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How did Delaware schools contribute to the Brown v. Board of Education decision?

In October 2020, the unjust educational funding formula used in Delaware schools appeared in the news as the Delaware NAACP, ACLU and other organizations announced that they had reached a settlement with the State of Delaware. This lawsuit was brought after various organizations spent 20 years lobbying the state legislature to overhaul the state’s 80-year-old funding system, which does not provide funding based on student needs.    


Delaware’s history of unequal educational reform began with the ratification of the Delaware Constitution of 1897, which codified the segregation of schools into law. Delaware was one of 17 states to have legally mandated the segregation of schools. The result was a separate educational system for African American children, and African Americans would spend the next 50 plus years struggling to address the issues of equality and separation in education.


Beginning in the 1930’s the NAACP began a campaign to challenge school segregation through strategic lawsuits and acts of disobedience across the country. With the support of the NAACP, a group of Black families registered their children at their all-White community schools in New Castle County. None of the children were admitted, but this action laid the groundwork for two lawsuits which would help change the structure of public education in the United States.   


Louise Belton was one of ten Black plaintiffs from Claymont to bring a lawsuit in 1952 against the Delaware State Board of Education for the right to attend the all-white Claymont High School. Although the Belton family lived less than a mile from the school in the Hickman Row houses, a neighborhood originally built to house Black workers at the Worth Steel Mill, Louise had to travel two hours by city bus every day to attend the black high school, Howard High School in Wilmington. The Belton’s had to pay for Louise to take the city bus each day because publicly funded busing was not mandated at that time. Howard was the only Black high school in the entire state, so Black students who could not travel to Wilmington had no access to public education past the eighth grade.   


The city bus stop was a mile from the Belton's home, and on her walk each day Louise would pass the all-White Claymont High School. The disparities between the two schools were stark.

“The combination grade school-high school in Claymont served about 400 white students. It occupied a 14-acre site. The school was well equipped, and the grounds were beautifully landscaped. Black children, in contrast, were required to travel by bus to Howard High in Wilmington, the only black high school in the entire state. It was surrounded by factories and warehouses. The student-to-faculty ratio was three times higher at Howard than at Claymont. Sixty percent of Claymont's faculty held master's degrees, compared with 40 percent at Howard. Claymont offered several extracurricular activities that were not available at Howard.”


The Belton’s case, which included seven other Claymont families in the same situation, was ruled upon in April 1952 by Judge Collins J. Seitz of the Delaware Court of Chancery.  He ordered that all twelve children named in the suit be allowed to enroll immediately at Claymont High School. The Board of Education appealed, and the Delaware Supreme Court upheld the lower court ruling. The Delaware Attorney General instructed the Superintendent of Claymont schools to delay admitting the students because the case was being brought before the U.S. Supreme Court, but the Claymont School Board decided to enroll the students anyway. Those students became the first to integrate a public school in Delaware in September of 1952. 


A second plaintiff to sue the Delaware State Board of Education was Mrs. Sarah Bulah on behalf of her daughter Shirley Barbara. Mrs. Bulah asked that Shirley be allowed to ride the school bus which passed her home each day carrying White children. The family lived two miles from the one-room schoolhouse where local Black children went to school. Mrs. Bulah was denied her request, and state officials confirmed that "colored" children could not ride on a bus with White children. She brought suit along with the families from Claymont against the State Board of Education.  


The two Delaware cases, Bulah v. Gebhart and Belton v. Gebhart, were combined with other NAACP cases from Kansas, Washington, D.C., South Carolina and Virginia in the famous Brown v. Board of Education case argued before the U.S. Supreme Court beginning in December 1952. The verdict, delivered May 17, 1954 determined that the "separate but equal" doctrine, established by the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, violated the 14th amendment.  


While this was a tremendous victory in the push for equal rights, it did not solve the issues of school segregation in Delaware. In the next article on the history of school segregation in Delaware we will examine the aftermath of the Brown v. Board of Education decision.  


Read the next piece in this series:

How did Delaware respond to the Brown v. Education decision?


Read first hand accounts of the integration of Delaware public schools:

Recovering Untold Stories: An Enduring Legacy of the Brown v. Board of Education Decision


Learn more about the history of school segregation and desegregation: 

The History of African American Education in Delaware

Brown Case - Belton v. Gebhart

The Smithsonian - Separate Is Not Equal - Brown v. Board of Education 

Wilmington has long, messy education history

Historic Hockessin Colored School to become center for diversity and inclusion under new agreement







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