produced many of these civil rights heroes, remains largely unknown. The Reddings of Wilmington, Delaware were in many ways typical of their class in twentieth-century America. Their story is important because they were ordinary, hardworking people who strove for excellence and achieved success, and who for a moment in time, helped make a difference in their community and their country."--Jacket.