Darryl Owens, a graduate of Central State University and Howard University, has passed away. Get the full story from Andrew Wolfson and contributors Phillip M. Bailey and Krista Johnson at the Louisville Courier Journal below.
He grew up in a one-bedroom apartment in Louisville’s Sheppard Square public housing. His mother, a $5-a-day housekeeper, had to buy used clothing for him and his sister.
He got his first taste of racial discrimination when they ventured downtown to lunch counters that wouldn’t serve them and department stores where they couldn’t try on clothes.
But stressing a holy trinity of religion, family and education, Dorothy Minter Owens raised a son who quietly became a giant as a civil rights leader, public servant and a man of firsts:
- First Black assistant attorney general.
- First Black countywide officeholder.
- First Black candidate for mayor.
Darryl T. Owens, former state representative, county commissioner, juvenile court judge and NAACP president, died Tuesday night. He was 84.
He had suffered from Parkinson’s disease and cancer, illnesses that his lifelong friend Raoul Cunningham said he bore bravely.
In a tweet, Mayor Greg Fischer said Owens was “a kind, gentle person and also a fierce leader and advocate for our city and commonwealth. He was one of our great social and racial justice warriors.”
But enshrining him in its hall of fame, the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights described him as a “model of leadership.”
He served the 43rd District in the House of Representatives from 2005 to 2018.
And representing Jefferson County’s C District — which was 65 percent white — he won plaudits on the old Fiscal Court from community leaders even in neighborhoods that gave him few votes by paying prompt attention to constituent concerns.
He also shepherded such measures as a landlord-tenant act through Fiscal Court.
Owens also walked a fine line between fighting for issues that such as desegregation and open housing and loyalty to the Democratic Party.
Owens won some public posts in the 1970s, including appointment to the juvenile court bench by then-County Judge-Executive Todd Hollenbach and to the state Workers’ Compensation Board by then-Gov. Julian Carroll.
He also shepherded such measures as a landlord-tenant act through Fiscal Court.
Owens also walked a fine line between fighting for issues that such as desegregation and open housing and loyalty to the Democratic Party.
Owens won some public posts in the 1970s, including appointment to the juvenile court bench by then-County Judge-Executive Todd Hollenbach and to the state Workers’ Compensation Board by then-Gov. Julian Carroll.
Owens practiced law and quickly became active in social and political causes, joining open-housing demonstrations and stuffing envelopes for state Sen. Georgia Davis Powers.
He was credited with calming the unrest after the deaths of 10 people during civil rights demonstrations in 1968 and after firebombings at Zion Baptist Church and the Newburg Community Center.
In 1973, he volunteered as one of the lawyers for the NAACP in its historic and tension-charged lawsuit to desegregate local schools. He later said the threats at home got so bad he had to instruct his daughters not to answer the phone.
Owens adopted a low profile in the busing case, lead counsel Robert Sedler later recalled.
“There was a tendency of a lot of Black leaders to do a lot of posturing,” he said. “Darryl didn’t operate that way.”
In the Kentucky House, from which he retired in 2018, he was the architect of the Economic Opportunities Act, which promoted minority-owned businesses in Louisville, and of landmark felony expungement legislation in 2016.
The state Chamber of Commerce gave him its “MVP award” for that bill.
Owens lived with his second wife, Brenda, in the Chickasaw neighborhood.
Cunningham said Owens also quietly stood up for women’s rights.
When the Green Street Baptist Church, in which they both grew up, wouldn’t allow women to preach, Owens left the church in 1999, Cunningham said.
Louisville attorney Aubrey Williams, also a former NAACP chapter president, said Owens was a “dedicated, resolute and fearless warrior in the movement and struggle for justice and equality of Black people. He was also a dedicated and effective public servant. Furthermore, he was an accomplished lawyer and a wonderful mentor to the lawyers in my age group. He earned his stripes.”
