Judge Sleet says struggle for civil rights continues

Gregory Sleet, judge of the U.S. District Court in Delaware, shares his thoughts on civil rights and images by his father, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Moneta Sleet Jr., at UD's annual Louis L. Redding Diversity Lecture.

3:10 p.m., March 16, 2007--Gregory Sleet, judge of the U.S. District Court in Delaware, shared his thoughts on civil rights and images by his father, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Moneta Sleet Jr., in his presentation, “The Struggle for Civil Rights in the U.S. as Viewed through the Lens of My Father, Moneta Sleet.”

Sleet delivered UD's annual Louis L. Redding Diversity Lecture Thursday evening, March 15, in the Trabant University Center Theatre. At the end of the lecture, the Louis Lorenzo Redding Diversity Award was presented to UD's College of Arts and Sciences. The lecture and the award honor the late outstanding civil rights attorney, who was the first African-American to be admitted to the Delaware bar.

UD president David P. Roselle welcomed Sleet and said the University was honored to have him deliver the address.

Sleet quoted the 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln's “Gettysburg Address,” and said King and Lincoln implored in their addresses that all Americans continue the struggle to ensure that liberty and justice is indeed for all.

“Both men remind us that the struggle to realize the promise of the organizers of this great experiment known as American democracy must be undertaken by all Americans without regard to racial or ethnic makeup, economic status or background, religious or party affiliation, gender, height or weight, long hair or short, and, yes, even age,” Sleet said. “None of us in this room today is excused as either too old or too young. Both Dr. King and Lincoln spoke of the efforts in terms of being a struggle.”

Judge Gregory Sleet: “The majestic claims of our nation’s founding papers, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, are not yet realized because the theory, the ideals upon which America was founded, still outdistance by a good measure in my view, reality.”

Sleet also quoted Fredrick Douglass' 1857 West India Emancipation Speech, and said Douglass' remark, “If there is no struggle, there is no progress,” still rings true today. “The majestic claims of our nation's founding papers, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, are not yet realized because the theory, the ideals upon which America was founded, still outdistance by a good measure in my view, reality,” he said. “If we are to honor the memory, the courageous efforts and the brilliant work of those who have tried to reinforce the foundation upon which our liberty rests, we must all continue to struggle in order that we all might continue to progress.”

Sleet said Littleton Mitchell, former president of the Delaware branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), found Sleet after his induction into the district court and told him he was able to tell Redding, who was on his deathbed, that it had “finally happened.”

“What [Mitchell] meant by that was that Mr. Redding had despaired living long enough to see the day when an African-American would occupy the federal bench,” he said. “I don't know whether he knew, but he lived long enough. It happened in his time. That to me was a great day.”

Sleet displayed pictures his father, an award-winning Ebony and Jet photojournalist, took of civil rights leaders. Sleet said he was very proud to be the eldest son of the photographer.

“[My father] was an extraordinary man in many ways, and chief among them was the love and devotion he gave to his family,” he said. “Now that's a son's view. You, the public, will quite correctly conclude that his greatest contribution to the struggle for equal treatment was the ability, through gifted vision, to point his camera in the direction that is the human drama on virtually every continent and virtually every state of this union.”

Sleet showed a selection of his father's photos of famous Americans, including Rosa Parks, Arthur Ashe, Jackie Robinson, Billie Holliday, Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X. Sleet said he was fortunate to be able to go with his father on some of his assignments to meet the celebrities and leaders, including Jackie Robinson during his induction to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962, and Martin Luther King Jr. “The most wonderful thing is that I am able to carry some memories of personal meetings and exposure to some of the truly historic figures in American history,” Sleet said.

Sleet also showed a selection of his father's photos from the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march in 1965 and the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of Coretta Scott King at her husband's funeral in 1968.

Wunyabari Maloba (left), chairperson of UD’s Commission to Promote Racial and Cultural Diversity, presents the Louis Lorenzo Redding Diversity Award to Tom Apple, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

Showing intimate pictures of King's family and King traveling to and receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway, in 1964, Sleet said his father had unusual access to the King family. “[My father] was always able to be in a place, sometimes a very private place, and to be unobtrusive. That's why people would let him there,” he said. “He was 6 feet, 2 inches tall, so it wasn't that he could hide, but he was constantly a professional. He really respected people's privacy.”

Sleet said the idea of equality for all is still attainable if the fight continues. “Unless we keep the hopes and aspirations of citizens of the world like Martin Luther King Jr. and Louis L. Redding alive in discussions and presentations like this today, unless we continue the struggle toward the goal, we will never, ever, achieve it,” he said.

Redding, who died in 1998 at age 96, was a graduate of Howard High School in Wilmington and an alumnus of Brown University and the Harvard Law School. In 1929, Redding became the first African-American admitted to the Delaware Bar.
An outstanding jurist, Redding was instrumental in a host of cases that transformed the legal and social fabric of the state and the nation. He successfully opened the doors of the University and the Delaware public schools to African-Americans and, with Thurgood Marshall, argued and won the landmark 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education case in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the "separate but equal" system of school desegregation.

Wunyabari Maloba, chairperson of UD's Commission to Promote Racial and Cultural Diversity, awarded the Louis Lorenzo Redding Diversity Award to UD's College of Arts and Sciences for its efforts to recruit and hire minority faculty members and for establishing a minor in Sexualities and Gender studies.

Dean Tom Apple said he was honored to accept the award on behalf of the college. “We owe our students the debt to make sure we diversify our faculty and our student body,” Apple said. “It's very important that they experience different points of view and different backgrounds that people bring. We've made some nice first strides in the college, and we have so much more to do.”

Article by Julia Parmley, AS '07
Photos by Duane Perry

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