Lawrence D. Reddick

Lawrence Dunbar Reddick (March 3, 1910 – August 2, 1995) was an African-American historian and professor who wrote the first biography of Martin Luther King Jr., strengthened major archives of African-American history resources at Atlanta University Center and the New York Public Library, and was fired by Alabama’s state board of education for his support for student sit-ins at Alabama State College—an event that earned him honor for his courage and brought Alabama State College censure by the American Association of University Professors.

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 was curator of the Schomburg Collection of Negro Literature at the New York Public Library from 1939 to 1948. 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.

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