Lawrence Dunbar Reddick (1910 - 1995)

Born 3 Mar 1910 in Jacksonville, Duval, Florida, United States

Died 2 Aug 1995 at age 85 in New Orleans, Orleans, Louisiana, United States

Problems/Questions Profile manager: US Black Heritage Project WikiTree [send private message]

Lawrence Reddick is a part of US Black history. Join: US Black Heritage Project Discuss: black_heritage

Biography

Lawrence Reddick is Notable.

Lawrence Dunbar was an historian and professor who wrote the first biography of Martin Luther King Jr.

Lawrence was born in 1910. He passed away in 1995.

Born March 3, 1910, in Jacksonville, Florida, Reddick earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in history from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, completing his work there in 1933. In 1939, he married Ella Ruth Thomas and received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago, where he wrote his dissertation on The Negro in the New Orleans Press, 1850-1860. During the years he was working on his Ph.D., he directed a Works Project Administration collection of interviews of former slaves in Kentucky and Indiana; that 1934 project was based at Kentucky State College in Frankfort. He joined the faculty of Dillard University in New Orleans in 1936.

An early advocate of research on the history of all persons of African ancestry world-wide, Reddick had an opportunity to further that vision as curator of the Schomburg Collection of Negro Literature at the New York Public Library from 1939 to 1948.[2] He then took a position as head of the library at Atlanta University Center, a consortium of Atlanta colleges. In 1956, he became chair of the history department at Alabama State College in Montgomery.

Montgomery bus boycott and M. L. King, Jr. Reddick began writing for Dissent about the civil rights struggle, the students sit-ins, and the 1955-1956 Montgomery bus boycott. He then was requested to work with Dr. King on his book about the successfully-completed boycott, Stride Toward Freedom (1958). Later Reddick finished his own biography of King, Crusader without Violence (1959).

In 1960 the state board of education ordered Alabama State College president H. Councill Trenholm to fire Reddick as part of the board's retaliation against students and professors involved in sit-ins. For his courage and contributions to the movement, Reddick was awarded the Silver Jubilee Award by the New York City Teachers Union. The American Association of University Professors censured the Alabama college for firing him without due process; the censure lasted for twenty years.

Reddick subsequently held teaching positions at Coppin State Teachers' College in Baltimore (1960–67), Temple (1967–76), Harvard (1977–78), and Dillard (1978-87). He wrote Worth Fighting for: a History of the Negro in the United States during the Civil War and Reconstruction (with Agnes McCarthy, 1965) and Blacks and U.S. Wars (1976).

He became well-respected as a historian and a university professor and was a contributor to educational and political journals. He had expertise in media criticism, especially the effect of radio, movies, and popular culture on public perceptions of Negroes. He died on 2 August 1995 in New Orleans at age 85.

Sources

• "United States Census, 1940," database with images, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:KQRC-QM8 : 7 January 2021), Lawrence Reddick in household of Ella Reddick, Brooklyn, New York City, New York, United States; citing enumeration district (ED) 24-1262, sheet 61B, line 53, family , Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940, NARA digital publication T627. Records of the Bureau of the Census, 1790 - 2007, RG 29. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 2012, roll 2579.
• "United States Social Security Death Index," database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:JYXK-Z46 : 9 January 2021), Lawrence D Reddick, Aug 1995; citing U.S. Social Security Administration, Death Master File, database (Alexandria, Virginia: National Technical Information Service, ongoing).
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_D._Reddick
• Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, & Modern, 3rd ed. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 340.