Between North and South: Delaware, Desegregation, and the Myth of American Sectionalism 9780812207972

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction
PART I. Challenging Jim Crow
Chapter 1. “There Is a Movement on Foot”
Chapter 2. “He Wouldn’t Help Me Get a Jim Crow Bus”
PART II. Eliminating Jim Crow
Chapter 3. “The Delaware Method of Solving Things”
Chapter 4. “If We Must and Are to Have Integration”
PART III. Extending Brown’s Mandate
Chapter 5. “The Other Side of the Milliken Coin”
Chapter 6. “For and Against School Busing”
Epilogue
Abbreviations
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments

Citation preview

Between North and South

POLITICS AND CULTURE IN MODERN AMERICA Series Editors: Margot Canaday, Glenda Gilmore, Michael Kazin, and Thomas J. Sugrue Volumes in the series narrate and analyze political and social change in the broadest dimensions from 1865 to the present, including ideas about the ways people have sought and wielded power in the public sphere and the language and institutions of politics at all levels—local, national, and transnational. The series is motivated by a desire to reverse the fragmentation of modern U.S. history and to encourage synthetic perspectives on social movements and the state, on gender, race, and labor, and on intellectual history and popular culture.

Between North and South Delaware, Desegregation, and the Myth of American Sectionalism

Brett Gadsden

un iversit y of pennsy lvania press phil adelphia

Copyright © 2013 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania  19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gadsden, Brett V., 1969–   Betweeen north and south : Delaware, desegregation, and the myth of American sectionalism / Brett Gadsden. — 1st ed.    p.  cm. — (Politics and culture in modern America)   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-0-8122-4443-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)   1. Segregation in education—Law and legislation— Delaware—History—20th century. 2. School integration— Delaware—History—20th century. 3. Discrimination in education—Law and legislation—Delaware—History—20th century. 4. African Americans—Education—Delaware— History—20th century. I. Title. II. Series: Politics and culture in modern America. LC2802.D3G34 2012 379.2'6309751—dc23 2012008454

For Natasha

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As long as you are South of the Canadian Border, you are South. —Malcolm X, King Solomon Baptist Church, Detroit, Michigan, April 12, 1964

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Contents

Introduction 1 Part I. Challenging Jim Crow

21

Chapter 1. “There Is a Movement on Foot”

23

Chapter 2. “He Wouldn’t Help Me Get a Jim Crow Bus”

59

Part II. Eliminating Jim Crow

99

Chapter 3. “The Delaware Method of Solving Things”

101

Chapter 4. “If We Must and Are to Have Integration”

136

Part III. Extending Brown’s Mandate

171

Chapter 5. “The Other Side of the Milliken Coin”

173

Chapter 6. “For and Against School Busing”

213

Epilogue 241 Abbreviations 251 Notes 253 Index 305 Acknowledgments 313

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Introduction

In the early summer of 1974, freshman senator Joseph Biden (D-Del.) accepted an invitation from the Gordy Estates Civic Association at the Krebs School in Newport, Delaware, located just south of Wilmington, to discuss the issue of busing with his constituents. Two years earlier, school desegregation proponents had reopened a suit against the state board of education over the matter of racially segregated city and suburban schools. Building on litigation strategies developed roughly four decades earlier, which focused on the problem of school segregation in the context of the Jim Crow South, reformers now focused their efforts on a challenge to this persistent problem in a new context, one in which school segregation was rooted not in law but in geography, with white students concentrated in suburban schools and black students concentrated in city schools. In response, the U.S. district court had found a record of state-sponsored discriminatory practices in school and housing policy that reinforced segregation and had set about to consider a variety of remedies, including a two-way busing program that promised to transfer students between urban and suburban districts. The possibility that black and—worse—white students would be transferred across the municipal boundary sent a wave of anxiety through the white population. Although the organizers of the Krebs School event had presented the affair to Biden as an open discussion about busing, it had in truth been organized by the anti-busing Neighborhood Schools Association, whose leadership had pledged massive resistance to desegregation.1 The group, which had already issued a flyer accusing the senator of reneging on pledges to oppose busing, now sought to attack him publicly. The coordinator of the event, John Trager, had established the “47–46 Committee” to monitor Biden’s record on busing, promising, “We’re going to hound Biden for the next 4 years if he doesn’t vote our position.” Not surprisingly, the meeting quickly degenerated into a multipronged attack on the senator.2 In the minds of many constituents, Biden’s sin was that he had opposed a clause in the omnibus education bill during the Senate’s previous session that would have permitted jurisdictions facing court-ordered desegregation to return to court and possibly have their bus-

2

Introduction

ing mandate vacated if their current plans did not conform with the prescriptions contained in the legislation. No matter that Biden had voted in support of all the other anti-busing measures and a compromise measure that affirmed the right of students to attend the schools nearest their homes. The organizers blamed Biden for the one-vote defeat of the measure.3 For two hours Biden paced the auditorium stage and absorbed the ire of the 250-member audience, composed of mostly local white residents. He counseled patience and noted that the Wilmington situation hinged on developments in the Supreme Court as it deliberated upon a Detroit segregation case, Milliken v. Bradley, in which the facts were essentially the same. In the mid-1970s, Biden and the nation had reached a crossroad of sorts in the struggle over the issues of racial segregation and inequality. Civil rights activists had won a succession of court rulings in the 1960s and 1970s and secured the passage of federal legislation in the mid-1960s that promised African Americans equality before the law. Still, as was made particularly clear when the movement turned its attention north and west and urban uprisings erupted in cities across the United States, segregation and inequality remained endemic in many parts of the country. And just as southern whites had often resisted the movement, so too did northern and western whites outside the South respond to the advance of reform, especially when its proponents made demands for more affirmative actions—measures that promised to advance desegregation outside the context of Jim Crow.4 Biden had campaigned for his Senate seat on a promise to support the ideals of the civil rights movement—such as racial equality and equal opportunity—that were enshrined in major legislation of the 1960s.5 Now he attempted to explain his conditional support for school desegregation through a delicate explication of the sectionally inflected, highly politicized nomenclature that jurists, social scientists, politicians, activists, and the general public used to define forms of school segregation that ranged from the starkly unconstitutional to the supposedly innocuous. Biden expressed his support for busing only as a means of specifically addressing de jure segregation in schools, an institution associated with Jim Crow school systems in the U.S. South and border states. The young senator reiterated his opposition to busing as a remedy for racial imbalance—situations where the racial demographics of schools varied markedly from the demographic profile of a particular geography, but where such imbalances were functions of what observers considered racially neutral factors such as personal choice and socioeconomic disparities. Unlike the de jure discrimination of the Jim Crow

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3

South, Biden reassured his audience that any segregation in Delaware was de facto in nature and therefore beyond the authority of the courts. In a further articulation of his evolving position on school desegregation, Biden promised to support an amendment counteracting any Supreme Court decision that sanctioned busing to overcome these forms of segregation. The Krebs School crowd was unmoved. In the face of constant interruptions and heckling, he yielded the microphone.6 Just over one year into what would become a long and distinguished career in national politics, Joe Biden had come face-to-face with a central challenge confronting public officials in the modern era. On one hand, politicians sought to answer the demands from black communities and civil rights activists that they dismantle systems of segregated schools and recognize blacks’ rights as citizens; on the other, they faced persistent white opposition intent on maintaining segregated schools or, at the very least, minimizing the impact of school desegregation remedies. This book is a study of the decadeslong struggle between proponents and opponents of school desegregation in Delaware and the evolving case law and consequent public policies. This project explores the historical roots of Biden’s heated meeting with his constituents, as well as—more broadly—the possibilities and limits of the liberal consensus around civil rights in the post-World War II era.

* * * To make better sense of the contest between school desegregation proponents and opponents, I explore three interrelated concepts: civil rights liberalism, geographic sectionalism, and white reaction. As historians have expanded their study of the civil rights movement, civil rights liberals who sought remedies in the courts (particularly to address school segregation) have received a critical reassessment. In gauging their accomplishments, scholars have focused on the “unfinished agenda” of Brown v. Board of Education and the prohibitively high “costs” of school desegregation, especially to black teachers. Some have even argued that Brown did more to undermine reform than to advance it, while others have critiqued the limitations inherent in a courtoriented approach to social change. In hindsight, scholars have also noted that the focus of the NAACP and other organizations on formal equality before the law, their emphasis on civil rights instead of economic rights, and their concession to Cold War imperatives had a moderating influence on the civil rights movement. A few scholars have even taken the position of

4

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white opponents of desegregation, claiming that the reforms undermined the political, economic, and social rights of whites. And further filtering their analysis through the perspective of underclass ideology, they have concluded that desegregation, especially in the 1970s, opened the doors of white schools to a torrent of poorly behaved and disrespectful black children.7 I contend that civil rights liberals and school desegregation proponents in Delaware possessed a sophisticated understanding of the discursive and structural bases of racial inequality in U.S. society and forwarded a dynamic, powerful, and efficacious challenge to those foundations. Moreover, their tactics were sensitive to the changing patterns of racial segregation both in the Jim Crow context, when state law sanctioned segregation, and in the post-Jim Crow era, when school segregation was a function of the sum of discriminatory education and housing policy. Contained within the legal strategies was also a sustained challenge to the institutional inequalities in state school systems that enforced diminished black political, economic, and social standing. On the whole, school desegregation proponents leveled an adaptive attack upon racial inequality—to address problems of race and resources—that took advantage of the shifting political opportunities of the postwar period to confront the varying terrain of segregation both inside and outside the framework of the Jim Crow South.8 Reformers offered a progressive critique of white nationalist discourses that served as the ideological foundations for Jim Crow segregation. They disputed the notion that race was a biological fact, ideas about blacks’ innate difference and inferiority, and claims that individual intelligence was a function of race. Their demands that the state of Delaware recognize African Americans as citizens also challenged, as the political scientist Dean Robinson observed, “one of the oldest American political fantasies—what Ralph Ellison calls the desire to ‘get shut’ of the Negro in America—to banish [blacks] from the nation’s bloodstream, from its social structure, and from its conscience and historical consciousness.”9 In exploring the power and possibilities of campaigns to desegregate the nation’s schools, this book also challenges portrayals of school desegregation proponents, especially the lawyers who often stood at the center of these dramas, as polite moderates who were beyond the effective influence of grassroots actors and aloof from black popular opinion.10 Such portrayals were given substance by the often rigid demands of the laws and the courts. As the legal scholar Herbert Eastman warned of the documents that largely frame stories about civil rights litigation, “The [legal] complaint omits the social

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5

chemistry underneath the events normally invisible to the law—events that create the injury or compound it. In this complaint, we lose the fullness of the harm done, the scale of the deprivations, the humiliation of the plaintiff class members, the damage to greater society, the significance of it all.”11 Granted, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was not the most radical black freedom organization. And Brown v. Board of Education and school desegregation were no panaceas to the sum total of racial oppression in the South or elsewhere. Still, the movement to desegregate public education did represent grassroots sentiment about the inequalities, inequities, and stigma inherent in the system of segregated schooling, even if it also reflected the orientation of civil rights groups that believed the law was an efficacious avenue for change.12 Legal challenges provided important means through which black citizens could express and advance their complaints about the problems inherent in segregated schools.13 The formal arguments of attorneys, as expressed in organizational memos and legal briefs, and the novelty and power of historic court decisions often subsumed local people’s voices. Still, they were not silenced. Attorneys’ rearticulation of popular complaints in language that reflected legal and social science discourses gave their challenges much power while provoking tensions between groups committed to direct action and stirring debates among blacks over the proper avenues for reform. I hold that strategic legal tactics proved an important means of enabling black students to gain recognition of their rights as citizens and to escape the stigma and inequalities of segregation’s institutions. Indeed, the legal proceedings and subsequent political wrangling were important sites in which all the parties were able to “tell stories.” These stories, as the legal scholar Thomas Ross has observed, “reveal, with special clarity, the deeper nature of  .  .  .  struggle[s] to move to a world where discrimination on the basis of race truly has no place, no purpose, no logic.”14 Even if the struggles over segregated schooling lacked the compelling theater of direct action campaigns such as those in Birmingham or the militancy of the Black Panther Party, strategic legal challenges proved essential in creating a public record of complaints, expanding notions of citizenship, and gaining blacks increasing access to public resources and higher-quality educational programs in many ways that had been beyond the effective interventions of other movements.15 This work also challenges the portrayal of school desegregation proponents as ideological dogmatists.16 To this end, my consideration of the efforts of activists challenges many ideological and organizational typologies that

6

Introduction

frame studies of African American freedom struggles, such as accommodation versus agitation, desegregation versus separatism, civil rights liberalism versus black power, and integration versus community control.17 The organizations that oversaw the Delaware litigation campaign—the NAACP and later the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Center for National Policy Review (CNPR)—were certainly rooted in the traditions of democratic nationalism and legal liberalism.18 But as the NAACP oriented its resources toward an attack upon segregation, it tapped into the energy of movements steeped in self-help and voluntarism to fuel its own campaign. In these challenges to the color line that advanced the cause of desegregation and black education, school desegregation proponents drew upon decades-long efforts focused on increasing the capacity of historically black institutions. We can discern a similar blurring of typological lines in school desegregation proponents’ challenges to segregation in urban and suburban schools in the 1970s. As the campaign advanced, and later as activists and school officials turned their attention to formulating an equitable remedy, reformers fashioned a kind of fusion politics that took into account black interest in civil rights liberalism and community control politics. The efforts of school desegregation proponents in this study, especially as they responded to evolving political developments within black communities, defy these neat categorizations and necessitate an appreciation of the organizational adaptability of civil rights organizations. An exploration of the work of civil rights advocates in Delaware presents historians with an opportunity to expand our geographic scope of American race relations and of movements to advance and thwart black freedom struggles. In broad sectional sweeps, Delaware is often overlooked—too small and insignificant, too far north to demand the attention of southern historians, too far south for scholars of the North, or too marginal in the grand scheme of national politics.19 But Delaware was one of the central proving grounds for the NAACP’s campaign against segregation in education. The first state to ratify the U.S. Constitution on December 7, 1778, it was here that the organization won its first case ordering the desegregation of the undergraduate programs at a public university.20 Moreover, two Delaware state court decisions (Belton v. Gebhart and Bulah v. Gebhart), both initiated by the NAACP, marked the first time that segregated white primary and secondary schools were ordered to admit black students.21 The cases were then bundled with Brown v. Board of Education (Kansas), Briggs v. Elliott (South Carolina), Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County (Virginia), and Bolling v.

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7

Sharpe (District of Columbia) as companion cases upon which the Supreme Court set about reevaluating the merits of Plessy v. Ferguson and the constitutionality of segregation in public education. The findings of fact in the Delaware cases provided Chief Justice Earl Warren with important justifications for his ruling in Brown that segregated schools were inherently unequal. In the aftermath of Brown, Delaware experienced one of the first episodes of white reactionary backlash—later characterized as massive resistance—after the Milford Board of Education admitted a small group of black students to the local white high school in 1954.22 Delaware’s senior senator, John J. Williams, cast the vote that broke the southern filibuster to the 1964 civil rights bill. School desegregation proponents in Delaware also won the nation’s first interdistrict, metropolitan desegregation suit, and the eventual remedy in that case represented the most extensive outgrowth of the direct attack campaign initiated three decades earlier.23 According to the terms established by the original architects of the NAACP’s direct attack strategy challenging segregation in public schooling, the cumulative effects of the long litigation campaign proved to be a considerable success, largely unrealized in the rest of the nation. This process was painfully slow, sometimes inequitable, and never a panacea for the myriad problems associated with race and education. But according to educational experts Gary Orfield and Chungmei Lee, Delaware was also among the most desegregated states for black students in the nation by the end of the twentieth century.24

* * * Positioned directly on the Mason-Dixon Line, the border state of Delaware also provides an interesting opportunity to study a provincial hybrid, one in which ostensibly southern and northern modes of U.S. race relations operated. Historians and historical actors have described other border states in similar terms, evoking a number of metaphors, including “a world between,” “middle ground,” “gateway,” and the “ ‘Dixie-Yankee” duality. On the fault line between the Jim Crow South and the “free” North, in communities where slavery and freedom coexisted, scholars have noted distinctive demographic features, including fewer numbers of black residents and lower black-white ratios, greater ethnoreligious diversity, fewer incidences of ritualized racial violence in the form of race riots and lynchings, and blacks’ greater access to mechanisms of political power, including the right to vote. They have also noted more highly developed commercial and industrial sectors with links to

8

Introduction

national and international markets, relatively high levels of unionization, and the predominance of allegedly de facto (as opposed to de jure) forms of segregation. A culture of “polite racism” is often described, a testament to border state whites’ perceived commitment to civility and a more humane—though still unequal—mode of race relations.25 It is not surprising that students of Delaware have figured the state’s history in a manner that lends to it an air of duality. In his reflections on the history of school desegregation, Chancellor Collins Seitz described Delaware “as a northern state with a southern exposure,” a statement meant to testify to the mixed quality and moderate mystique of the state.26 They have positioned Wilmington as part of the political, economic, and cultural complex of the northern, urban industrial vein that runs up the Delaware River through Chester and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Camden and Trenton, New Jersey.27 In contrast, the southern Kent and Sussex counties are noted for sharing the more traditional, southern, rural, and agricultural characteristics of the more conservative, former slaveholding area of the Delmarva Peninsula in Maryland and Virginia—and by extension the Upper and Deep South.28 Historians recall how downstate agrarian interests dominated Delaware political culture throughout the early to mid-twentieth century. As such, the state never abolished slavery within its border. Indeed, as historian Robert L. Hayman, Jr., has argued, “Delaware defended the institution with an increasing intensity as disunion approached, and the overtly racist ideology it embraced would inform its public stance for many generations to come.”29 As the national debate over slavery reached a boiling point in 1861, the Delaware General Assembly rejected Lincoln’s experiment in compensated emancipation and railed against the federal government’s intrusion in the internal affairs of the state. The Democrats, having run on a platform committed to the hegemony of the “White Man’s Party,” dominated politics for most of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The state’s congressional delegation opposed all forms of federal intervention—Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Bill of 1866, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments—that offered any measure of equality to blacks and threatened to undermine the white racial monopoly on political, economic, and social power in the state. Delaware systematically disenfranchised African Americans by the early twentieth century. And in extending the “badge of servitude” to its black citizens, the general assembly wrote into the state’s constitution language demanding segregation in public schools.30 In figuring the implications of the state’s dual character, journalist Richard Kluger summed,

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9

Pennsylvania Hockessin

Arden

Wilmington

New Jersey

Newark Delaware City

Chesapeake and Delaware Canal Middletown

New Castle Co. Smyrna Hartly

Dover

Kent Co. Milford

Mar yland Rehoboth Beach

Georgetown Seaford Laurel

Sussex Co. Frankford

0

5

10

20 Miles

N

Figure 1.  Delaware political map.  By Michael Page, Emory University Libraries.

An unspoken quid pro quo arrangement had evolved between the sophisticated Wilmington plutocracy and the downstate conservative farmers who still had the votes that passed the laws that ran the state. If Wilmington saw to it that statewide taxes were kept low and did not foist a lot of costly social-welfare programs on the southern counties—particularly anything that would materially benefit the

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Introduction

black man—the legislature would rubber-stamp the fondest wishes of the high-powered corporation types, most of them linked by employment or family to the du Pont squirearchy.31 Indeed, the composite quality of Delaware political culture was, in many ways, a microcosm of the sectional divides that marked U.S. political culture writ large. The dual framework has clear limitations in explaining the political culture of the state, however, especially insofar as it relies on Manichean conceptions of “southern” and “northern” modes of U.S. race relations that were themselves rooted in sectionalist terms. This acute sense of sectionalism has animated U.S. historiography for much of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. “As soon as we cease to be dominated by the political map, divided into rectangular states, and by the form of the constitution in contrast with the actualities,” the revered historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued in 1926, “groups of states and geographic provinces, rather than states, press upon the historian’s attention.”32 Turner proposed an approach to the study of U.S. political culture through the concept of “geographic sectionalism.” These various sections had their unique characters and interests, particularly as expressed in congressional voting blocs and geographical economic alliances that often trumped party affiliation. Turner’s most important contribution to the field came in his exploration and assertion of the importance of the frontier and the West. Still, he recognized that the North and South—particularly around questions about slavery, state sovereignty, and disunion—came first to most Americans’ minds. As historian Numan Bartley has asserted, “Frederick Jackson Turner . . . elevated sectional self-consciousness to the status of an independent variable. Each major region evolved ‘in its own way’ and ‘each had its own type of people, its own geographic and economic basis, its own particular economic and social interests.’ ”33 Successive generations of historians have taken up Turner’s formulation and helped institutionalize a sectionalized approach to the study of American political development. In this discursive context, renowned conservative historian Ulrich Phillips identified what many have assumed to be the essence of southern political culture: it is a land with a unity despite its diversity, with a people having common joys and common sorrows, and, above all, as to the white folk a people with a common resolve indomitably maintained—that it shall

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11

be and remain a white man’s country. The consciousness of a function in these premises, whether expressed with the frenzy of a demagogue or maintained with a patrician’s quietude, is the cardinal test of a Southerner and the central theme of Southern history.34 Many commentators similarly assume the South as the center of slavery and segregation (despite ample evidence to the contrary) and present white male southerners as bogeymen and the progenitors of racism, white supremacy, and racial terror in this standard narrative of national and sectional studies of race relations. While rarely portrayed as a racial utopia, the North was construed as the South’s antithesis—the place that nurtured the spirit of American exceptionalism, republican models of nationalism, and free market wage labor.35 If researchers identified racial reaction in the North, they often explained this process in terms of the “southernization” of the nation.36 On the matter of public education, Jim Crow laws purposely designed to discriminate against blacks were understood as characteristic of political society in the South, while instances of school segregation in the North were attributed to individual private acts, market forces, and innocent public accidents. More recent historians have called into question the material basis of these historical frameworks. Matthew Lassiter and Joseph Crespino, in particular, have argued that such approaches “encouraged oversimplifications and overgeneralizations” in our understanding of U.S. political development and have served to fuel the myths of southern exceptionalism.37 This volume offers an alternative approach to the problem of place through a view of U.S. sectionalism as socially and politically constructed and a powerful narrative framework with which historians and historical actors have assessed the legitimacy of different forms of racial segregation. It also supposes that conceptions of U.S. sectionalism had material effects when put to the service of social and political movements. In both their challenges to and defenses of segregated schooling in Delaware, activists helped create and perpetuate (and later contest) a number of sectional imaginaries that were based on the “nature” of segregation in southern and border states. This form of legalized segregation, which came to be institutionalized in the popular and judicial imagination of the nation as de jure segregation in the postwar period, was eventually found legally suspect by the Supreme Court. Activists, jurists, and the populace thus understood de jure segregation as a function of law and counterposed to de facto segregation. In contrast, they came to understand the latter as a function of residential patterns and cus-

12

Introduction

toms outside the geographic and temporal bounds of the Jim Crow world and beyond the purview of federal authorities to regulate. In my exploration of the sectional imaginaries of de jure and de facto segregation that frame this story, this project takes a cue from historian Allen Tullos, whose work explores the political imaginary of Alabama—especially its oppressive face—that he terms the “Heart of Dixie.” In Tullos’s assessment, the political imaginary stands as “an affective terrain rather than a sovereign polity  .  .  .  [that] configures possibilities and outlines limits, suggests the boundaries of the legitimate and the outrageous, [and] limns the contours of power.”38 I contend that the sectional imaginaries of de jure and de facto segregation operate in a similar manner. This project seeks to capture the discursive foundations of the historical agency of racial reformers as they mobilized the resources of grassroots and activist communities, devised strategies, argued before the courts, and formulated public policies to advance the cause of school desegregation. This book supposes school desegregation proponents—alongside the judges and policymakers who often sit at the center of many considerations of the history of school desegregation—as architects of the epistemological frameworks with which historical actors and historians assessed the boundaries of legitimate and illegitimate institutional arrangements and against which figures devised insurgent, remedial, and oppositional strategies that delineated avenues of reform and reaction.39 In his analysis of black insurgencies, sociologist Doug McAdam argued that blacks took advantage of “expanded ‘political opportunities,’ ” defined as disturbances to the existing conditions such as wars (cold and hot), industrialization, and migrations, to advance the cause of insurgent movements.40 Building on his premise, this project argues that in constructing these epistemological frameworks blacks also created political opportunities requisite for advancing racial justice. This book is divided into three parts. Part I explores how the NAACP, through its direct attack strategy against segregated schooling in the late 1930s and 1940s, helped craft and popularize the sectional imaginaries of de jure (and by implication de facto) segregation in its campaign against racial discrimination and segregation. The organization recognized that in the South and border states the demand for segregation was clearly inscribed in state law, unwavering, and virtually immune to exceptions. Segregated black schools were also—almost by definition—unequal to the facilities available to white students. Graduate and professional educational opportunities for aspiring black students were entirely absent in many southern states. As a

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13

result of the NAACP’s challenge to school segregation in Delaware (and in the District of Columbia and three other states) and the victory it ultimately secured in the Supreme Court, de jure segregation in public education came to denote distinct forms of institutional arrangements widely associated with the American South and border states. As this book explores in Part II, proponents of school desegregation challenged the remnants of the state’s segregated school system. They did so through negotiations and more lawsuits within the emerging constitutional regime prescribed by Brown after the courts attached the value of constitutionally suspect to the sectional imaginary of de jure segregation. They succeeded in securing reforms that advanced, if often slowly, school desegregation across the state in the form of modified attendance zones and freedom of choice plans in formerly Jim Crow districts. National developments intervened to speed desegregation across the state and affirm the power of the sectional imaginaries of de jure segregation and the distinctiveness of “southern-style” segregation. Passed in response to the rising tide of direct action campaigns, violent response, and social chaos, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited school boards from (among other things) assigning students to public schools on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin. As Gary Orfield has asserted, “The first great educational accomplishment of the 1964 law was a historic remaking of the schools of the South that was accomplished in just five years of active enforcement . . . . Enforcement of the act broke the back of segregation in southern schools after many generations of legally imposed apartheid.”41 The Civil Rights Act made exceptions, however, for racial imbalances in public schools.42 Congress and President Lyndon Johnson thus lent their authority to the sectional imaginaries of de jure and de facto segregation that both widened the avenue for reform in the formerly Jim Crow states and extended a collective exemption to school districts in the North and West that also maintained segregated schools but on terms widely considered beyond legal reproach. In Delaware, the state board of education acknowledged its responsibility to expunge the vestiges of Jim Crow and dismantled the dual system of education lest it lose federal education funding. As explored in Part III, school desegregation proponents acknowledged the limited efficacy of the southern and border state litigation targeting state laws and policies that expressly demanded racial segregation in public schools in the 1970s. In developing a new metropolitan strategy, reformers highlighted the intersecting networks of state-sponsored discrimination in education and housing policy that served as the bedrock for segregation

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Introduction

in Wilmington city and suburban schools. They challenged the assumed distinctions between the sectional imaginaries of de jure and de facto segregation that they had helped popularize in the previous two decades and argued that no matter the engine of segregated schools, it was de jure in nature. The district court found the plaintiffs’ arguments compelling and in 1978 ordered the implementation of an interdistrict, metropolitan remedy. In its decision affirming the plaintiffs’ contentions, the court effectively elided the distinction, pervasive in jurisprudential and popular discourses of the time, between purportedly de jure and de facto and “southern” and “northern” forms of segregation. Activists and the courts also rejected sectionally inflected definitions of constitutional violations that cast the segregated schools in the South and border states as anathema. This strategic development enabled the extension of the mandates of Brown and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 beyond the Jim Crow world to the racial segregation in schools that was a function of discriminatory housing policies and residential segregation.

* * * If historians have expended much energy exploring the complexity and dynamism of the black freedom struggle, a number of scholars have recently called for equally sensitive explorations of white backlash politics that evolved contemporaneously with civil rights movements. Building on the insights of such scholars, this project examines an equally sophisticated countermovement to school desegregation that evolved in lockstep with the campaign to advance school desegregation and adapted to the changing social and political terrain of the postwar era to oppose racial reforms. This book emphasizes the shifting centers of opposition: Jim Crow-era segregationists, white suburbanites, and Democratic Party senators. This study also highlights the ideologies that undergirded the politics of backlash that were couched in the language and logic of the rights of whites to be free from federal and outside interference and in the liberal discourses of equality, which were, ironically, a central component of the civil rights movement itself. It was around these purportedly color-blind principles that a vast array of school desegregation opponents expressed their continued opposition to desegregation without necessarily having to resort to racial demagoguery. In the face of a succession of court decisions and federal legislation demanding the desegregation of schools in Delaware, reform opponents did concede to certain ideals of a

Introduction

15

racially liberal society—that whites and blacks were equal under the law. As the historian Daniel Rodgers asserts in his exploration of white reaction in modern American political culture, “What conservatives wanted now was not a restoration of the pre-Brown social order with its memories, customs, institutions, and rules of racial place and etiquette. They did not want history restored, or even remembered. What conservatives wanted now, they insisted, was a common, equal playing field and judgment on the basis of individual merit alone.”43 This point is not to be underestimated as one considers the evolution of twentieth-century race relations and popular opinions on race. When expressed in populist rhetoric, however, this whites’ rights framework provided the means for transcending scientific racism and assumptions of innate inferiority that were falling into increasing disrepute after World War II. As school desegregation proponents advanced their campaign against Jim Crow schools, opponents mobilized to protect the rights of the white majority to manage local institutions free from the interference of federal authorities and evoked the ostensibly neutral mantras of states’ rights, the educational rights of (white) children, administrative efficiency, and “law and order.”44 If reformers mobilized in ways to shape the discursive landscape upon which they operated, opponents of desegregation also resisted in ways that gave substance to the sectional imaginaries of de jure and de facto segregation. The origins of this sectionally inflected reaction can be traced back to the politics of secession, the defense of the rights of states to maintain slaves as property unimpeded by federal authorities, and later “redemption.” As I discuss in Part I, white Delawareans demanded the recognition of their right to govern relations between whites and blacks and officially order race relations in a manner that maintained segregation between the races. In Part II, I examine how school desegregation opponents contended that intimate contact between blacks and whites threatened social equality between the races and would lead to social disruption and the degradation of cherished public institutions. In these ideas one can discern echoes of the black beast rhetoric of racial demagogues that was advanced throughout the first half of the century.45 As whites struggled to make sense of the monumental scale of changes wrought by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, school desegregation opponents then complained that the federal government had singled them out as border state residents because of past practices, even as they contended that northern communities also maintained segregated schools. School officials and white suburbanites actually adopted the principles

16

Introduction

embedded in Brown and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to oppose affirmative efforts beyond the dismantling of discriminatory pupil assignment policies that would actively reorganize schools in a multiracial fashion after reformers set their sights on challenging segregation in the Wilmington metropolitan area in the 1970s. In Part III, I demonstrate how they refigured civil rights advances as a rejuvenation of constitutionally suspect forms of racial classification and court-ordered busing programs as a form of reverse discrimination that infringed on the constitutional rights of white citizens in defense of property rights, meritocracy, and free market principles. This last development provided the foundation for a broad rejection, as reflected in polls in the 1970s, of the proposed means for achieving desegregated schools outside the context of the Jim Crow South and border states. It also provided the discursive bridge for an oppositional politics composed of interests nominally considered “southern” and “northern,” and “liberal” and “conservative.” In this manner, this volume figures liberals and members of the Democratic Party who had been historically aligned with civil rights goals more centrally in the conservative ascendency and white backlash politics. As the school desegregation campaign advanced beyond the temporal bounds of Jim Crow, reform opponents attempted to invigorate the assumed duality between the sectionally inflected imaginaries of de jure and de facto segregation and the assumed dissimilarity between Jim Crow schools and Wilmington suburban and city schools marked by racial imbalance. They agreed that expressions of de jure segregation reminiscent of the Jim Crow South and border states were constitutionally and morally suspect. Instead, foes of reform framed their opposition to a metropolitan remedy in the language of racial balance and imbalance. In this way, white suburbanites and their advocates distinguished the segregation in the Wilmington metropolitan area schools in the 1970s from that of the Jim Crow era. They also drew distinctions between themselves—as upwardly mobile residents of the periphery of metropolitan space—and white southerners of yore. Challengers of reform contended that a series of draconian laws mandating segregation in schools separated whites and blacks of the Jim Crow era. Against the backdrop of increasingly racially segregated cities and suburbs in the postwar period, these reform opponents held that African American city students and white suburban students were differentiated by a set of purportedly raceneutral economic and cultural institutions and practices that were grounded in impersonal market forces, meritocracy, black pathology, and racial and ethnic communitarianism.

Introduction

17

In assessing the broad impact of white reaction, this book looks to the work of civil rights historians Steven Lawson and Charles Payne, who have offered one of the most cogent debates on the relative importance of political elites and grassroots activists in measuring civil rights outcomes.46 Taking into account the merits of both positions, this work posits a third constituency—white opponents of civil rights reforms—in assessing the public policy outcomes of race reforms. In his mid-century exploration of U.S. race relations in An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, sociologist Gunnar Myrdal asserted, The more important fact, however, is that practically all the economic, social, and political power is held by whites. The Negroes do not by far have anything approaching a tenth of the things worth having in America. It is thus the white majority group that naturally determines the Negro’s “place.” All our attempts to reach scientific explanations of why the Negroes are what they are and why they live as they do have regularly led to determinants on the white side of the race line. In the practical and political struggles of effecting changes, the views and attitudes of the Americans are likewise strategic. The Negro’s entire life, and, consequently, also his opinions on the Negro problem, are, in the main, to be considered as secondary reactions to more primary pressures from the side of the dominant white majority.47 Myrdal’s comments testified to the power of white supremacy at the time and the considerable challenges that African Americans faced in mid-century America, even as he overstated the extent to which African American existence amounted to, as Ralph Ellison noted, the sum total of racist oppression.48 Myrdal’s observations do, however, portend a problem endemic to U.S. political development with which this project engages directly: the extent to which white opponents of reform continued to exert a profound influence on “the Negro’s place.” If school desegregation proponents advanced their program in many tangible ways, opponents of reform were never vanquished. This book contends that they continued, in many ways, to exert a profound influence on the trajectory of reforms. With the addition of opponents of reform to the broader narrative—seeing them, in other words, as contributors to the outcome of struggle rather than as simplistic reactionary adversaries—we can more accurately chart change

18

Introduction

as a product of the collective labors of activists and citizens within and without the movement, jurists, and liberal and conservative policymakers. Without losing sight of the adversarial nature of this politics, we can also bridge two vital and dynamic historiographies that alternately stress black agency and the evolving nature of culture and politics and assess the material weight of the discursive sectional frameworks as deployed by various interests.49 By analyzing the efforts of activists and opponents of race reforms side by side and considering the latter as constitutive actors in the history of black freedom struggles and educational reform, we can more effectively explain victories and losses, progress and “unfinished agendas.” We can also better understand the disjuncture between the rights and privileges of citizenship blacks sought and secured in the courts and the remedies that produced inequitable and unanticipated outcomes against the backdrop of struggles over the legitimacy and illegitimacy of de jure and de facto segregation. In this light, this book also exposes a hidden narrative in school desegregation efforts and white backlash. Unfolding in two stages, the period between 1919 and 1965 marked the greatest expansion of black education in the state. In the first stage, the Delaware School Auxiliary Association, under the auspices of the industrialist and philanthropist Pierre S. du Pont, oversaw a school building program.50 This history tracks closely to the history of southern education detailed by historian James D. Anderson, who charted the intersections between northern industrialists and philanthropists and a conservative black leadership who collectively oversaw the evolution of a segregated, black industrial education system designed to “adjust black southerners to racially qualified forms of political and economic subordination” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.51 My project charts a second stage of black school expansion in Delaware against the backdrop of a convergence of interests between school desegregation opponents and black educational reformers in the mid-century who— as the school desegregation movement gained momentum—linked efforts to modernize systems of historically black schools with the maintenance of black institutions as functionally segregated in practice, if not necessarily in law. As state officials became aware of their inability to defend de jure segregated school systems in the 1940s and 1950s, Delaware moved in a systematic way—for the first time—to attend to many of the institutional inequalities between black and white Jim Crow institutions that had long animated black complaints about segregated and unequal schools. White public officials mobilized in such a manner not in response to efforts of black activists com-

Introduction

19

mitted to vitalizing historically black institutions; they moved only after it became apparent that more and more blacks looked to white schools as the means to escape the deprivations endemic to black schools and only after school desegregation proponents began winning in the courts. The state then devoted greater resources at Delaware State College, enriching educational opportunities at this historically black institution. Delaware also initiated a comprehensive black high school construction program and expanded transportation services for black students across the state. This project also highlights an underexplored, if implicit, meeting of the minds between white liberals like Biden in the 1970s—who were increasingly antagonistic to busing remedies—and Black Power activists who had privileged self-determination and community empowerment over civil rights liberalism. Historians have most often stressed the rift between white liberals and Black Power activists in explaining the fracturing of the New Deal coalition.52 Challenging this dominant narrative, others have stressed the close relationship between Black Power and liberalism.53 This book brings to light a variation of Derrick Bell’s theory of interest convergence in which black activists and educational reformers, whose work was steeped in the traditions of self-help, racial uplift, voluntarism, and community control, found common cause—directly or indirectly—with white public officials who wanted to perpetuate racial segregation or temper the impact of desegregation mandates.54 It is an ironic and unanticipated outcome of civil rights liberalism that modernization and equalization campaigns in support of historically black schools in Delaware owe as much—if not more—to the success of school desegregation proponents as to those who accommodated themselves to and sought to operate within the constraints of segregated institutional contexts.

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PA R T I Challenging Jim Crow

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Chapter 1

“There Is a Movement on Foot”

The origins of all social phenomena are debatable, but the roots of the movement to desegregate public education in Delaware can be traced, in a real sense, to the letter of inquiry of one Ira S. Edwards, who sought admission to the University of Delaware in 1939. Edwards, a resident of Wilmington and a graduate of Howard High School, requested information from university president Walther Hullihen about the opportunities in electrical engineering for black students in the state. “I am afraid I cannot tell you where you, a colored citizen,” Hullihen replied, “can get a college course in Electrical Engineering in Delaware unless the College for Colored Students at Dover is planning to establish such a course.”1 At that time, the historically black Delaware State College offered no graduate courses and black students were barred from attending the university, as segregated education was mandated by the state constitution and written into the Delaware Revised Code.2 Delaware, he continued, “has not been able, or willing, to provide all forms of education for either white or colored students. No white or colored students can secure state-supported training in law, medicine, pharmacy, dentistry, mining, forestry, or many other such professions or vocations.” Hullihen did extend a sympathetic note to Edwards, perhaps a sign of his own commitment to expanding the educational program at the university. “Some day,” he concluded, “I hope provisions will be made for all of these in so far as there is any significant demand for them.”3 The inquiry and subsequent rejection spurred conversations at a dinner meeting of the Wilmington Branch of the NAACP, at which lead chair of the NAACP legal office Thurgood Marshall was in attendance, about a possible challenge to racial segregation at the University of Delaware.4 Three years earlier, Marshall had won his first significant graduate school desegregation case in neighboring Maryland, representing Donald Murray, who had been denied admission to the University of Maryland Law School on the basis of

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Chapter 1

his race. The university cited its policy of not accepting black students and, after a personal appeal by Murray, recommended that he apply to Howard University in the District of Columbia. Marshall challenged the inequalities inherent in Maryland’s higher education system, not the state’s right to establish separate schools for black students. The Baltimore City Court and the Maryland Court of Appeals proved sympathetic. The city court ordered that Murray be admitted to the Maryland law school and the appellate court upheld the decision. Murray entered law school in 1936. The Maryland campaign was a testament to the NAACP’s increasingly narrow focus on racial segregation in southern public education.5 As legal scholar Mark Tushnet has noted, “Southern states [including Delaware] did not have many graduate and professional programs for blacks, so the problems [in higher education] were not of ‘separate but equal’ but were rather problems of ‘separate and nonexistent.’ ”6 The legal arm of the NAACP thus set their sights on the soft underbelly of Jim Crow—officially segregated universities—and that focus gained particular expression in challenges to the color line in Delaware. Edwards’s letter and the NAACP dinner marked the rise of a powerful alternative to the ethics of black institution building and voluntarism that had been the dominant approach to black educational reform in the postemancipation period.7 This chapter argues that local activists like Edwards, and later a student strike at the historically black college in the state, brought to very public light grassroots discontent with the state of black higher education in Delaware and the inequalities inherent in its system of segregated schools. The work of these local actors created the pretext for the NAACP’s school desegregation campaign in Delaware, and it was in this context that the vital center of black educational activism began to shift from equalization to desegregation. Black discontent was subsequently routed through the NAACP, an institution with deep roots in civil rights liberalism and staunchly averse to Jim Crow. If a rising tide of black dissatisfaction with the state of black higher education sparked a challenge to Jim Crow schooling, the state was put on the defensive and forced to articulate a rationalization for the system of segregated schools. In formalistic terms, university officials first cited the state constitution that demanded racial segregation as the basis for denying black students admission to the white school. Thus they construed school desegregation as an affront to the principle of states’ rights and an offense to the democratic prerogatives of the (white) majority to maintain their educational system in a manner they deemed preferable. The court’s sympathy to the arguments

“There Is a Movement on Foot”

25

of black plaintiffs and the NAACP attorneys revealed the vulnerabilities of the system of Jim Crow schooling to challenges in the wake of a succession of pro-desegregation Supreme Court rulings and created opportunities for blacks to cross the color line. The advance of reform, however, also provided the impetus for a reevaluation of and investment in the system of segregated black schooling. As the record of institutional deficiencies at the historically black Delaware State College mounted, school officials were forced to defend the mission of their institution. The state, in its broad defense of Jim Crow education, also began exploring greater investments at the college to allay black demands for entrée into the university. Here school desegregation opponents and boosters of historically black education found common cause. The residents of the state of Delaware had thus set off on a course of reforms that would desegregate higher education in the state and modernize the longneglected historically black school.

* * * Edwards’s inquiry was one of many that forced the university to convey a justification of segregationist policies.8 Beyond the legal explanations for segregation, officials cited cultural reasons for keeping the university all-white. Hullihen expressed concerns about the conservative culture of the state and the possibility that any violation of the color line would provoke a white backlash. In response to Ralph W. Robinson’s inquiry about the possibility of blacks attending an interscholastic athletic competition, he noted with some regret that “I have found the attitude of the people of Delaware toward the negro race much less liberal, friendly, and generous than that of the people much further south.” The organizers of the event, he was informed, “while not themselves opposed to admitting negro contestants who are properly registered in the competing schools, are faced with the threat—or at least the fear—that admitting members of the negro race would result in the withdrawal of practically all of the Delaware schools and would consequently destroy the fundamental purpose of holding this meet, which is to bring students of the Delaware schools to the University.” Hullihen also expressed his regret and “shock” at the rejection of his request for permission to allow Delaware State College (DSC) president William C. Jason and a number of his teachers to sit in as auditors in the university’s Summer School lectures. If such a request were granted, he had been warned, “the whole class would doubtless leave the room.” In a faintly hopeful note, however, he stressed,

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“We hope and believe that the University, through the teaching of many of its courses in Political Science, Sociology, and History, particularly, is laying something of a ground work for such improvement.”9 The growing number of requests for applications finally prompted state officials to pursue more practical measures to allay blacks’ demands for admission to university. By late 1946, the case of two African Americans who were interested in pursuing master’s degrees in agricultural economics and education came up in a meeting at which governor Walter W. Bacon and top state officials were in attendance. Bacon acknowledged “there is a movement on foot to open the doors of the University for colored residents of the state.” The governor expressed his support for maintaining the status quo at the university, however. Hullihen’s successor, William Carlson, thus recommended establishing a scholarship program that would provide tuition support for black students to attend programs outside the state to which they gained admission.10 Drawing on the segregationist policy initiatives that had been developed by other border and Upper South states in the face of black student challenges to separate and unequal educational opportunities, State Superintendent of Public Instruction George Miller and President Carlson subsequently recommended that the state provide out-of-state scholarships for black students wishing to pursue degrees that were available to white students only. Before World War I, most blacks were denied access to a comprehensive high school education that would provide them the skills and credentials requisite to pursue a college education. However, as the number of high school graduates grew in the 1920s and blacks’ demand for higher educational opportunity rose, school officials across these regions instituted measures designed to allay black demands for admission to white institutions of higher education. Missouri had first appropriated funds for out-of-state tuition grants in 1929 for black students who were interested in pursuing course work that was not offered at historically black Lincoln University. Maryland followed suit in 1933. Kentucky, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia also established similar programs in response to threatened lawsuits. Maryland’s high court invalidated the state’s out-of-state tuition program in 1936, and the Supreme Court ruled similarly in its judgment of Missouri’s program in Gaines v. Canada: Missouri ex rel. two years later. Instead of pressuring the state to capitulate to integration because of the high costs of maintaining a segregated system of higher education as the NAACP had hoped, “most southern states responded to Gaines,” as legal scholar Michael Klarman has

“There Is a Movement on Foot”

27

noted, “by adopting the very out-of-state scholarships that the Court had invalidated.”11 Hinting at the potentially politically explosive nature of this policy, Carlson reported to the president of the Board of Trustees, Hugh Morris, “It is Governor Bacon’s feeling that all of this should be handled as confidentially as possible and that whatever fund is set up should not be labeled specifically for this purpose.” He then recommended to Morris that the university’s budget commission set aside $2,000 for this program and added two conditions to the governor’s plan that should be considered at the next meeting of the executive committee: eligible black students must have academic credentials worthy of admission to the university, and no funds were to be provided to black applicants to attend programs not otherwise available to white students at the university.12 Miller also expressed his concern to Carlson about “considerable agitation coming to him regarding the education of negro teachers in service.”13 In response to this source of agitation, university officials proposed to expand the out-of-state tuition program. Again, only black teachers who were qualified to attend the University of Delaware were eligible for tuition payments, and they were only eligible for support for programs available for white students at the university. Black students could not seek support for a medical or law degree because no such programs were offered to white students in the state. Carlson and Miller also proposed a cap on out-of-state aid. The state would thus only extend an amount of support beyond what a black student would have to pay if he were white and eligible to attend the university. Early the next year, the board also investigated private sources of support to supplement the amount appropriated by the state legislature.14 The state’s decision to accommodate the demands of black students through offering out-of-state tuition did little to distract the NAACP from its efforts to secure admission for black students to the university. During a tour arranged by the Wilmington Branch in May 1947, the delegation would have surely been introduced to the university’s postwar reorganization and modernization effort. Under the leadership of President Carlson, the university had undergone a great expansion during which enrollment grew and the administration instituted a multimillion-dollar building construction program to accommodate the demands of a growing student body. The administration expanded adult education programs, set up a university research fund, and tapped its alumni development fund. The state legislature raised the university’s annual appropriation in 1947 from $360,892 to $623,500. It also pro-

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vided a special allotment of $75,000 for the university and gave cost-of-living raises to all staff. In addition, the university had secured private funds for research in the agricultural and engineering programs. The NAACP delegation might have also discussed the university’s plans to establish summer faculty research grants, create new endowments, institute new departments, and fashion academic extension programs in the next couple of years.15 One month after the NAACP campus visit, four more black students— this time two undergraduates and two graduate students—sent admission applications to the university under the auspices of the NAACP. At the same time, Evelyn Brannen, a member of the NAACP Education Committee, penned a letter to the national office in New York notifying them of the action. They were preparing to publicize their efforts and coordinate their activities with other sympathetic organizations. Brannen also requested advice and support from the national office. The next month, one of the undergraduate applicants had her application returned with a recommendation that she apply for admission at DSC. She immediately responded with a letter stating that she could not pursue her preferred course of study at the college and returned her application with the requisite submission fee. None of the other three applicants received any response to their submissions. Upon news of the university’s response (and lack thereof), Assistant Special Counsel for the NAACP Robert L. Carter recommended that Brannen coordinate her activities with local attorney Louis Redding, as he was confident that Redding would be interested in handling the case. The national office, Carter insisted, was most interested in these efforts, but organization protocol demanded that its participation, if the local activists, parents, and students so desired, would have to be first arranged through the Wilmington Branch and local counsel.16

* * * As African Americans in Delaware increasingly sought admission to the University of Delaware, Louis Lorenzo Redding emerged as the conduit through which many of the demands of Delaware’s aggrieved black student population would be fashioned into a more forthright social protest challenge to segregation in public education, and an approach rooted in civil rights liberalism and school desegregation would predominate in this civil rights movement. Redding was a product of Delaware’s segregated black public schools and received his bachelor’s degree at Brown University. Following a path similar

“There Is a Movement on Foot”

29

to that which Du Bois described so poignantly in The Souls of Black Folk, Redding taught in black schools in rural Florida and urban Georgia, where “he tried to learn something of Negro life there where Negroes abound.”17 Redding earned his law degree at Harvard University in 1928, a crucial site in the education of black attorneys, and counted among his fellow graduates Charles Hamilton Houston, Raymond Rae Alexander, Jesse Heslip, and William Hastie. It was here that he was schooled under the tutelage of Felix Frankfurter and Roscoe Pound. Frankfurter and Pound were proponents of the philosophy of progressive realist jurisprudence that rejected laissez-faire, noninterventionist conceptions of government and instead embraced a regulatory state with more authority to intervene to improve the lives of citizens. The law, realists believed, should reflect developments in modern social science, balance individual and property rights, and be sensitive to the plight of minorities.18 Redding returned to Wilmington at the behest of his father and passed the Delaware bar exam in 1929. His struggles for acceptance in the legal establishment were indicative of the great challenges that blacks faced before the law. Delaware lawyers were expected to secure the sponsorship of a preceptor for admission to the bar. After his requests for sponsorship were rejected by a number of attorneys in the state, Redding approached U.S. senator and former municipal judge Daniel O. Hastings. Hastings extended his sponsorship, in part, because of the influence of Redding’s father, Lewis A. Redding, who was a prominent figure in Wilmington’s black religious and cultural circles and Republican Party politics. He would not, however, permit Redding to prepare for his bar exam in his law office like his other white charges, as was the custom at the time. Redding’s subsequent admission to the bar did not confer unto him the same professional privileges as his white colleagues; he was denied admission to the Delaware Bar Association. Thus he practiced his craft largely in isolation, his former law partner Leonard L. Williams remembered, and cultivated the reputation as a loner. Redding would have the dubious distinction of being the only black attorney in the state for nearly three decades.19 Redding operated a general civil law practice from his small office in downtown Wilmington and handled a variety of cases ranging from mundane civil matters to criminal offenses. His first courtroom battle came in 1926, when a bailiff in the Wilmington Municipal Court evicted him from the “white side” of a Delaware courtroom where he had settled to witness the proceedings during a Christmas vacation from law school. One of his first

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acts after he passed the bar was to write a protest letter to Hastings. Hastings conceded that there was no legal basis for the practice: the state constitution only demanded segregation in schools—nowhere else. He thus ordered the Wilmington courts to cease segregating the public according to race in courtrooms. Redding’s practice often took him across the state, especially to the capital of Dover, a fifty-mile trip complicated by poor roads, motels that refused to accommodate blacks, and only one restaurant on the route that would serve blacks even a cup of coffee. His clients tended to be blacks and poor whites, many of whom were ignorant of the law and who, if not for Redding’s generosity and marginalization within the legal community, would have had an even more difficult time securing legal representation. “Unsure how to address an attorney,” historian Annette Woolard-Provine recalled, “they usually referred to Louis as ‘Lawyer Redding.’ ”20 Redding had a unique style, described by those who knew him as attentive, formal, eloquent, tireless, and stoic—functions of his class standing and the professional necessities demanded of a black attorney judges often perceived as an annoyance in their courtroom and of a black and white public that held low expectations of black lawyers’ legal acumen.21 He chafed at the small and often conservative confines of black Wilmington society and often traveled to Manhattan to find professional and cultural sustenance. Redding moved his family just over the state line into Pennsylvania, where he bought a farmhouse to escape many of the indignities of Delaware’s brand of Jim Crow. His Ivy League accent and his propensity for Brooks Brothers and J. Press suits, Mark Cross Pens, and imported English Oval cigarettes (which, NAACP attorney Jack Greenberg recalled, he “usually carried or let dangle from his lips  .  .  .  unlit and filter end outward”) further revealed his elitist sensibilities.22 His refined air did not come at the expense of his broader interest and commitment to political and educational activities however, and Redding embraced the multipronged approach black lawyers, African Americans, and their allies supported in challenges to various forms of racial segregation and inequality. For practical and ideological purposes, Redding embraced certain elements of black voluntarism and civil rights liberalism, as well as the interracialism and intraracialism that ran through black protest organizations of the age. He also gravitated toward approaches to the Negro problem that stressed the efficacy of race- and class-based solutions. Redding was a participant at the Second Amenia Conference in 1933, which was intended to infuse a new vitality into the NAACP and develop a consensus among the African Ameri-

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31

can leadership around a broad-based racial and class agenda. “The goal of the meeting,” historian Thomas Sugrue has argued, “was nothing less than rethinking the tired ‘methods and philosophy’ of organizations dedicated to the advancement of African Americans.”23 The meeting also revealed a generational tension between the elder statesmen among the Talented Tenth and their younger colleagues, whom historian David Levering Lewis labeled the Young Turks.24 The latter group was a heterogeneous one and counted among its ranks the likes of Houston, Abram Harris, Ralph Bunche, E. Franklin Frazier, Sterling Brown, and Redding. These men did not exude the same degree of class-consciousness that they saw in their elders and seemed more open to economic critiques of prevailing race relations. Redding observed that many of the older-generation conferees had “so subtly become infused with middle-class American ‘success philosophy’ as to have trouble remembering the great mass of ‘poor, ignorant, uncounseled and exploited’ black people.”25 The Talented Tenth, he argued to NAACP chairman Joel Spingarn in a follow-up letter to the conference, needed to better serve the masses.26 But for all the talk of a generational divide, Redding expressed sympathy for the wide variety of programs that had been proposed by the participants in a letter he also sent to NAACP assistant secretary Roy Wilkins just days after he left Amenia. He believed that a quasi-nationalist platform combined with a dose of socialism, as had been articulated by Frazier, was essential to African American political culture given the pervasiveness of white racism.27 He also supported the “Negro Bloc” idea, a means of consolidating and leveraging black electoral power, particularly in northern and border congressional districts where black voters were concentrated, in support of Republican, Democratic, or independent candidates who expressly supported African Americans’ aspirations. At a period during the 1930s when African Americans began to split from the Republican Party and gravitate toward the Democrats, he also sided with Houston and his argument that African Americans should participate in both political parties. (Redding had written eloquently about his shift to the Democratic Party and his support of Democratic nominee Al Smith in the 1928 presidential election.) In a position that thoroughly aligned him with the Young Turk impulse of the conference, Redding also endorsed Harvard political scientist Emmett Dorsey’s idea of “comprehensive social planning,” a program that involved, Dorsey would later detail, an interracial coalition of black and white workers striving toward educational uplift and desegregation.28 If Redding embraced a wide array of political philosophies that drew from multiple traditions within the black freedom struggle, the young attor-

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ney’s professional associations also spanned the spectrum of African American political culture. He was listed as a member of the national Executive Committee in the proceedings of the National Negro Congress in 1936. He was a member of the Emergency Civil Rights Committee in his early career and maintained an association with the National Lawyer’s Guild, a racially integrated, progressive association of lawyers, and served on its executive board in the mid-1950s. He maintained his membership until the state of Delaware passed a law requiring members of such organizations to register with the state police in the midst of the second Red Scare. In local matters, Redding participated in interracial workshops with white liberals and in small-scale protest activities. He advised white politicians on matters that pertained to the African American population in the state as a kind of “black cabinet” functionary.29 Redding also represented participants in the communist-led hunger march on Washington in 1931 in which a number of activists were arrested on various charges. The experience moved him greatly. “I . . . learned perhaps a whole new set of ideas about the way some people organized their lives and thought that life in this country might be organized, “ he recalled. “I’m sure that they had some influence . . . in leading me from being just a shall I say ‘bread and butter lawyer’ to a lawyer who became much more deeply interested and much more involved in what might be called social causes.”30 Redding’s most important professional and political association was with the NAACP, however. At this juncture, his political energies were channeled through the political and institutional stream marked civil rights liberalism. Redding was part of a small cadre of black attorneys, under the leadership of Houston, that professionalized the black bar, thrust black lawyers into the forefront of the struggle for civil rights, and effected a dramatic transformation of constitutional jurisprudence. He was among the first group of black attorneys appointed to the National Legal Committee of the NAACP in 1932 amid increasing criticism of the organization for its failure to integrate its legal staff. Redding continued with the Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc. (LDEF) under the direction of Marshall when it split from the main organization in 1939.31

* * * On January 20, 1948, a delegation from the Wilmington Branch of the NAACP set out to establish the groundwork for a legal challenge to the state’s system of

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segregation in higher education. They met with the president of the university to discuss the applications of Benjamin C. Whitten, one of the four applicants who had been refused admission to the engineering school six months earlier, and John H. Taylor, a teacher at Howard High School who was interested in extension courses at the university. Jean Jamison of the Wilmington Branch had requested Thurgood Marshall’s attendance at the meeting, but he was unable to attend. Marshall was consumed with another graduate school desegregation case in Oklahoma in which the plaintiff, Ada Lois Sipuel, was denied admission to the law school at the University of Oklahoma on the basis of her race.32 The registrar had rejected Whitten’s application, stating simply, “under the charter of the University of Delaware we cannot accept your application for admission for the School of Engineering.”33 The meeting yielded few results, and on January 26 Redding wrote to Marshall informing him that he believed they had a strong case with a sympathetic plaintiff. Houston had always emphasized the significance of finding appealing plaintiffs, and the NAACP sought to represent candidates with spotless academic credentials whose denial could be based only on race. Whitten fit the bill: he was a Wilmington native, a veteran then attending graduate school at Pennsylvania State College, and apparently in excellent academic standing.34 Support from the national office for this effort came two days later when Assistant Special Counsel Edward R. Dudley responded on behalf of Marshall (who was by then working on another graduate school desegregation case in Texas in which Heman Sweatt was denied admission to the University of Texas School of Law on the basis of his race). Dudley sent Redding a copy of the record and a brief of Marshall’s Oklahoma case, in which the Court had ruled that Sipuel was immediately entitled to attend the law school at the University of Oklahoma. Dudley advised Redding to make sure his client had the academic qualifications sufficient for obtaining admission under regular conditions and the paperwork testifying to such qualifications, financial resources to pursue the case, and support from the local branch of the NAACP and the broader community. NAACP protocol then dictated that the client should submit an application to the registrar and, upon refusal, follow up with the Board of Trustees. After all administrative remedies had been exhausted, the local actors were then to file suit in either federal or state court, depending on the disposition of the different bodies and the remedy sought. This was a novel suit in Delaware, but Redding was not operating on a legal terrain blindly. The Sipuel and Sweatt cases provided valuable legal guides to the possibilities of this sort of groundbreaking litigation and

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pointed to the eroding foundation of Plessy and the myth of the separate but equal doctrine.35 In response to the sum of requests for the admission of black students to the university and against the backdrop of the higher education segregation case recently decided by the Supreme Court, the executive committee of the Board of Trustees of the university convened on January 27, 1948, to refashion their admission policies on this evolving social and legal terrain. It subsequently prepared a resolution and presented it to the full Board of Trustees at a special meeting on January 31 in which Judge Hugh M. Morris, the president of the Board of Trustees, Chancellor William Watson Harrington, President Carlson, and Governor Bacon were in attendance. Morris explained that the special meeting had been called in response to recent developments in the Supreme Court and the NAACP’s petition on behalf of Whitten and Taylor. After Morris presented the board with Whitten’s letter and credentials, executive committee member Robert H. Richards presented the board with their resolution that would open the university, albeit on limited terms, to blacks. There was some discussion as to the final language of the resolution. Richards was concerned about the passage acknowledging the Court’s demand that states provide “substantially equal facilities.” He conceded that he was not familiar with the exact language that the Court used in the higher education cases, but he was concerned that the resolution would enable black students to mount an end run around the board’s limited accommodation of the black students’ demands. I do not want somebody coming in and seeking to enter the University to take an A.B. degree because he thinks the courses leading to an A.B. degree in the University of Delaware are better than the course or courses leading to that degree in the college for colored people at Dover. All the Supreme Court decided was that if Missouri and Oklahoma did not provide a law school for colored people within the State they should be permitted to go to the University Law School conducted primarily for white students.36 The board unanimously adopted the resolution. Far from a principled stance for racial equality, the board’s resolution reflected a combination of social and legal realpolitik based on the board’s fear of a white backlash if it was perceived as acting too hastily in the relatively conservative racial climate of Delaware. It also reflected the board’s mori-

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bund confidence in the constitutional viability of maintaining segregated graduate and professional programs. As if to express its powerlessness over this decision, the board went out of its way to stress that it was making the decision to open the doors to black students under duress. It noted that the state constitution mandated segregation in public education and that it was the board’s opinion that this policy should not be deviated from unless it was compelled by a “paramount authority.” The governing body then cited that paramount authority—the Supreme Court—and its recent decision in Sipuel and the older Gaines decision. The cases were cited, Carlson noted during the drafting of the resolution, “to soften the blow for those who do not understand the reason for taking this action.”37 They also served to insulate the board from any possible criticism. Thus the board recognized the “binding effect” of the Supreme Court rulings and resolved to admit black students, in line with Richards’s earlier concerns, “to pursue a course of study of his choosing leading to a certain degree for which a course of study leading to the same degree is not furnished in any educational institution provided by this State within this State for the education of bona fide colored residents of this state.”38 The foundations of Jim Crow had been undermined. For the first time, black students had the opportunity to enjoy graduate and professional programs, summer schools, and extension programs at the University of Delaware that had been denied them as a matter of law.39 The practical effects of the board’s 1948 resolution on the university’s graduate programs were of limited scope. Redding and the NAACP forwarded the men’s applications primarily as an initial test of school segregation in the state. Whitten apparently continued with his graduate work at Penn State. Taylor was interested in taking qualitative organic analysis, but that course was not offered that term. Black schoolteachers, on the other hand, made great inroads in the summer school program. The news that the university had opened its graduate programs to blacks was particularly well received by the NAACP staff. “We wish all cases were as easy as this,” Dudley quipped, “even though it might result in ‘putting us out of business.’ ”40 For the time being, Redding suspended taking any legal action against the university.

* * * A student strike at Delaware State College brought to light another source of black discontent with the system of segregated and unequal higher edu-

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cation in the state. The strike itself was, very broadly, an extension of a long tradition of black student activism that dated back to the 1920s, when black students at historically black institutions like Fisk University and Hampton Institute challenged the autocratic administration of schools and, as historian James Anderson has argued, “called essentially for an abandonment of the Hampton-Tuskegee idea.”41 DSC students initiated the strike on February 8, 1949, when demonstrators marched in front of Delaware Hall, the recitation building, and Conrad Hall.42 Their list of grievances was long and included pointed criticisms of the college’s physical plant, student programs, curriculum, library, and administration. In an unsigned treatise, a protester complained about the inadequacy of the dormitories that, the students stressed, they had to paint themselves to make livable; the filth and disrepair of various buildings; the lack of and dilapidated furniture; and fire hazards. The student’s exposition also noted the low quality of food in the dining hall and the lack of university-sponsored intellectual, cultural, and social programs. There were no on-campus medical services, and students had to find their own transportation to town if they needed care. The college had no recreational facilities or beauty parlor. As to academic matters, they complained that many of the subjects listed in the catalogue were not taught and wondered why the library was closed on Saturday afternoon. If the strikers stressed the material inadequacies of their school, they also challenged the quality of the administration of the college. Of a total of 294 full-time students, 187 signed a petition calling for the resignation of trustee Judge Elwood Melson. The students reserved particular condemnation for DSC president Howard D. Gregg, however, and his management of the institution: “It is a disgrace to state herein that he who has originally been a symbol of good becomes the very symbol of corruption.” They charged him with intimidation and complained about the college’s exploitation of student labor on the eve of impending inspections. They also charged Gregg with nepotism and accused him of firing faculty who opposed his positions. Outside groups bolstered the students’ case against the administration. A citizen’s committee composed of religious, press, business, and education leaders leveled their own set of charges. It accused the president of, among other things, maintaining family members on the college payroll, charging exorbitant prices at the school store, using “school labor” to maintain his personal residence and care for his livestock, using travel funds for personal use, and late payment of bills. The committee also listed among its concerns the inadequate training of faculty, poor vocational equipment, declining enrollments, and poor student retention.43

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Notwithstanding Gregg’s passionate defense of his record of recent improvements at the college and his attempt to contextualize any problems within the longer history of state neglect, the rising tide of student discontent prompted a broader evaluation of the conditions at DSC and the quality of the segregated system of higher education in the state.44 The governor sent a representative to the college to sit with the board of trustees to determine the validity of the students’ complaints.45 Reverend Arthur R. James of the Central Baptist Church in Wilmington and longtime president of the Wilmington Branch of the NAACP took the opportunity of the crisis to offer a critique of the college in a letter to the governor. In his assessment, the roots of the problems at DSC lay in the politicization and neglect of the educational program. “Taking advantage of the customary indifference towards Negro education in a segregated school system,” he asserted, “the Republican Party has treated Delaware State College both as an appendage and as an unwanted step-child.” The student strike proved that the college program needed a thorough overhauling, especially when compared to opportunities afforded white students at the University of Delaware. “Separate and EQUAL FOR BOTH RACES” was, after all, an operating principle of the state’s education system. He complained that positions on the Board of Trustees were awarded for Republican Party loyalty, not on the basis of the candidate’s knowledge and expertise in matters of higher education. In contrast, he noted, a toplevel board governed the university. As to the facilities at the two schools, James glibly stated, “perhaps it is better to skip the question to avoid further embarrassment.” On the matter of appropriations, he noted that “this poor step-child of a college is so badly under-nourished”; it received just half the resources of the historically black institution in neighboring Maryland. To this end, James recommended a number of reforms. The state could equalize the program at DSC with that of the university or merge the two institutions. It could also reorganize the governing body of the college such that blacks occupied a majority of the positions. In this second scenario, the state, James concluded, should appropriate adequate resources to ensure that the college was first rate. The alumni association also conducted its own investigation and expressed concerns about certain “irregularities” at the school.46 In the wake of the strike and a surge of criticism of the conditions at DSC, strike sympathizers put forward a resolution to investigate the causes of the student action before the state senate on February 15, 1949, but senate Republicans blocked its adoption. Recently elected Democratic governor Elbert N. Carvel and the Board of Trustees moved to formally address the rising tide

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of discontent on March 21 and resolved to open a hearing to evaluate the merits of the charges against Gregg, assess his management of the college, and determine with still more precision the material conditions there. The first set of charges against Gregg focused on a series of allegedly fraudulent transactions in which the president and his family had enriched themselves at the expense of the college through the sale of overpriced and ill-prepared chickens. The committee also cited a number of cases of professional misconduct, the sum of which gave greater clarity to the impetus for the student strike. The committee charged that Gregg had prohibited a group of World War II veterans from starting their own organization. He had granted a noncompetitive concession for the operation of the cafeteria, which sold items to students at above-market prices. Gregg had prohibited the establishment of a student government. He had required the college choir to perform at certain non-college functions and dictated which songs the students would sing. Gregg had failed to attend to the loss of silver and chinaware in the dining hall, which resulted in insufficient amounts for students. He had also failed to remove dining hall staff who had been charged with poorly preparing and serving food, which was of low quality to begin with. Gregg had ignored problems related to crime and gambling on campus. He had also collected key deposits and not returned them. Gregg had failed to maintain social and cultural programs, despite collecting $30 in activity fees from each student. In what appeared as a blatant violation of students’ privacy, he was charged with opening their mail and inducing students to spy on each other. When Gregg discovered student Wendal Booth in possession of a copy of the students’ complaints that undergirded their strike, Gregg turned the pupil over to the state police, who fingerprinted him and interrogated him as to the names of those associated with drafting and distributing the treatise. In light of the sum of these charges, the committee concluded that chief executive of the college lacked the administrative qualifications requisite to continue as its president. Nonetheless, Gregg was cleared of all charges by a 3–2 vote of the Board of Trustees on May 24.47 The embattled president was not out of hot water, though. Governor Carvel announced the appointment of two new board members, including a replacement for Gregg supporter Melson, soon after the controversy surrounding the strike erupted. The replacements broke the Republican monopoly on power on the board and soon tipped the scales towards the anti-Gregg camp. The newly composed board unsuccessfully attempted to reopen the case against Gregg but suspended him nonetheless on July

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13. The beleaguered Gregg did have some supporters. The Human Rights League of Delaware called for his reinstatement. Gregg himself fought back, filing charges of bias against the board and the Carvel appointees before arriving at a final resolution with the college, which included his formal resignation and a cash settlement.48 If the successful effort to remove Gregg from his presidency marked the end of one difficult chapter in the history of DSC, the visit of an evaluation team of the Middle States Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools in late October further highlighted the depths of the crisis and the inequalities inherent in the state’s system of higher education. A five-member evaluating committee of the accreditation organization, including Charles H. Thompson, dean of the School of Education at Howard University and founder and editor of Journal of Negro Education, visited the campus that fall. The report they completed represented an even more systematic assessment of the college’s program, set more explicitly against a long history of racial segregation in the state’s system of segregated higher education. “The Delaware State College is an anomaly,” the agency contended, “due to the fact that it has been set apart as a special institution for Negroes—which up until last year had to serve as University, College and Technical school for the Negroes of Delaware. Many of its problems grew out of the fact that, educationally, it is a superfluous institution.”49 In setting their assessment of the college in this context, the assessors did note the appointment of a new board and its fresh commitment to improvements at the college. The committee recognized the deeper roots of educational disadvantage that were inherent in the state’s system of black primary and secondary schooling. And it acknowledged, in the wake of the student strike, the efforts to facilitate greater student participation in curricular reform and the expansion of extracurricular activities. Still, the evaluating committee asserted that the quality of education at the college fell short of acceptable professional standards. They cited outdated teaching methods, high student-teacher ratios, inadequately equipped classrooms and laboratories, limited course offerings, and inadequate measures of educational advancement. The team acknowledged that many academic buildings were in good condition, but the library was understaffed and ill-suited to serve its staff and patrons. The faculty were underpaid, and salaries were too low to recruit and retain good teachers in the region’s competitive labor market. State appropriations were also low in relation to the academic objectives of the institution. The college’s failure to meet many of the professional standards of the era

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subsequently served, in sum, as the basis for the Middle States Association to withdraw its accreditation.50

* * * In the wake of the college’s loss of accreditation, the black college student movement and the NAACP found common cause. Sensing an opportunity to advance their desegregation campaign at the University of Delaware, Ruth Laws, president of the Kent-Sussex Branch of the NAACP, contacted the national branch in early January 1950 seeking advice as to the NAACP’s position on the accreditation crisis at DSC. Director of Branches Gloster Current advised Laws that it should be the local branch’s position “that in view of the accreditation issue that Negroes should be admitted to the existing accredited college in the state and that this is an excellent opportunity to seek the elimination of the segregated schools upon the accreditation issue.”51A host of student groups, including representatives of the Student Council Committee and those poised to graduate that year, subsequently wrote to Governor Carvel seeking his assistance through the accreditation crisis.52 Reginald Stanton Tynes’s letter captured the spirit of the students most impacted by the college’s loss of accreditation: “Of the four classifications of students at this institution, the seniors are of course more affected by this recent action of the Middle States Accrediting Association, than the rest, and we felt that the state of Delaware owes us an accredited education, and since it has failed in its duty to provide us with the same, we feel some action should be taken in the matter.” To this end, Tynes recommended two courses of action that indicated the growing importance of desegregation as a practical means of addressing the educational challenges facing black college students. In the first, the senior class of DSC would transfer to the University of Delaware and continue to pursue their degrees at that institution. In the second scenario, seniors would pursue coursework at both institutions and, upon successful completion, receive their degree from the college.53 A number of other students, apparently under the direction of Louis Redding, also sent requests to Charles W. Bush, director of admissions, for applications in January 1950. Lillian Coleman applied to the program in Elementary Education. Irving J. Williams, in what must have created a stir in the admissions office, walked into the office and requested an application in person.54 The university did attempt to assuage black students’ concerns about the value (or lack thereof) of degrees at DSC. After the Middle States Association

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rendered its decision, college dean Maurice E. Thomasson contacted the university to inquire about the significance of the college’s loss of accreditation to the DSC applicants to graduate programs at the university in light of the 1948 resolution. Carl J. Rees, director of graduate study, announced that the university would not penalize black applicants to its graduate programs because of the college’s loss of accreditation. Those applications would be considered on the same basis as applications from students from accredited schools. “Under this arrangement,” Rees determined, “the student rather than the institution is the deciding factor.”55 DSC students, upon admission, were subject to a one-semester probationary period, however. Thomasson seemed satisfied with Rees’s decision: “I agree fully that the procedure is fair. Our students are being informed of your statement so that they may know that our present absence from the rolls of the Middle States Association . . . will not bar them from graduate study.”56 Notwithstanding the university’s accommodation of black students’ concerns regarding future graduate school admissions, the administration declined to admit DSC students to their undergraduate programs. The students who pressed for admission to these programs were all interested in enrolling in the spring term, which was scheduled to begin on February 2. In each case, the administration informed them that under the 1948 resolution they could not be admitted. Two others, including Homer Minus, were rejected because they failed to specify their preferred course of study. Irving Williams received verbal notification that he would not be admitted. Another student, Daniel Moody, was successful in securing an application and returned it with the requisite personal photograph and application fee. Bush later wrote to him in a manner that summed up the matter, stating, “as a colored person, he . . . could not be admitted to the University of Delaware.”57 Redding condemned these decisions in the press: “The Board of Trustees had defaulted on an opportunity to take a just and significant step in the realization of the democratic ideal. It was in possession of sufficient facts and authority to take that step. The separate but equal doctrine is a delusion. This is graphically demonstrated by the glaring inequality between the college education offered to Delaware citizens at Newark and at Dover. The inequality is both qualitative and quantitative.”58 After the students had exhausted all their administrative appeals, Redding and Assistant Special Counsel Jack Greenberg, who was assigned the Delaware case by Marshall, set out to establish the groundwork for a lawsuit. The University of Delaware case was Greenberg’s first big lawsuit with

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the NAACP. Current had suggested to Marshall that they assign Assistant Special Counsel Constance Motley to the Delaware action, but Marshall had other ideas.59 “He picked me because my in-laws lived in Delaware,” Greenberg remembered, “not a bad reason and an expression of the personal, freeform way Thurgood ran the office.” Delaware was, in a sense, Greenberg’s “home ground” and a place where the NAACP could better control the travel and lodging costs associated with the litigation campaign. Greenberg and Redding got along splendidly, as the young attorney recognized in Redding “something resembling [his] own taciturnity and intolerance of nonsense.”60 There was little chance that this effort would be undermined due to the lack of coordination with the national office or overzealous or inexperienced local counsel, which had resulted in legal setbacks in earlier litigation campaigns in North Carolina and Tennessee. Among his first acts, Greenberg contacted the Middle States Association for a copy of the DSC accreditation report.61 Redding also contacted board of trustees’ president Morris about the recent rejections of the black students’ applications. He reminded Morris of the rationale undergirding the students’ requests and the university’s logic undergirding the rejection of their applications. In a sympathetic note, the civil rights attorney acknowledged that the university was not responsible for the situation at the college. Redding stressed, however, that the quality of the institutions was profoundly unequal. He thus urged the Board of Trustees, given the state’s responsibility to provide “equal access to education of the same quality,” to open its doors to black students. “For the Board of Trustees of the University of Delaware, an agency of the state, to maintain such a denial of equal access, or opportunity,” he concluded, “constitutes a deprivation of the equal protection of the laws and, I believe, is invalid.” Redding also requested additional applications for students who wished to make requests for admissions and that those applications be considered without reference to their race.62 Time was of the essence, Redding stressed in a subsequent correspondence, as registration for the fall semester was to begin the following week. Morris replied that he was unable to meet Redding’s impending deadline, as university bylaws dictated that two weeks’ notice had to be given to board members before a meeting could be scheduled, but he stated that they would address his request. After considering Redding’s letter on behalf of the black applicants, the Board of Trustees issued a formal resolution on the matter. Because the applicants did not fall within the purview of the 1948 resolution, it concluded, their requests for applications and the consideration of those applications regardless of race were denied. Greenberg subsequently

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began preparing materials for a suit. Based on NAACP protocols, he recommended that they file suit for a preliminary injunction forbidding the university from refusing to consider the blacks students’ applications and then seek a judgment establishing the right of black students to admission to the University of Delaware.63 As the formal challenge to segregation gained momentum, a number of interests pressed the state to address the problem of the inequality between DSC and the university. In a subtle affirmation of the black students’ complaints, the editors of the Journal-Every Evening, the newspaper of record in northern Delaware, agreed with Redding’s point that the state had failed to live up to its constitutional obligations to provide black students with equal educational opportunities. They defended the board, however, refuting the central tenet of Redding’s argument about the board’s legal responsibilities. The editors believed that the board was justified in refusing the admission of the entire student body of the college and subverting the democratically crafted state law. The matter should be resolved by the courts. Still, editors of the Journal expressed sympathy for students who were handicapped as a result of the poor conditions at the college. “The fact is that for a Negro population as small as Delaware’s, a ‘separate but equal’ institution of higher learning is an impossibility.” The editors acknowledged efforts in other southern states to equalize their black and white schools and the expenses related to those efforts. They concluded however, “The State of Delaware just cannot follow suit.”64 Representatives of the Dover Metropolitan Council of Negro Women and Sussex County Alumni Association all urged the governor to either support the increase of resources allocated for the college or admit the college students to the accredited University of Delaware. The governor also received a recommendation to establish a Delaware Commission on Higher Education. Composed of leading figures from various fields (one of whom would presumably be African American), the commission would be charged with addressing the problems at the college.65 DSC trustee Gilbert Nickel acknowledged the calls of students, faculty, and DSC trustee Mary Berryman that the state legislature call a special session: “The whole complicated problem of social and civil rights for the Negroes must be considered and the party must take a definite stand or ignore it.” Their call for $3 million, Nickel stated rather flippantly in a correspondence with Carvel, was a minor point for it presumably addressed the problems of inequality between the schools and would relieve blacks’ demands for admission to the university. Money was not an issue, he con-

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cluded; there was enough money in the state budget for the efficient operation of the college.66 Ever focused on challenging segregation in the state’s system of higher education, Redding and Greenberg filed suit in the Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware on March 10, further guiding challenges to separate and unequal education through the NAACP’s institutional framework. Their efforts here raised school desegregation as a bona fide alternative to earlier reformist efforts that were rooted in self-help and black institution building. This was “the first suit filed by the NAACP for admission of Negro students to a so-called ‘white’ undergraduate institution of higher learning,” an NAACP press release announced.67 The main thrust of Redding and Greenberg’s arguments, as Greenberg recalled, was as follows: “integrate because the schools are unequal (and promises to equalize do nothing to alleviate the inequality); integrate because segregation is unconstitutional.”68 In their complaint, the NAACP lawyers sought injunctions that restrained the state from considering and acting upon the plaintiffs’ applications and those of other black applicants on the basis of race. To this end, they contended in their complaint that the ten plaintiffs—all citizens of the United States and residents of Delaware—had been refused admission to the University of Delaware, an administrative department of the state, solely on the basis of their race. The University of Delaware and Delaware State College, they continued, were “unequal and disparate in quantity and quality in all essential aspects.” The university’s refusal to receive the applications of blacks students thus resulted in the plaintiffs’ “suffering immediate and irreparable injury” and violated their constitutional rights under the Fourteenth Amendment.69 Greenberg then set about to organize a panel of expert witnesses to testify to the disparate conditions at the schools.70 The suit forced the state to articulate its most forceful justification for segregation in education, even if Attorney General Albert James had a difficult time formulating a strong defense. His own initial investigation revealed striking disparities in per student and total expenditures between the schools. James’s inquiry to Maryland Attorney General Hall Hammond further highlighted the eroding legal grounds upon which he could forward a defense. Esther McCready had challenged the state’s practice of racial segregation at the University of Maryland School of Nursing. The Maryland Court of Appeals, Hammond informed his neighboring colleague, had decided the previous week that Maryland’s policy of racial segregation at the nursing school and offer of an out-of-state scholarship to Meharry Medical College to

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McCready as an alternative to desegregation failed to pass constitutional muster. After reviewing the decision, James determined that the case would not serve his defense of segregation in education in Delaware.71 Compounding his difficulties, the university Board of Trustees sought a collective exemption from testifying in the state’s defense. Reiterating the themes of powerlessness in their 1948 and early 1950 resolutions, Morris argued that the trustees’ actions had to be understood in the context of legislation passed over the last fifty years that demanded segregation in schools. It was thus not in their power to modify the university’s application policy. “I think it would be contrary to the general welfare, and the interest of the University of Delaware,” Morris informed Deputy Attorney General William Bennethum, “for any trustee of the University to appear as a witness in the pending action . . . . I assume that any testimony by any trustee with respect to that matter would not be helpful.”72 Still, James pressed ahead and filed the defendant’s brief on April 20. Notwithstanding these complications, James asserted that the university admission policy was justified under state law and the inequalities cited by the plaintiffs were functionally irrelevant. In a statement that stretched the bounds of credibility, James forwarded a relative assessment of the college and university that was at great odds with those of the black college students, NAACP, university officials, and accreditation board: “Concerning the University of Delaware, we were highly disappointed. Delaware State College afforded us a pleasant surprise and a not unfavorable impression comparisonwise. Needless to say, there was absolutely nothing at Delaware State College which in any way whatever remotely resembled the air of utter despair displayed by the so-called ‘temporary dormitories and barracks’ at the University of Delaware.”73 He diminished or dismissed the significance of the limited course offerings at the college—after all, black students interested in programs not offered at the college were already eligible to apply to the university. He also rejected the list of inequalities previously noted by the student strikers and the Middle States Association and those contained within the plaintiffs’ complaint. In a particularly creative tack, James also argued that the university was a private institution and thus beyond the purview of the Fourteenth Amendment.74 In what would turn out to be a promising series of events for the plaintiffs, Vice Chancellor Collins J. Seitz was assigned the case. Chancellor William Watson Harrington, who was originally scheduled to preside over the suit, was forced to disqualify himself from the proceedings because he was

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a member of the Board of Trustees of the University of Delaware and, therefore, named in the suit against the university. Seitz was born and raised in Wilmington and attended Wilmington High School and the University of Delaware. After graduating from the University of Virginia Law School, he went to work for the prestigious corporate law firm of Southerland, Berl & Potter, where he proved adept at disentangling the intricacies of corporate law. He distinguished himself to such an extent that he was appointed as the vice chancellor of the Delaware Court of Chancery in 1946 at the relatively young age of thirty-one. While he donated some of his spare time to the ACLU and was active in Democratic Party politics, his sympathy for the plight of the plaintiffs was not self-evident. Seitz was a political appointee with a finite term. The governor, subject to the consent of the State Senate, appointed chancellors and vice chancellors to their terms of twelve years. Seitz alone would decide the case in this juryless court, and any ruling threatening the racial status quo might elicit the ire of elected officials to whom he would be beholden at the end of his term. Redding and Greenberg were confident, however, that his penchant for strict interpretation of the law and the obvious disparities between the schools would result in a favorable outcome.75 The court initiated its formal examination of the record of inequality and the legality of segregated higher education in Parker v. University of Delaware on June 12, 1950. The trial lasted three and a half days, wherein university and college administrators and outside experts testified to the glaring disparities between the two schools. The original plaintiffs to the lawsuit appeared before the court and their testimony attested to the grassroots foundations of the NAACP-led campaign against segregation in education. Homer Minus, Lillian Coleman, Helen Handy, and James Scott each testified to their desire to transfer to the university because of the college’s recent loss of accreditation and the lack of course offerings in their fields of study.76 Administrators from the two schools in question attested, in most contrasting assessments, to the substantive inequalities between the two institutions. Recently appointed university president Allan P. Colburn could hardly contain his pride when he testified to the university’s relative strengths in terms of staffing, salaries, and facilities. For his part, Thomasson offered a very contrasting picture of the institution he briefly oversaw in 1949 and 1950 after Gregg’s dismissal. He testified that the college was plagued with shortcomings, among them limited course offerings that he believed undermined its ability to provide

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its students with an adequate education or grant its students a quality bachelor of arts or bachelor of science degree. More suggestive of the dire state of things at DSC, he reminded the court, was that the college had lost its accreditation, a condition that diminished the standings of even its most accomplished students.77 Charles H. Thompson was called as one of the NAACP’s most expert witnesses. His testimony attested to the spirit and direction of the NAACP’s broader campaign against segregation. As a member of the accreditation survey committee, he was in a unique position to make intimate and informed judgments about the relative qualities of the two schools. Seitz appeared particularly interested in his assessment of the situation, stating, “I am just waiting to be educated, frankly, about this. I am not familiar with it at all.”78 Thompson was happy to oblige His Honor and described at considerable length the various criteria upon which accreditation agencies based their decisions, including the professed aims and objectives of each school and their financial resources, faculty, library holdings, and curricula. After a series of hypothetical comparative exercises led by Greenberg, he concluded, “It is undoubted that a student who comes from an unaccredited institution is at a disadvantage when compared with a student who comes from an accredited institution.”79 Thompson then commented on the merits of segregated education itself. Hinting at the growing boldness of the NAACP’s campaign against segregation, the education expert was unequivocal: “the separate but equal education based upon race in my estimation and in the estimation of a number of other people is neither practical nor theoretically possible.”80 His not-so-subtle critique of the Plessy doctrine provoked a subtle rebuke by Seitz, however, and a suggestion that this line of reasoning was beyond the immediate purview of his court. THE COURT: Doctor, you keep in mind that I have to do what the Supreme Court of the United States has said. When they say separate and equal—you are disagreeing with the statement of law which I must apply. MR. GREENBERG: I think the Doctor is saying that separate is not equal. THE COURT: Well, he is saying that, but I have to do what the Supreme Court of the United States says.81

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The court may have revealed its sympathy for the record of tangible inequalities between the university and the college, but Seitz’s halting of Greenberg and Thompson’s exchange hinted at the jurist’s reticence about judging the constitutionality of segregation itself. James, for his part, continued with what Seitz later recalled as a halfhearted defense of segregation.82 He called witnesses whose testimony was intended to refute the plaintiffs’ assertions about the scope of the inequalities between the schools and the related disadvantages that black students faced. But under cross-examination their accounts only crystallized the disparities between the schools and the reasons why the black students sought application to the university. James called to the stand Oscar J. Chapman, president of Delaware State College, on the fourth and final day of the trial. Presidents of historically black colleges and universities often had the difficult task of balancing the demands of white politicians and trustees, philanthropists, educational reformers, black communities, and their student bodies. And when civil rights movements targeted segregation in higher education, black college administrators often came under intense scrutiny and pressure.83 A longtime advocate of black education, Chapman found himself in the unenviable position of defending the historical mission of his institution without seeming to deny or forgive the institutional inequalities that were endemic to the state’s system of Jim Crow higher education. In negotiating this fraught terrain, Chapman took a prospective stance on the stand that emphasized future investment while subtly reminding listeners of his institution’s history of want. Under questioning from Bennethum, he presented a point-by-point account of the reforms undertaken in the recent past or destined for implementation in the near future. He noted recent increases in faculty and staff salaries and the allocation of funds for hiring a new dean, athletic director, and head football coach. In his reference to conditions at the university, he had stressed—and would again—the fact that the minimum salary for full professors should match those at the university. Chapman detailed allocations for additional equipment for the natural science laboratories; home economics, agricultural, animal husbandry, and industrial arts programs; and social science classrooms. He highlighted the purchase of additional library books. A new gym and women’s dormitory, he informed the court, would be completed in the next two or three years. Chapman also noted a number of administrative reforms that had been recently implemented. The Dean’s Office was separated from the Registrar’s Office. A new athletic director and professor of health and physical education had been appointed.

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Student personnel services had been reorganized. The college had set aside money for a health clinic. It had hired a qualified librarian to replace the assistant librarian who did not have training in the field. And the college was in the process of implementing a new ranking system for faculty. In what became an increasingly contentious period of direct examination, Bennethum also asked a line of questions designed to elicit comments on the relative qualities of the college and university and a rationalization for the continued operation of segregated black schools. He thus asked Chapman to reflect upon his experiences at historically black and white institutions of higher education and present his assessment of his experiences. Chapman had attended Hampton Institute, Lincoln University, University of Michigan, and The Ohio State University. In an ultimately ill-fated attempt to redeem historically black institutions in the eyes of the court, Bennethum somehow entered a line of questioning about Chapman’s high school experience and whether he had received a quality education at Hampton. Chapman testified that he had indeed received “a first class high school education” at Hampton, a subtle allusion to the period at the institution when industrial philanthropy still held sway and the industrial normal schooling was privileged over liberal education.84 Bennethum then attempted to redirect, if awkwardly, the questioning to the president’s assessment of the relative opportunities at the black and white institutions. “Did you get at Hampton or Lincoln any feeling,” he inquired, “which was absent at the unsegregated schools?” Chapman admitted to some difficulty explaining his feelings on this matter and described his commitment to paying his annual alumni dues to the black schools. Every year Hampton and Lincoln, along with Michigan and Ohio State, send me notices of alumni dues . . . . I always paid my alumni dues to Hampton, and I haven’t missed a single year to Lincoln. Now, I hate to say this, but I have never paid alumni dues to the University of Michigan and Ohio State. Now, it is something that I feel in here. [Chapman pointed at his heart] Hampton and Lincoln. I don’t know what it is. I have a sort of feeling for Hampton, and when they ask for five dollars, and that is a little high, I pay it, and Lincoln is four, and I don’t even know what Ohio State and Michigan are. They have stopped sending me notices because I haven’t paid dues.85 Above and beyond the historical inequalities between segregated historically black and white schools, his comments testified to the deep loyalty many

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blacks felt for the institutions that served their communities, even if they were lacking. Ever focused on the constitutional issues at stake, Redding objected to this line of testimony. African Americans’ loyalty and, he noted, the demand for these kinds of institutions were, as a matter of law, immaterial. Seitz sustained his objection.86 If Bennethum’s line of questions sought to highlight the positive reforms taking place at the college and the centrality of institutions like DSC to the black community, Redding’s cross-examination redirected attention to the continued inequalities at the college, especially in relation to the standards demanded of accreditation agencies. In what must have been a trying moment given his pride in DSC, Chapman noted his familiarity with the Middle States Association report and acknowledged its validity. The two briefly discussed the nature of reforms that had taken place in the wake of the accreditation crisis. Then Redding asked a pointed question about whether the reforms in the library would be sufficient to bring the college program up to standards expected by the accrediting agencies. Chapman tried to dodge the question and redirect the court’s attention to, what he believed, was the school’s bright future: “There is no doubt in my mind that the trained librarian is going to help considerably. There is no doubt in my mind at all about it.” Unsatisfied, Redding asked that his answers be stricken from the record as unresponsive. Seitz granted the motion. The legal matter of the future of the institution was not before the court, just its past and present state. The court reporter reread Redding’s question and Chapman retreated from his previous position: “My answer is no, I don’t know because I don’t know what the standards of a library would be for a college of that size . . . . Your question is would it bring it up to full status, and I don’t know.”87 Redding then briefly recalled the list of improvements at the college and asked a similarly difficult question of the man who felt compelled to defend the mission of the college and balance a certain pride in recent accomplishments with a tacit acknowledgment that those improvements might still prove insufficient to the maintenance of an accredited college program. Even given the recent reforms, Redding pressed, “Would the College still be an appropriate college for the number of students at Delaware State College, and could they receive satisfactory Bachelor’s degrees there?” Chapman demurred, “My answer would be this: It wouldn’t be what I would like for it to be.” After some more haggling over the nature and scope of the question, Redding excused the witness and with that the defense rested its case.88 On August 10, 1950, Redding received a Western Union telegram from

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Greenberg at the Hotel Rubens in London, England, where he was visiting his wife, Ruth, who had won a Fulbright Fellowship to the London School of Economics. The telegram stated simply, “We won.”89 The previous day Seitz had ruled that the facilities at the historically black Delaware State College were grossly inferior to those at the University of Delaware and that the black plaintiffs were entitled to immediate admission to the state’s flagship university. Seitz’s reputation for clarity and his formal approach to the law were clearly evident in the language of his decision. In his assessment of the material conditions at the two institutions, the jurist cast further light on the institutional inequalities between the schools. His decision also underscored, ironically, the liberal potential of Plessy and the power of the separate but equal doctrine, when taken seriously, to further liberal racial reforms. The vice chancellor eschewed abstractions and rooted his ruling within the context of recent Supreme Court decisions in a manner that focused intently on many of the tangible factors of comparison between the two schools. The principal issue was whether the University of Delaware was entitled to prohibit the admission of black students from their undergraduate programs on the basis of their race because Delaware State College offered similar programs for black students in the state and the facilities were separate and presumably equal.90 Before Seitz elaborated on conditions at the two schools, he addressed the NAACP’s not-so-subtle insinuation that segregation was per se unconstitutional. Plaintiffs’ counsel must have been disappointed to read, “I assume, without deciding, that the Trustees of the University were entitled under Delaware law to refuse admission to these Delaware Negroes solely because of their race.” Bowing to the separate but equal doctrine as confirmed in Sweatt and McLaurin, Seitz concluded, “I shall assume  . . . that the College is for Negro students and the University for ‘white’ students to the extent that the State is permitted to impose segregation under the United States Constitution.”91 Seitz then shifted his attention to the relative qualities of the respective schools. Across the board—in comparisons of curricula, faculty, libraries, accreditation, student personnel services, health services, maintenance staffs, athletic facilities, and scholarships—he concluded that the “physical facilities at the College are vastly inferior to those at the University.”92 Indeed, the university’s own strengths—facts that university officials felt little compulsion to downplay in testimony and which Seitz quickly discerned during his campus visit—ultimately undermined the defense’s case: “the University’s acting President, when testifying,” Seitz noted, “took an ob-

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vious and commendable pride in the excellence of the University’s physical plant and equipment.” In contrast, “One came away from the College with the feeling that there was an institution which, even without comparison, was a most inadequate institution for higher learning.” He thus granted the plaintiffs a permanent injunction in accordance with the terms of their complaint and demanded immediate admission of blacks to the University of Delaware. “To countenance delay,” Seitz later recalled, “was to deny them relief.”93 An NAACP press release announced a “victory in the first suit filed by the [organization] for admission of Negro students to a ‘white’ undergraduate institution of higher learning.”94

* * * Bowing to the court’s dictates, Judge Morris almost immediately requested that the university administration make plans to admit black applicants. Still, James set about investigating possible legal avenues for an appeal and the reinstatement of segregation at the university under the separate but equal doctrine. He sought guidance from the Florida attorney general Richard Ervin, who was overseeing a case involving the desegregation of the University of Florida. In 1949 a number of black students, including Virgil Hawkins, had just begun what would turn out to be a protracted challenge to segregation at the University of Florida. The Florida Supreme Court subsequently rejected Hawkins’s claim that his rights had been violated because the state had declared its intention to establish a black law school. In August 1950 Ervin informed James of the state’s decision to establish a graduate program at the Florida Agricultural and Mechanical College for Negroes (FAMC). Until that time, the Florida Board of Control had authorized the president of the black college to arrange temporary courses at the university for black students until they had been set up at the black college. Apparently doubtful as to the applicability of the Florida case to the situation in Delaware, James informed Morris that he believed the facts of the Florida case were substantially different and thus of little guidance to the board if it wanted to initiate a legal challenge to Parker. The board later formally resolved not to appeal Seitz’s decree and held fast to the path of desegregated education.95 If the DSC administration had purposefully operated within the context of segregation since its inception, Parker prompted the administration to reformulate its institutional mission in this new legal context. Historians Henry N. Drewry and Humphrey Doermann have observed that against the

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backdrop of the advance of desegregation, black administrators “struggled against views widely held among white Americans that black colleges were ipso facto inferior and had been justified only because segregation was necessary (according to segregationists) or legally required (according to those less willing to state a personal view).”96 DSC trustee Berryman thus acknowledged that Parker was a “ ‘milestone’ in education progress.” She was also compelled to remind her contemporaries of the continued relevance of her institution. Berryman argued that DSC had a continued role to play in the education of black students in the state. Noting that the high school system had, in general, poorly prepared black students for undergraduate work, Berryman argued that the college “must be retained both as an institution of higher learning for Negroes who cannot afford to enter the university, and as a strong junior college or preparatory school for those who need further education before qualifying for admission at Newark.”97 Ever the institutional booster, Chapman downplayed the impact of the decision: “I do not think that this court decision will have any appreciable effect upon the enrollment of Delaware State College.”98 Reflecting on the desegregation of other southern institutions of higher learning that had been reserved for whites, he noted that the removal of racial barriers did not result in a flood of black applicants. Chapman argued, like Berryman, “There will always be a definite need for Delaware State College.” He stressed the importance of the financial aid programs—work-aid and state scholarships—that were available to black students at his institution. Chapman also questioned whether black students would be allowed to participate in intercollegiate athletics. DSC could emerge as one of the leading land-grant black colleges,” he predicted, “if given the necessary resources. When this does happen; and it is my hope that such development will take place within the next two years, very few Negroes of this state will have any reason for wanting to attend the University of Delaware in order to get a first-class education.”99 In the wake of the Parker decision, the DSC administration set out to detail the needed reforms and develop what was essentially a modernization program at the school early the next year. In a January 1951 report to the governor, Chapman focused on the expansion of the college’s physical plant, as the state had failed to fund any new construction projects since 1931. Indeed, the college was the only historically black institution that did not receive any assistance under the New Deal-era Works Progress Administration public works programs. Chapman asserted that the college’s immediate needs included a new library, new dormitories, a vocational building, and a

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stadium. These additions would, among other things, help bring the college in line with the Middle States Association accreditation requirements. The Board of Trustees concurred and stressed the need for the college to maintain its independence.100 In this new climate of reform, Governor Carvel formally established a committee, which was composed of the presidents and members of the boards of trustees from both the university and the college, to consider the future of DSC early the next year. Vice Chancellor Seitz and prominent figures in the black and white communities also served on the working group. The committee held four meetings in February and March. After considering a range of options, it gave its most ardent endorsement to a proposal that involved the expansion and improvement of the college’s plant and facilities “up to the level required for accreditation, but limited to those courses which the college can effectively offer.”101 In operational terms, the proposal included a construction program as described earlier by Chapman and plans for the reorganization and strengthening of the elementary and secondary school, agriculture and home economics, and liberal arts programs. In a move further distancing the institution from the Hampton-Tuskegee model, the committee also endorsed the elimination of the industrial education program.102 The group specifically declined, however, to endorse measures that would increase the capacity of the college to the level to which it would be essentially equal to the university. It also gave favorable consideration to a proposal that would have reorganized DSC as a junior or community college. Three members of the committee, including Louis Redding, offered a dissenting opinion to the majority’s position because they believed that the majority sought to perpetuate the system of separate and unequal education. This minority was particularly concerned that the committee’s endorsement would “perpetuate Delaware State College as a segregated Negro institution, denominated a ‘college’ but with overall aims and standards even less approximating those of a college than the aims and standards of the present institution.”103 Another governor-appointed committee revived the discussions about the future of the college in early 1953. University of Delaware administrators now stressed the exorbitant costs associated with maintaining low enrollments at the college. They noted that per pupil expenditures were four times those of the university and seventeen other historically black land-grant colleges. Thus the writers stressed in a powerful statement that intersected somewhat with the NAACP’s commitment to desegregation, “higher education of Delaware negroes can be better served if the college is discontinued, by providing

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scholarships for the present Delaware students to attend accredited colleges, and providing additional scholarship support to the University to be made available to promising and needy negro high school graduates.”104 They were particularly confident in their conclusions, given what they thought had been the smooth integration of black students since the Parker decision. The debates about the future of DSC continued when Governor Carvel’s successor, J. Caleb Boggs, called a meeting of interested parties from all sides of the issue in late April 1953. If the factions often vigorously disagreed as to the fate of the college—and whether it should be closed or maintained—they all agreed that it would take a lot of resources for the college to secure its reaccreditation and recover from years of politicized administration, financial neglect, and mismanagement. At the time of the meeting, only 111 students were enrolled at the college; nine classes had just one student. Deputy Attorney General Edmund Carpenter and DSC booster Solomon Thomas personified the positions of the two groups. Carpenter expressed skepticism as to whether the General Assembly would devote the necessary resources to carry out the reforms and thus recommended DSC’s closure. If his office had defended the state’s right to maintain the college as a segregated black institution, he now seemed to share Redding’s skepticism about the state’s commitment to equalizing conditions at the college, warning, “as long as it remains a second class college, it will mean second class standards in the Negro high schools and will perpetuate a regard of the Negro as entitled only to second class facilities.” Characterizing DSC as an “expensive monstrosity,” Carpenter recommended that all students be encouraged to attend the university. In contrast, Thomas was the most vocal defender of the college: “I believe we should maintain Delaware State College at all costs.” The college, he argued in manner that located the necessity of the historically black institution in a new era of desegregation, was essential in that it provided educational opportunities for historically disadvantaged black residents in Delaware, especially those who could not afford the higher tuition at the university. Ever the optimist, Thomas believed that DSC could emerge as one of the best land grant institutions in the nation if the state appropriated the requisite resources. Boggs, most likely to the consternation of both parties, adjourned the meeting without making a decision on the fate of the college.105 The meeting and the points about which the participants argued spilled out of the conference room. A number of citizens cited the exorbitant costs of maintaining the institution and recommended its closure. The Education Advisory Committee of the Delaware State Chamber of Commerce also recom-

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mended that DSC be closed. Members of the Ebenezer and Ross Point PTAs, however, both lobbied the governor to preserve the college because it was an important cultural institution that served relatively disadvantaged communities in the southern counties. Muriel Symington of the communist-affiliated Civil Rights Congress commended the committee’s recommendation to close DSC. She figured her support in language that would increasingly animate challenges to Jim Crow schools, explaining how segregation caused psychological trauma in black students and suggested that desegregation was an essential element in fostering harmonious relations between different communities. The desegregation of higher education in the state was a means of remedying the former and promoting the latter.106 Newly appointed president Jerome Holland, who would see the college out of this turbulent period, also took up the defense of DSC. Despite the fact that the University of Delaware now admitted black students, he argued that the college still “serve[d] a well defined role in the educational system of Delaware.” The rising number of black secondary school students and what he predicted would be the ensuing demand for higher education justified this position. DSC was an important social and cultural institution in the black community and served as an essential avenue of compensatory education for the state’s historically disadvantaged black population. If the college was a vestige of Jim Crow as was implied by Redding and the deputy attorney general, Holland asserted that the college could serve as a means of remedying the legacy of segregation. Thus the president concluded, “The segregated pattern of public education in Delaware has resulted in the Negro citizen being adversely discriminated against and given a rather mediocre education. Delaware State College had been faced with the problem over a period of years and has developed a type of corrective program, which is needed to serve such students.”107 Far from the painful symptom of segregation that had been the focus of much contestation in the preceding years, Holland now reconceptualized DSC as the solution to the legacy of the historical inequalities associated with Jim Crow. The arguments of the defenders of DSC apparently held sway. As the college’s enrollment swelled, the General Assembly, while not ascribing its intent to preserve segregation, subsequently appropriated a considerable sum—more than $3 million or approximately $10,500 for each of the college’s 300 students—for construction of new buildings, maintenance of existing facilities, and purchase of much-needed equipment. Holland oversaw the construction or renovation of nine buildings, including administration and

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classroom structures, a health and physical education facility, a men’s dormitory, and a library expansion—all additions that the court had acknowledged that DSC lacked in previous court proceedings. The General Assembly subsequently appropriated an additional $2 million for a science center and other infrastructural needs. In an indication of the scope of recent reforms, Holland notified Governor Boggs on May 2, 1957, that Delaware State College had received its formal accreditation from the Middle States Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools.108 And as historian G. James Fleming observed of the preceding years, “Delaware State College since about 1954, ha[d] taken on a new life” and come into the modern era.109

* * * Almost ten years after Parker, Louis Redding concluded that “the Delaware picture on desegregation is one of lights and shadows.” “The bright spot is, of course, the State University.”110 Black students and their advocates had demonstrated that the state had failed to live up to its constitutional responsibilities under Plessy and aspiring graduate and undergraduate students gained access to the opportunities offered at the flagship school in the state’s system of higher education. Understanding the university segregation case as just the beginning of the reform process, the NAACP had organized a conference in which representatives of nineteen local organizations and local branches gathered to discuss the practical and legal import of the decision “in the light of [the organization’s] interest in a successful accomplishment of this program to integrate Negro students.”111 As black students increasingly assimilated into the fabric of campus life, university officials repeatedly stressed that black students had been integrated into all facets of the university.112 While the university community would struggle over myriad issues related to race, represenation, and access in the following decades, civil rights advocates had exposed certain vulnerabilities in the system of Jim Crow schooling, and the residents of the state embarked on the long road of reform in the public school system. Redding also concluded, however, that the “State College is a shadowland now functioning almost wholly for Negroes with an isolated token for desegregation.”113 Redding’s pessimistic assessment reflected his estimation— and that of the NAACP as an organization—of the slim possibility of African Americans achieving equality under any system of racial segregation.114 The civil rights stalwart acknowledged that the state’s outlays at the college

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were essential in regaining its accreditation in 1957. Still, he was skeptical of the state’s future commitment to devoting the requisite public resources to make the historically black college functionally equivalent to the university. He also highlighted what he believed was a certain cynical and reactionary quality about the increasing funding that enabled the modernization of an institution long neglected by the state. In light of Parker, he charged, “the significance for desegregation of this lavish expenditure has been negative, not affirmative.” The state’s increased investment in DSC was intended to perpetuate the operation of DSC—now in practice, if not in law—as essentially a black institution.115 In this way, he concluded, the state sought to extend the system of Jim Crow schooling—if only informally—even as it opened the doors of schools previously reserved for white students under judicial decree. Indeed, the NAACP would remain critical of the operation of DSC as what they characterized as a “segregated school” well into the 1960s, revealing a continuing rift within black communities about the status and merits of this historically black school. Then Delaware State Conference of NAACP Branches president Littleton Mitchell charged that the college was poorly funded and its academic programs were inferior to those at the University of Delaware. The maintenance of the college, he also concluded, was an affront to the larger drive for desegregation.116 By the mid-1950s, however, reform— in the form of desegregated classrooms at the university—had indeed come to Delaware. Still, the advance of school desegregation existed in acute tension with interests bent on preserving a certain continuity in race relations and maintaining more than a modicum of segregation of black and white residents.

Chapter 2

“He Wouldn’t Help Me Get a Jim Crow Bus”

African Americans in Delaware and certain allies had long worked to address institutionalized deficiencies and secure greater educational opportunities for their children in primary and secondary education. Against the background of sustained institutional neglect of public education in general—and black education in particular—they lobbied the state and engaged in publicity campaigns to highlight the poor conditions of black schools.1 These efforts were embodied by Reverend James, who also served as the chairman of the Committee on Education of the Negro Welfare Council. In 1939, James complained about the longstanding deplorable conditions at the No. 29 school, at Twelfth and Poplar Streets in the African American section of Wilmington. He cited the lack of a playground for the students and the fact that they had to play on the sidewalk or in the streets around the school. “The worst feature, however,” he observed, “is the overcrowding, evident in all negro schools, yet especially so at No. 29.” As a result, teachers were forced to hold classes in the school basement or in the principal’s office. Class sizes at No. 29 were far too large, he continued; the students needed an additional building to serve their needs. Similar conditions existed at the No. 5 school. James noted that the nearby Bancroft School, which was reserved for white students, was far below capacity. Indeed, students had been transferred to the facility to justify its continued use. This building, James suggested, should be turned over to black students to help alleviate the conditions at No. 29. He stressed that his efforts were geared toward securing for black students the kind of educational resources—like science laboratories, modern curriculum, and well-trained teachers—that would prepare them for university-level work or “gainful employment in dynamic present-day industry” and were offered to their white peers. Framing his demands within the conventions of state law, which mandated separate and equal facilities for black and white students, James asserted, “We don’t ask anything unreasonable. All we want

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is what the law says we’re entitled to. We ask that there be no discrimination against us, and that our children be given the advantages the law guarantees.” A meeting between a delegation of the Negro Welfare Council and Dr. S. M. Stouffer, superintendent of public schools in the city of Wilmington, apparently yielded no progress. Stouffer acknowledged the poor conditions at the black school but failed to appropriate the necessary resources to address the complaints.2 The state’s continued insensitivity to the demands of its black citizens was evident seven years later, in 1946, when the Wilmington Parent-Teacher Association organized to protest very similar conditions at the same No. 29 school. Under the leadership of James, the association charged that the black school was “dangerously overcrowded, unsanitary, and without even basic facilities” and provided the local press with more than a dozen photographs that documented the deplorable conditions.3 Black communities in southern Delaware also complained about the primitive conditions of their schools and lobbied for greater resources for their children. The boards of trustees of Frankford School No. 206 and Blackwater School No. 207, for example, protested the poor state of affairs in the system of one- and two-room schools that predominated in the region. They highlighted the need for the repair and modernization of existing facilities (particular in the area of sanitation) and additional space for students. The state’s failure to provide transportation for black students, who were often dispersed throughout rural and small town southern Delaware, personified, to many, the greatest impediment to black students’ progress through all twelve grades.4 As the state largely ignored requests for increased resources for black primary and secondary schools, black Delawareans thus began to seek remedy through alternative avenues of relief in the form of revised pupil assignment policies that enabled black students to attend better resourced and more conveniently located institutions that had been reserved for white students. Here the NAACP once again emerged as the primary conduit through which grassroots complaints about the inequalities and inequities of Jim Crow schooling were translated into concerted action. Civil rights attorneys, on behalf of black parents and students, now broadened their challenge to the institutional inequalities between black and white schooling in an attack on segregation in primary and secondary education. They put forward a challenge to racial classification schemes that posited blacks’ intellectual difference and inferiority and served as the ideological foundation for segregation. And in a novel development, school desegregation proponents argued that

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segregation caused psychological damage to black children. If the challenge to segregation at the University of Delaware was a somewhat indirect attack on Plessy, this last argument served as the basis for attorneys’ contention that Jim Crow schools were—by definition—unequal and unconstitutional. In its next defense of the color line, the state extended arguments initially developed in the university segregation case that desegregation undermined the principle of states’ rights and the democratic prerogatives of Delaware citizens—that is, the white majority—to govern relations between the races and maintain their educational system in a manner that they best saw fit. The depth of white opposition to desegregation was further revealed when, after decades of complaints, school officials finally turned their attention to improving the conditions in primary and secondary black schools in order to stem blacks’ demands for entrée into white schools. The state courts’ sympathy to the plaintiffs’ charges affirmed African Americans’ accounts of inequality, thus undermining the legal foundations of Jim Crow and promised to open the doors of better-resourced schools to the black students in question. The lower court’s rulings also provided the evidentiary basis upon which the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which declared official state policies demanding the separation of black and white pupil populations unconstitutional. As civil rights attorney and jurist Robert Carter asserted, “Brown was the culmination of a trend . . . away from the arid and sophistical reading of the Civil War amendments marked by the legalisms of Plessy v. Ferguson,” and it set the stage for a broader reevaluation of and challenge to segregation demanded by law throughout the Jim Crow South and border states.5 More broadly, the NAACP’s campaign and the High Court’s decision provided the foundation for the construction of the sectional imaginary of de jure segregation and ascribed a normative value to “southern-style” school segregation as constitutionally and morally suspect in the postwar era.

* * * The grassroots basis upon which the institutionalized educational reform movement shifted farther from equalization to desegregation can be traced to August 1948, when a group of parents from Dover and Bridgeville met with NAACP assistant special counsel Franklin W. Williams. These parents had expressed a desire to seek admission for their children to the white high schools in their communities. At the time, the state maintained only one

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four-year, comprehensive black high school, in Wilmington, an almost insurmountable commute for most of the state’s black secondary school students. Delaware State College offered a two-year high school program, but students from communities like Bridgeville, 30 miles south of Dover, still had to undertake a considerable journey to attend classes there. The Delaware Conference of the NAACP voted to support the parents’ efforts to get their children into white high schools. The national office recommended it coordinate its efforts with Louis Redding, who, it was presumed, would act as local counsel.6 Indeed, the condition of black education across the state at mid-century, as revealed by a report by the Delaware Fellowship Commission, was dire and marked by systematic inequalities. The commission was particularly concerned about the concentration of black students in small, one- to threeroom schools, which by mid-century were falling out of favor with education specialists. A much larger proportion of black schools fell below State School Survey Commission standards for minimally acceptable student attendance units and ran afoul of progressive educational reforms.7 Small black schools were much more likely to be staffed by three or fewer teachers than white schools. Black teachers shouldered higher student loads than their white colleagues. Indeed, the Middle Atlantic States Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools recognized that only two of fourteen black secondary schools, as compared to 24 of 37 white schools, met accreditation standards, most likely because these institutions did not offer coursework through the twelfth grade. Twenty-eight white high schools—or 75 percent of all secondary education facilities—provided such opportunities for white students. The Delaware Fellowship Commission further highlighted discrepancies in curriculum offerings for black and white students. Howard High School students were denied opportunities to study romance and Germanic languages, advanced high school math, public speaking, and world geography. The opportunities were even more limited for students in southern Delaware, where only a small number of students had access to the high school program at Delaware State College. Black schools were far more likely than white schools to be in poor condition—66 versus 25 percent. There was also a paucity of black administrators (18) compared to white administrators (128). These figures were most likely a function of restricted opportunities available to the former group. Whites managed white and black schools across the state. Black bureaucrats were restricted to Jim Crow schools and given no authority over white administrators, teachers, or students. Black schools were far more likely to fall below the standards developed by the National

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Council on School House Construction and be located in slums, poor residential areas, or industrial districts. Furthermore, there was considerable variation in the financial appropriations for black and white schools. Across the board, school officials appropriated more resources per pupil for the education of white students than for blacks. In New Castle, Kent, and Sussex Counties, they allocated on average $104 for whites and just $87.43 for blacks. If the study was a somewhat clinical survey of the state of education in Delaware, the sum total of these disparities in the system of separate and unequal schooling produced very different educational outcomes. In 1948, 82 percent of white students graduated from the state’s public high schools. Just 18 percent of blacks, the researchers observed, earned high school diplomas. A more pointed challenge to segregation in primary and secondary education in Delaware would have to wait a couple of years, however, until the national organization of the NAACP had committed to a direct attack strategy on segregation in primary and secondary schools. In the late 1940s the NAACP’s national office became increasingly convinced that segregation violated the Fourteenth Amendment. The NAACP Board of Directors endorsed this position, and soon after the Lawyer’s Committee agreed that every case under their charge should be directed at challenging the constitutionality of segregation itself. Emboldened by their victories in the higher education cases in Oklahoma and Texas, the lawyers pledged the NAACP’s commitment to fighting for non-segregated public education. And, skirting the edges of professional ethics, they further pledged that all lawyers under the purview of the NAACP would urge their clients and local NAACP branches to insist on this form of relief. The NAACP board formalized this position in a resolution in June 1950, stating that all future actions in education case should “be aimed at obtaining education on a non-segregated basis and that no other relief other than that will be acceptable.”8 In this new context, subsequent local complaints about the inequalities and inequities inherent in Delaware’s brand of Jim Crow education were channeled into a challenge to segregation itself. On the eve of Shirley Bulah’s third grade year in fall 1950, her father, Fred, complained to his wife, Sarah, that he did not see why there was not a bus for black children. The task of getting six-year-old Shirley back and forth from Hockessin School No. 107, the local black elementary school located about seven miles west of Wilmington, was arduous for her parents. Unlike the transportation services provided for local white children who attended Hockessin School No. 29, there were no buses for black children in the community. Sarah Bulah agreed and, in her

Figures 2, 3, and 4. The photos were taken as part of a five-part series on the state of education in Wilmington and were purposely staged by principal Eldridge Waters to convey to the public the poor conditions in the schools under his charge and to sway public opinion in support of an educational bill that would have channeled greater resources to these institutions. At the time, the state legislature was considering an education appropriations bill. Waters was concerned that public officials would again refuse to invest the requisite resources to address the problem of inadequate facilities in schools reserved for black students in Wilmington. Journal Every Evening, May 11, 12, and 15, 1948. Courtesy Gannett.

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husband’s name, began a letter-writing campaign requesting transportation for Shirley that detailed the scope of the inequities black students faced outside the corporate limits of cities and towns. In a letter to the governor in early October, the Bulahs explained that they lived more than two miles from Shirley’s school. A school bus passed their home, but the driver refused to pick her up. They had contacted the director of transportation, Preston Eisenbrey, about the matter but had yet to receive a response. “We are citizens and taxpayers of the state of Delaware,” they concluded, “and would appreciate anything that can be done to adjust this matter.” The governor’s administrative assistant, George I. Sylvester, Jr., forwarded the Bulahs’ letter to Eisenbrey, who sent the Bulahs an application form for transportation benefits. After reviewing the application, he denied it. Unbowed, the Bulahs appealed the decision to the governor and offered their own counterproposal: since the bus passed their home twice on its daily rounds, it could pick Shirley up at the house and drop her off at the post office, which was only two blocks from No. 107. “To take my child to school would not reroute the bus at all,” she asserted. “Put her off at the post office and pick her up at the post office and bring her right back to my door. The bus is not full. So that isn’t an excuse. Please look into the matter for me, as I seem to be getting the run around.”9 The “run around” spoke to the web of allegedly race-neutral rules, regulations, and laws that conspired to deny blacks the kinds of services more available to white students and widely assumed to be essential to the education of all students. The state often cited inadequate numbers of black students and their wide dispersal in many communities as grounds for denying requests for transportation services for black students in particularly rural areas. This fact most likely explains why Shirley was not provided a bus. In refusing the rather modest request that the school bus for white students stop along its route to pick up Shirley, Eisenbrey later cited the state law that provided the basis for the ultimate denial of the Bulahs’ request: “You, no doubt, realize that the laws of Delaware require the State Board of Education to provide separate schools for colored pupils. Therefore, we who, are responsible for administering the laws, have always considered this to include the transportation of pupils.”10 Undaunted by the succession of negative responses, Sarah Bulah then approached Redding. With his assistance, her modest request was broadened to include a challenge to the inequalities and inequities inherent in the entire system of black education. “He said he wouldn’t help me get a Jim Crow bus to take my girl to any Jim Crow School,” reporter Carl Rowan recorded Bulah

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as saying, “but if I was interested in sendin’ her to an integrated school, why, then maybe he’d help.”11 She agreed to his terms and the letter writing continued. But this time, Bulah sought admission for Shirley to the Hockessin School No. 29, which was reserved for white children. In letters to No. 29’s board of trustees and the State Board of Education, Bulah stated her belief that the facilities at No. 29 were superior to those at No. 107. After the chairman of the No. 29 board passed her request on to the state board, she further asserted in a manner that stressed her possession of the rights and privileges bestowed upon each member of the American polity: “We believe that our citizenship entitles us to have for our child everything that the State Board of Education considers an ‘integral part of a school program.’ Moreover, all the facilities at School No. 29 are better than those at School No. 107 at Hockessin. Therefore . . . , we are requesting that our seven year old daughter Shirley Bulah be admitted as a pupil at Hockessin School No. 29.”12 Her request denied once again, she filed suit on behalf of Shirley against the State Board of Education with the support of her counsel. At around the same time that Bulah was coordinating her challenge to segregation in Hockessin, four groups of black parents from neighboring communities in the Wilmington metropolitan area were beginning their own challenge to the state’s system of segregated secondary education. A group of parents from Claymont sought the admission of their children to the local elementary school, as well as Claymont High School to avoid the longer commute to Howard High School in Wilmington. A number of Newark parents also applied, on behalf of their children, for admission to Newark High School. The principal of Newark High School, Frederick B. Kutz, denied their admission and, after further appeals, so did the superintendent of Newark Public Schools and the Newark Board of Education. In a final plea, Reverend Edward H. McNair lobbied the state board for admission of the black students to the schools in their communities to relieve the students of the approximately twenty-five-mile commute between Newark and Howard High School. Mrs. Arthur Johnson, Bertha Scott, and Mrs. David Powell of New Castle launched a similar challenge to the state’s segregation policies at the William Penn High School. They, too, petitioned the principal and local board of education for admission of their children to the high school in their community. And at each administrative level, school officials denied their petition, citing the constitutional demands for segregation in public education. In one last administrative appeal, the New Castle parents also applied to the state board for relief. Faced again with a veritable barrage of requests

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from black students for admission to white schools, the state superintendent, George Miller, notified each party that the state board would consider their requests at the board’s meeting the following month.13 If Miller was gracious in his initial responses to the black petitioners, it was clear that he was not moved by the terms of their requests. The day after notifying the black parents that the state board would review their cases, he began drafting the state’s official denial of their requests. In the draft, Miller cut straight to the constitutional rationale undergirding the state board’s denial of the black parents’ requests: “since the apportionment of State monies is conditioned by the Constitutional requirement that separate schools shall be maintained for white and Colored children, the petitions seeking admission into the Claymont, Newark, Hockessin and Alexis I. du Pont white schools for certain Negro children are hereby denied.”14 On March 16, the state board approved the language of Miller’s letter and each party was notified accordingly of the board’s decision.15

* * * Having exhausted their administrative options, the parents found common cause with the NAACP and, on their behalf, Redding and Greenberg teamed up again to initiate their first legal challenge to segregation in primary and secondary education. Once again, the attorneys had the support of the local branches and quality plaintiffs to represent. Redding provided the NAACP with credible and informed local counsel informed by the decades-long litigation campaign. Greenberg provided an additional link to the New York office. The national staff had long debated the merits of various forums in which to bring suits. Many staff lawyers preferred federal courts, which they believed would be more sympathetic to their arguments. The state courts, in contrast, were often hostile to black complaints and demanded familiarity with the procedural rules in each state.16 With four groups of plaintiffs seeking access to the white schools in their communities, Redding and Greenberg decided to hedge their bets and pursue both routes. They brought their first suits in the U.S. District Court for the Third District on behalf of the parents from Newark and New Castle in consolidated suits under Wilson v. Beebe and Johnson v. Beebe on June 2, 1951. As the NAACP advanced school segregation suits throughout the Jim Crow South and border states, the architects of the campaign must have been cognizant of the fact that the federal district courts, which oversaw the Deep

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and Upper South, were largely beholden to southern Democrats who were poised to derail any nomination not of their liking. In those circuits, their colleagues faced the almost impossible task of convincing the courts that segregated schools violated the constitutional rights of black citizens. In contrast, the Third District was composed of jurists representing the Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Virgin Island districts and could be supposed to be more willing to hear the NAACP’s case. Five of the judges had been appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and two by Harry S. Truman; they were presumably more sympathetic to the rise of legal realism and the wave of social reforms—in terms of the emergence of the modern welfare state and a certain liberalization of race relations—associated with the New Deal and World War II. The plaintiffs complained that the state refused to permit their children to attend the public high school in their community solely on the basis of their race and forced them to send their children to the black high school, which was outside their home district. The extra time required to transport the students to the black school thus deprived them of their right to equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment. Beyond the inequalities that arose from segregation and travel times, the plaintiffs further complained that the facilities at the black high school were not equal to those of Newark High School. As such, they sought an injunction from the court to give the black students permission to attend the white schools near their homes, to prevent the state from maintaining separate schools, and to declare the section of the state constitution that mandated racially separate schools unconstitutional.17 In an attempt to preempt the two suits, Attorney General Hyman Albert Young evoked the rule of abstention and asked the federal court to relinquish jurisdiction to the state court. The state court of Delaware, he argued in a manner that privileged the rights of Delaware citizens, should be allowed to decide this case first. In their pre-trial briefs, Redding and Greenberg had notified the district court that they had commenced another lawsuit on behalf of the Claymont parents in the Delaware Court of Chancery that essentially raised the same issues and sought the same relief. In response to Young’s invocation of abstention, they asked the district court to retain jurisdiction in this case pending the settlement of the other case before the chancery court. The district court came to a decision that seemed to satisfy both parties. Circuit Judge John Biggs, on behalf of the court, agreed that the issues in the federal suit were substantially the same as those raised in the state legal proceedings. “We conclude,” he stated on July 26, 1951, “that we should stay the

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proceedings in this court pending the disposition of the State suit.” He did not entirely divest the court from the proceedings, however: “We assume, of course, as we have no doubt will be the case, that the Delaware tribunals will proceed to determine the [Belton v. Gebhart case] with dispatch to the end that the vexing issues presented may at long last be set at rest. The door of this court will remain open to the end that if the assumption made by us should fail, appropriate relief may be granted to the parties.”18 And so the challenge to segregation was routed back to the state court. Despite the national office’s concerns about the fairness of local courts, the Delaware attorneys could expect a fair hearing in the Delaware Court of Chancery, especially given their recent victory in the University of Delaware segregation case. Seitz was up for promotion to chancellor at the time, and Redding and Greenberg did not want to jeopardize his chances. “Segregationists in Delaware, of whom there were plenty, hated Seitz,” Greenberg remembered, “and downstate legislators were already lining up in opposition. We hardly wanted to reward his courage by costing him the votes he needed for promotion.”19 Redding expressed a similar sentiment. “The University of Delaware case had made Seitz a lot of enemies,” he recalled in an interview with Richard Kluger, “and we didn’t want him to have this much additional heat on him by having to decide the school cases as well.”20 It was a gracious attempt to repay the deeds of a jurist whose principled decision put his career on the bench in real jeopardy. In a fortuitous twist that seemed to serve the plaintiffs, Seitz—in the face of this considerable opposition—was confirmed as chancellor in a strange and secretive session of the General Assembly between the time the attorneys filed their motions and the district court made its decision.21 Greenberg and Redding were thus sent back to chancery court to appear before Seitz with a renewed sense of confidence. “For the first time,” Kluger noted, “the NAACP lawyers went into court with what they felt was a better than fair chance to win.”22 Redding and Greenberg put into practice the full weight of the NAACP’s direct attack strategy against segregation in their suit on behalf of Bulah and the party of parents from suburban Wilmington in the consolidated cases Belton v. Gebhart and Bulah v. Gebhart. They formally translated a set of basic claims about the nature of Jim Crow education into a broad critique of the institutionalized nature of inequality and inequity between black and white schools, a challenge to prevailing racial classifications schemes, and a set of citizenship claims. The NAACP attorneys advanced the plaintiffs’ complaints that were articulated in their letters to school officials. In the case of the

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parents from New Castle County who sought admission of their children to Claymont High School, plaintiffs’ counsel charged that state had denied the plaintiffs’ children admission to the school solely on the basis of their race. As a result, the children were force to make—at a minimum—a roughly ten-mile commute to Howard High School in Wilmington. That this requirement was not imposed upon white students in the Claymont Special School District, the attorneys charged, imposed an extraordinary burden and constituted a denial of their equal educational opportunities. Redding and Greenberg claimed that Shirley Bulah was denied admission to No. 29 on the basis of her race and that the No. 107 school, which was reserved for black students, was inferior to the white school in terms of facilities and instruction. The sum of the inequalities between the black and white schools amounted to a denial of the right to equal protection of the laws to Shirley.23 In both cases, the attorneys sought injunctions from the court enjoining the state from enforcing the segregation provisions of the state constitution and from denying the black students admission to the white schools in question. They would also make one more claim: that segregation had a damaging effect on the emotional development of black children. Young conceded to the plaintiffs’ charges in both cases that the state maintained a system of racially segregated public schools. The State Board of Education believed, he countered, that they had established and maintained the state’s system of free schooling in accordance with the Delaware constitution and state law. He denied that the charges of inequality—measured in travel times and the educational programs in the schools in question—constituted violations of the plaintiffs’ constitutional right to equal protection of the laws. Young asserted that the state transportation policy was premised on a number of nonracial factors, including the numbers of children clustered along bus routes. The policy applied to all students, he continued, regardless of race. Young also dismissed the plaintiffs’ claims about inequality between the black and white schools in Hockessin. He charged that the inequalities were not a function of disparities rooted in state policy but “the result of the difference in time and attention given by the parents and pupils at the two schools.” He then concluded by asking the court to deny the plaintiffs’ injunction.24 The black plaintiffs performed an act of considerable bravery in forwarding their grievances to courts, given the often violent reprisals that met complainants who pursued such suits. Their testimony was essential in transmitting certain firsthand facts and impressing upon the court the burdens

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shouldered by black students and parents. Kluger has noted about the testimony of plaintiffs in other school segregation cases, “Most of the plaintiffs had been picked because their children had a long way to go to school, and their grievance in this regard was about the extent of the NAACP case on inequality.”25 Still, they based their claims not simply on the tangible and intangible inequalities inherent in the state’s system of Jim Crow but also on a set of citizenship claims like those raised earlier by Sarah Bulah. Tenth grader Ethel Louise Belton told the court about her nine-mile commute, which took fifty minutes by bus and then foot, to Howard High School in downtown Wilmington.26 Her mother, Ethel Belton, testified to her sense of membership in the community of Claymont and explained why her daughter should be allowed to attend school there: “Well, first of all I live in the community of Claymont. I work in Claymont. I shop there, and I help to support the community in general, and I see no reason why my child should leave Claymont and travel all the way to Wilmington to attend high school when there is a public high school right in Claymont.”27 Then, in what seemed like a carefully orchestrated final act in Belton’s testimony, Redding asked her a number of questions as to whether she believed segregation had affected her daughter. In his questions, he opened the door for her to introduce testimony that supported the NAACP’s contention that segregation had damaging psychological effects on black children. Q. You have stated partially—at least you have stated why your application was made to the Claymont High School for the admission of your daughter. Do you have any other reasons? A. Yes, I do have some other reasons why I made application. To my understanding and my knowledge we are all born Americans, and when the State sets up separate schools for certain people of a separate color, then I and others are made to feel ashamed and embarrassed, because such separations humiliate us and make us feel that we are not as good Americans as other Americans, and I don’t want my child growing up feeling that she is not as good an American as any other American, so much so that the school she goes to, she has to be separated or set apart to attend a separate, special school. Q. Do you of your own knowledge know whether this feeling of shame and humiliation, I think you called it—

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A. Yes. Q. . . . has any effect on your daughter’s acquiring an education? A. Yes, I do think it has an effect on her because she feels within herself that she isn’t getting the education that she would get if they all attended the same school, and I don’t feel so myself.28 Sarah Bulah was the last plaintiff to testify, and she recalled her efforts to gain transportation for Shirley and the state’s repeated denial of their requests. In all, their testimony took up just half of the morning of the first day of the trial. Building on the grassroots sentiments inherent in the original plaintiffs’ testimony, Redding and Greenberg then launched a broad attack on the state’s management of black and white schools. To this end, they called a number of educational experts who, based on visits to the schools in question, recounted the institutionalized inequalities between the black and white schools and offered some of the most powerful testimony on the striking disparities between the schools in terms of the physical facilities, staffing, curriculum, libraries, and other services. Almost across the board, in relative comparisons and according to the professional standards of the time, they concluded that the white students enjoyed greater educational opportunities than the black students. Steven J. Wright, Dean of the Faculty at Hampton Institute, testified to the superior conditions at all-white Claymont High School as compared to Howard High School. On the basis of his two-day survey, he expressed particular concern about the geographic location of Howard, which was bordered by industrial parks and derelict housing, about the lack of playground facilities at the black school, and about the higher percentage of teachers with Master of Arts degrees at Claymont. Most teachers at Howard, Wright testified, had only bachelor’s degrees, and a number of staff members held no degree at all. He also found larger class sizes and higher student-teacher ratios at Howard that, in his opinion, negatively affected the amount of individual attention paid to each student. College-bound students, he summed, would do better to attend Claymont. Paul F. Lawrence, associate professor of education at Howard University, bore witness to the relative conditions at Hockessin Schools Nos. 29 and 107, concluding that the educational opportunities for the black children at 107 were far inferior to those at 29 and often fell well below many of the professional standards of what constituted an ade-

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quate educational environment. He also found the physical plant, classrooms, and recreational facilities severely lacking at the black school. Black students were denied the health and nutritional services deemed essential to their development that were provided to their white peers. Lawrence also testified that black students received fewer days of overall instruction because their teachers were often responsible for overseeing more than one grade. The cumulative effects of these factors, he concluded, were expressed in the lower standardized test scores at the black school.29 Redding and Greenberg then turned their attention to the merits of racial classification schemes and notions of racial differences that were rooted in white nationalist ideologies that set blacks apart and in an inferior place visà-vis whites and focused on the effects of segregation on democracy. Here they sought to bring to bear developments in race research to the courtroom deliberations. The NAACP had looked to social science research since the early stages of the campaign against segregation in public education. Before the postwar social science revolution that fundamentally reconceptualized the meaning of race in American political culture, race as a biological fact and racial hierarchy—that is, white supremacy—were fundamental tenets of social science discourse. After World War II, most social scientists had disavowed these notions and focused instead on culture—as opposed to race—as the operational determinant of difference and people’s mental and moral characteristics. They also increasingly portrayed racial prejudice as a learned rather than innate behavior and demonstrated a growing interest in the impact of racial discrimination on the personality development of African American children. Tapping into this intellectual network, plaintiffs’ counsel called Columbia University social psychologist Otto Klineberg to the stand. Klineberg had launched one of the most concerted—and influential—attacks on one of the central features of early twentieth-century American race theory: that racial differences accounted for differences in intelligence and explained black inferiority in terms of IQ scores.30 Klineberg testified to the arbitrary nature of segregation and dismissed the notion of innate difference between the races. “There are, of course,” he told the chancery court, “differences in intellectual capacity [among individuals], but we have no scientific evidence that those differences are determined in any way by the racial origin of the individual.” Acting president of Delaware State College Maurice Thomasson, continuing this line of argument, highlighted the insidious basis of segregation itself. “I can see no reason for setting up a separate system of schools,” he argued,

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“unless the persons who set the schools up think that for some reason or other the persons designated for that school are not quite fit to go to the regular schools.” Jerome S. Bruner, associate professor of social psychology at Harvard University, also testified on behalf of the plaintiffs. He claimed that segregation limited black children’s contact with the community at large and denied them the opportunity to gain the skills necessary to interact with the majority community at an important stage in their maturation. George Lane, associate professor of psychology at the University of Delaware, reiterated a similar point: segregation denied black children opportunities to develop skills necessary for citizenship in a democracy.31 In one final strategic innovation, Redding and Greenberg tapped into, as historian Daryl Michael Scott has noted, the therapeutic ethos that marked advancements in postwar social science.32 This move marked a shift away from tenets of the original grassroots complaints about the system of segregated education in the state. In the process, the attorneys marginalized the plaintiffs’ complaints—if often vague and imprecise—about the political economy of segregation and privileged concerns about racial attitudes and the negative effects that segregation had on the psychological development of black children. As the NAACP was devising its direct attack strategy on segregation, NAACP special counsel Robert L. Carter made the initial argument for introducing evidence of damage to the psychological health of black children that resulted from segregated schools. The demonstration of material inequalities between the black and white schools and a favorable ruling on these facts alone, he believed, was only a half victory. NAACP lawyers believed that the damage argument provided the organization with the grounds to argue that segregated education was ipso facto unequal, thus denying the courts the opportunity to evade the issue of the constitutionality of segregation like the Supreme Court had in previous higher education desegregation cases.33 Redding and Greenberg found their most effective proponent of the damage argument in the person of Frederic Wertham, a psychiatrist and director of the Lafargue Clinic in Harlem. The Lafargue Clinic was opened in the basement of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, established without any support from public or private agencies, and staffed by a variety of mental health professionals who provided their services pro bono. It was also virtually the only facility that welcomed, often free of charge, any of the four hundred thousand black residents of Manhattan. Literary critic, author, and New York City resident Ralph Ellison considered Lafargue “both as a scientific labo-

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ratory and as an expression of forthright democratic action in its scientific willingness to dispense with preconceived notions and accept the realities of Negro, i.e., American life.”34 It was the clinic’s work that, in large part, brought Wertham to national prominence and to the attention of the NAACP. His medical expertise also reinforced the social science testimony of the other expert witnesses. Before the trial, Greenberg and Wertham thought it best to arrange for the clinic staff to spend some time with a randomly selected group of black and white children from Delaware. Accompanied by a member of the education committee of the Wilmington Branch of the NAACP, thirteen children made the two-hour train trip to New York on five occasions for testing. The children were treated like ordinary patients of the clinic and subjected to a diagnostic regimen that included individual case histories and interviews, group observation and discussion, and standardized testing. Wertham reported these results to the court.35 Wertham’s testimony, bolstered by his Viennese accent, was more like an extended monologue than a session of questions and answers, but this did not detract from the power of his words. The bulk of his testimony revolved around two themes central to the NAACP’s campaign: that segregation caused a massive public health problem and that state-sanctioned segregation in schools was particularly harmful to the psychological development of black children. Reading from his notes on the interviews with the Wilmington children, Wertham asserted, “the fact of segregation in public and high school create[d] in the mind of the child an . . . unsolvable emotional conflict, and I would say an inevitable conflict.”36 Symptoms, he conceded, might not be manifest in all those affected, but there was the potential for illness in all who were subjected to such conditions. The typical coping mechanisms— realistic rationalization, repression, and overcompensation—that the mind employed to overcome such conflicts, he stressed, were ineffective because the children could discover no rational explanation for their treatment. The fact that segregation was experienced in school, Wertham noted, also mattered a great deal: What they are most trying to get is a correct image of human relationships in their daily life, and they are confronted in a very important part of their life, namely in their school life which for most children is the first part of social life, with a distorted image of human relationships, because an artificial and very strict barrier is set up which they don’t understand, and this restricts their human relationships in

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which we expect them and want them to be—I won’t say “successful,” but in which we want them to be healthy.37 He acknowledged that racism outside schools was a massive problem. But rather than conceding ground on the point that the effects of segregation in education were not easily isolated from other forms of discrimination and therefore dismissible, Wertham argued that segregation in education only compounded the harm of broader societal discrimination. The New York psychiatrist also found that the long commutes and a series of what he termed “minor tragedies”—defined as the accumulated loss of school days and class time and harassment from their white peers—were particularly damaging to black children. The stress associated with segregation was so great that Wertham was compelled to make his boldest judgment yet: that no amount of equalization could alleviate the damage to the psyches of these children. I have come to the conclusion that the physical differences in these schools are not at all really material, to my opinion. In other words,  . . . if the State of Delaware would employ Professor Einstein to teach Physics in marble halls to these children, I would still say everything in general I have said goes: It is the fact of segregation in general and the problems that come out of it that to my mind [are] anti-educational, by which I mean that education in the larger sense is interfered with. And since for a child education is one part of mental health and not merely a question of learning something, their health is interfered with.38 Black children, he concluded, thus interpreted segregation as a form of punishment. Wertham testified to yet another adverse effect of the state’s sanctioning of school segregation on young people. Children, he told the court, have a natural affinity for ethical authority figures and are taught to obey them from a very young age. Here the state stood as that ultimate authority. But in contrast to their experiences with other bodies exercising power, the children found that the state identifies with “its most bigoted citizens” and, worse, justifies its actions in moral terms.39 Unlike segregation in, for example, public accommodations, which Wertham implied was not generally acceptable and where traversing the color line was often possible, the state’s policies were absolute and had been in place for a very long time. The court was undoubtedly

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swayed by his testimony, as much of it would be reflected in the chancery court’s decision on segregation in education. Fresh from testifying in two other NAACP-sponsored school desegregation suits in South Carolina and Kansas, Kenneth Clark was the last expert to appear for the plaintiffs. The work of Clark and his wife and collaborator, Mamie, was instrumental in bridging the gap between public policy and the psychology of damage. They were also instrumental in pushing social scientists to ask the probing question, “did [black] children wish to be white?”40 For the NAACP’s purposes, Clark’s most important contribution was his 1950 study “The Effect of Prejudice and Discrimination on Personality Development,” which was included in the official report that resulted from the Midcentury White House Conference on Children and Youth. This essay was devoted to the study of racial awareness and attitudes among black children and to the detrimental effects of segregation on their emotional development, including feelings of inferiority, frustration, distortion, and self-rejection. Through the use of a doll test, in which the subjects were presented with identical white and black dolls and then asked a series of questions to elicit their feelings on matters that had the potential to cause emotional distress, the Clarks found a striking preference among the black children for the white doll and a rejection of the black doll, which led them to conclude “that young Negro children would prefer to be white.” Such preferences, they continued, reflected an “awareness and acceptance of the prevailing racial attitudes in his community.”41 Segregated schools, in Clark’s view, were a particularly pernicious expression of these racial attitudes: Both white and Negro children soon learn that the white school is considered superior, and that Negro children are sent to separate schools because the society in general considers them unworthy of association with other children. Even if the Negro schools were made equal to the white schools, they would remain concrete monuments to the stigma of the alleged inferiority of the Negro; they would in fact be gilded educational ghettos, reflecting undemocratic and unscientific attitudes that are incompatible with the goals of education.42 Carter was impressed with Clark’s conclusions and thought them tailor-made for the NAACP litigation campaign. The two men met in February 1951. Carter explained to Clark that their litigation campaign was being reoriented

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toward the goal of overturning Plessy v. Ferguson and proving that segregation was a violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Clark later recalled: “He pointed out that if they were to be successful in obtaining their objective, they would have to demonstrate to the courts that racial segregation in public schools damaged Negro children. Since they could not demonstrate that racial segregation inflicted concrete, overt, physical damage upon these children, they had to find evidence of psychological damage—that is, injuries to the personality, the self-esteem of these rejected children.”43 Not all the NAACP’s attorneys were as enthusiastic about Clark’s thesis. William Coleman and Robert Ming were not entirely convinced of the validity of his conclusions and thought them peripheral to their campaign. Greenberg himself was a bit skeptical. Nonetheless, Clark began his work with the organization, recruiting other social scientists as witnesses for the NAACP, assisting in the preparation of legal briefs, and testifying in a number of school segregation cases that had worked their way through the courts in Clarendon County, South Carolina, and Prince Edward County, Virginia. He would also personally appear before the chancery court in the Delaware case to testify about his research and his interviews with a number of Wilmington students.44 Clark’s testimony only buttressed the social scientific case against segregation in education. The bulk of his testimony pertained to the results of the doll tests he had administered to forty-one black students in Wilmington, thirty-nine of whom were enrolled at Howard High School and three who were in elementary school. Such projective tests, he stressed to the court, were commonly used to elicit testimony from patients as to how they felt about matters that had the potential to cause emotional distress. His conclusion: “the practice of segregation as perceived by these youngsters impaired their general functioning.” Clark told the court that when asked “Which of these dolls is likely to act bad?” the black children from Wilmington in three out of four cases identified the black doll as the one that would act bad, evidence that Clark interpreted as the children associating the black doll with negative racial stereotypes. This was compounded by the fact that every one of the subjects, when asked, “Show me which one is like you,” identified themselves with the black doll. The black children’s clear-cut identification with the this doll was, in Clark’s opinion, indicative of the “rather deep damage to self esteem of these youngsters, a feeling of inferiority, a feeling of inadequacy—evidence which was further supported

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by the kind of things which the youngsters said—‘I suppose we do act kind of bad. We don’t act like white people.’ ”45 Even when the black children did not readily identify with the black doll, Clark recalled, there was great hesitancy to identify with the white doll. They would rather have chosen nothing. In the psychologist’s assessment, state-sanctioned segregation only gave added weight to the adverse effects of segregation in the minds of these children. He stated: it sets up in these children a fundamental conflict, a confusion about the nature of their own person, their self image. It puts them in a struggle to overcome the feelings of inferiority which the society by virtue of these segregation practices continues to impose upon them. It sets up in them self doubt where the evidence suggests that from a very early age—five or six or seven—Negro children begin to learn to expect from the society some of the society’s rejection of them, so that they begin to reject themselves and feel inadequate and feel inferior and feel that certain kinds of things are not for them because they are brown, and some of the things which they imposed upon the brown doll which I presented are the things which they are really imposing upon themselves.46 Clark buttressed his account with a summary of the literature on these matters, meant to testify to the prevailing social scientific zeitgeist of the postwar period. Ninety percent of those publishing on these matters, Clark concluded, agreed with his conclusions.

* * * For all Young’s commitment to preserving the formal structures of racial segregation, he advanced a rather staid defense of this arrangement in the public schools. In opening arguments, he contended that segregation was not synonymous with inequality, the NAACP’s social scientific evidence notwithstanding. Young also argued that the maintenance of public schools and by implication pupil assignment policies were the legislative prerogatives of the state, and it had the right to maintain separate and equal schools as it saw fit. Young then counseled caution on the grounds of a kind of layperson’s social science that accepted the depths of white prejudice and thus the necessity for gradual reform.

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The State contends, your Honor, that the issue joined in this case poses a problem which requires hope and faith, character and patience. We must grow up to it. We cannot by judicial fiat impose upon a people against their will what they have accepted by heritage, tradition and governmental sanction as reflected in our Constitution and in the statute books for so many years. No solution, where there is a law as here, which is not accepted by large masses of the people can have any possible enduring quality.47 To rule otherwise, Young contended, would only make matters worse. Peaceful, gradual change could only be initiated at the local level by the state legislature, not by judicial fiat.48 Young had a terrible time putting together a credible defense of the state’s record of providing equal educational opportunities for black and white students. His star witness, George Miller, who had offered the last word on the Bulahs’ transportation request, turned out to be his Achilles’ heel. On cross-examination, Redding forced Miller to concede that the evidence of inequality on matters pertaining to books and other instructional materials, playing fields, aesthetic appearances, teacher credentials, pupil-teacher ratios, college-preparatory course offerings, and school newspapers—which were the foci of the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses—was valid in the comparisons of the black and white schools. More damning in terms of the superintendent’s credibility was his own record of research on race and education in the state. Here Redding focused the court’s attention on the superintendent’s 1943 doctoral dissertation titled “Adolescent Negro Education in Delaware: A Study of the Negro Secondary School and Community (Exclusive of Wilmington).” (Ironically, Miller had contacted NAACP executive secretary Walter White for assistance in his research on the state of African American education in Delaware.) In the dissertation, Miller argued—and Redding recited to the court—“Segregation of white and Negro for educational purposes offers innumerable opportunities for discriminatory practices.” Redding continued in Miller’s own words with an even more damaging passage: If one could be assured that equal opportunities for education would be realized under a policy of segregation, one wouldn’t consider the practice of segregation, one wouldn’t consider the practice as entirely unfair. But if one considers education as life and that the schools must somehow or other reproduce within themselves opportunities for life

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experiences, segregation offers little opportunity to meet this requirement. Living demands the ability to get along with others, and the schools must furnish social milieus in which children will learn to respect the personalities of different nationalities and races and to live within such groups in a spirit of actual co-operation.49 The conclusions of Miller’s research were certainly at odds with the state’s position on segregation. Indeed, they seemed to readily support the NAACP’s position of the inherently unequal quality of segregated schools. If the NAACP’s litigation strategy was marked by innovation and reflected liberalizing tendencies in postwar social scientific culture, the state’s attorney failed to expose the weaknesses in the NAACP’s social scientific strike against segregation. It is possible that Young simply thought the conclusions of the plaintiffs’ experts were too weak to compel the court to rule for the plaintiffs. Still, his expert witnesses paled in comparison to those presented by the NAACP and were called primarily to refute the charges of school inequality. He did not enjoy the privilege of a large pool of social scientists, either locally or nationally, who were willing or able to forward a scientifically informed defense of segregation and contest the burgeoning social science research on race, racial prejudice, and the personal and societal damage that resulted from segregation. Young also missed valuable opportunities to probe the methodological weaknesses in the social science research of the plaintiffs’ witnesses.50

* * * Chancellor Seitz afforded the NAACP’s direct attack strategy—and their assertions of inequality and damage—legal approbation when he issued his decision on April 1, 1952. In an unusual move for most jurists, he had demanded personal visits to each of the schools in question at the conclusion of the testimonial phase of the trial. His firsthand observations, in addition to the testimony presented by the plaintiffs and the expert witnesses provided the grist for the most damning assessment of Delaware’s system of segregated education. Seitz noted the long commute imposed upon Ethel Belton and its negative impact on her schedule, and he reserved particular condemnation for the State Board of Education’s “outlandish” refusal to provide bus transportation for Shirley Bulah. Seitz also acknowledged the significant disparities between the Claymont and Howard high schools and schools Nos. 29 and 107 in terms

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of student travel times and their physical plants, teaching staffs, course loads, class sizes, curricula, libraries, and extracurricular activities.51 The chancellor was also clearly moved by the testimony of the expert witnesses, particularly that of Wertham, whom he described as “one of America’s foremost psychiatrists.” Seitz’s decision was an affirmation of the claims of both the plaintiffs and their counsel. Rejecting Young’s argument that the state was not “ready” for desegregated education, Seitz affirmed the NAACP’s position that segregated education did indeed create “a mental health problem in many Negro children with a resulting impediment to their educational progress” and thus, “as a class,” they received “educational opportunities which are substantially inferior to those available to white children otherwise similarly situated.” But in what was most likely a disappointment for plaintiffs’ counsel, Seitz again withheld judgment on the constitutionality of the section of the Delaware constitution that mandated segregation in public schools. He acknowledged the argument that Plessy should be repudiated but ultimately ruled that it was up to the Supreme Court to determine the constitutionality of that historic decision.52 As to the plaintiffs’ right to immediate compensation for past wrongs, Seitz ruled as follows: It seems to me that when a plaintiff shows to the satisfaction of a court that there is an existing and continuing violation of the “separate but equal” doctrine, he is entitled to have made available to him the State facilities which have shown to be superior. To do otherwise is to say to such a plaintiff: “Yes, your constitutional rights are being invaded, but be patient, we will see whether in time they are still being violated.” If, as the Supreme Court has said [in Sweatt v. Painter], this right is personal, such a plaintiff is entitled to relief immediately, in the only way it is available, namely by admission to the school with the superior facilities.53 Seitz had indeed dropped what Kluger has characterized as a “thunderbolt,” casting further doubt on the merits of Plessy. The Delaware case stood apart from other NAACP-led school desegregation cases that were then winding their way through the courts. The NAACP had lost a suit in South Carolina and would lose others in Virginia, Kansas, and the District of Columbia. In Delaware, Sarah Bulah, Ethel Belton, and the rest of the plaintiffs had prevailed. And for the first time in the nation’s history, a court had ordered Jim Crow public primary and secondary schools

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to open their doors to black students. Two weeks later, Seitz issued his order, enjoining the state from denying the black students admission to Claymont High School and Hockessin School No. 29. The news of these developments was particularly well received by a conference of lawyers, social scientists, and civil rights leaders who were celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Charles Johnson’s Journal of Negro Education at Howard University. Seitz’s decision still left open, however, the possibility that Shirley Bulah and the other black students could be removed from the white schools if the state remedied the inequalities between the black and white institutions and lived up to the ideals of the Plessy doctrine.54

* * * If the Belton and Bulah cases marked a step forward in the fight against segregation, they also revealed the lengths to which the state would go to preserve the sanctity of legally sanctioned, separate black and white schools in the state. Anticipating a rising tide of white grassroots opposition to desegregation, the state mounted a two-front defense of Jim Crow. First, Young appealed the chancery court’s decision to the Delaware Supreme Court. Second, the state mobilized—really for the first time—to address the institutional inequalities that marked Delaware’s system of Jim Crow schooling. In late April 1952, a delegation from Hockessin School District No. 29 met with the state board to express their concerns about the impact of Bulah. Gordon Biehn, chairman of the district board of trustees, testified that there was considerable support for maintaining separate schools for black and white students in Hockessin. State Board of Education member Fred Gebhart expressed sympathy for Bulah’s request but opposed the desegregation of the No. 29 school because of overcrowding at the white school. In a separate appeal to the governor, he recommended that the state provide black residents of the community with a bus to transport their children to No. 107.55 Biehn also asserted that many white residents in the community intended to withdraw their children from school unless the district maintained segregated schools. The attendees then turned their attention to the possibility of improving conditions at No. 107. Miller expressed concern, however, that such efforts were far too expensive to be practical. As the debate proceeded, other members of the state board also appeared resigned to the fact that they would have to admit black students to the white schools given the stark inequalities between the two facilities. For now, school officials seemed to acknowledge Sarah Bulah’s complaints about

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the inequities inherent in the state’s denial of transportation to black children in the state and granted Eisenbrey the authority to pick up black children and transport them to school. Still, they also pledged to explore the possibility of improving conditions at No. 107.56 Not all Sarah Bulah’s neighbors were pleased with her challenge to school segregation: “many blacks, especially in the Deep South, viewed their schools and colleges with pride; built at great personal cost, they provided jobs, leadership, and community facilities,” the historian Adam Fairclough has noted. “For black southerners, integration was a leap in the dark.”57 Indeed, Sarah Bulah, according to Rowan, had been “something less than a hero to other Negro parents in the area.”58 The varied responses to her efforts revealed very different perspectives on the value of No. 107 and the possibilities inherent in the campaign for school desegregation. The reasons for the lack of support for Bulah’s efforts ranged from the seemingly personal to the highly political. Sarah’s own history was significant to residents of the area. She was Fred’s second wife and considered a relative newcomer to town though she had lived in the community for almost a decade. Shirley’s physical appearance also concerned some. They were suspicious of Sarah’s motives because Shirley was light skinned; the fact that Sarah wanted to send her daughter to an integrated school was interpreted as a desire to distance and distinguish her daughter from other black children. Reverend Martin Luther Kilson, pastor of the Chippey African Union Methodist Church in Hockessin, expressed his lack of support for Bulah’s efforts and tried to talk her out of the lawsuit. In his opinion, the effort to integrate Hockessin schools had been instigated by outsiders: “All we wanted was a bus for the colored. Redding . . . and some members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People encouched . . . [sic] this issue of segregation.” He was concerned about upsetting what he believed were good relations between blacks and whites in the community. Kilson also thought many in the community would rather have a black teacher for their children. “They didn’t want to be mixed up with no white folks,” he concluded. Many were also concerned about the possible closure of school No. 107. As well as a center of learning, this black school, like many others, served as a community center where the public held meetings and other functions. “It was so handy,” Kilson recalled.59 Out of a concern about the long-term viability of the black school and sensing an opportunity to secure much-needed funds for the institution, the secretary of the Citizen’s Committee in Hockessin subsequently presented a letter on behalf of the organization to the state board formally requesting repairs and improvements

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at the black school that summer. The state board subsequently received a survey of No. 107 that revealed that it would cost between $85,000 and $100,000 to carry out the necessary repairs and improvements. Board members were still concerned that these enhancements would not forestall the desegregation of area schools. For the moment, however, the state board approved the allocation of not more than $5,000 to make short-term repairs to the grounds and physical plant.60 Beyond the communities most immediately involved in the advancing school segregation cases, state officials who were committed to minimizing the impact of the court’s desegregation decrees also made plans for a black comprehensive high school program. This development signaled school officials’ sense that the current segregated system was unsustainable in that it failed to meet rising demands for black secondary education in southern Delaware communities, fell outside the bounds of prevailing educational standards, and was vulnerable to legal challenge. School administrators were also cognizant of the fact that black residents were increasingly looking to white schools for solutions to their educational needs. Thus they believed that the expansion of the comprehensive high school system would “relieve the pressure of Negroes wishing to enter the white schools.”61 School officials eventually acknowledged the need for expanded high school opportunities in the state’s southern counties. In 1948 they began to focus on what they considered great obstacles to black secondary education—especially high per-pupil costs, restrictions endemic to small school plants, and the dispersal of black students throughout Kent and Sussex counties. The state anticipated increasing black enrollments in the first decades of the 1950s and recommended the construction of a black high school in Dover. In these preliminary planning stages, officials imagined a Kent County Comprehensive High School that would serve black students between the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal and Milford, and a Sussex County Comprehensive High School that would serve black communities farther south. With graduation rates traditionally low throughout southern Delaware, school administrators anticipated that comprehensive high schools would provide an incentive for increasing numbers of primary school students to stay in school through all twelve years. They also recognized the need to reorganize the black educational program to bring it in line with the 6–3–3 school scheme, in which students spent six years in elementary school, three in junior high school, and three in high school, that was predominant in white school systems in the state.62

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The General Assembly made its first appropriations for the Sussex (later named William C. Jason Comprehensive High School) and Kent County (later named the William W. M. Henry Comprehensive High School) schools in the late 1940s. In some ways, the founding principles of these institutions sounded much like those that undergirded the Hampton-Tuskegee philosophy and reflected the spirit of self-help that animated black educational reform movements. The supervising principal of the Henry school, Harley F. Taylor, strongly encouraged the black community to take advantage of the opportunities available in the new high school: “That we should make hay from the grass under our feet. Let me charge you youth and adult among my people to start where-you-are and use what you have. One business owned, one house constructed, one company formed, one life cleanly lived, will tell more in our favor than all the talking and discussion that can be summoned to plead our cause.”63 Unlike the orientation of Hampton-Tuskegee project, however, the Henry School administrators planned to provide a diverse curriculum and tracks in academic, scientific, commercial, vocational, and general education that would prepare students for work after graduation or further opportunities at institutions of higher education. They also highlighted the diverse extracurricular offerings that would, in sum, amount to a significant corrective to the inequalities between the opportunities afforded black and white students. The state’s investment in black education in the shadow of the school desegregation suits was dramatic. The William C. Jason Comprehensive High School was opened in 1951, the William W. M. Henry Comprehensive High School the next year, and the Louis L. Redding Comprehensive High School the next. With one in each county, the system of high schools now extended the spine of black secondary education down the length of the state.64

* * * The Delaware Supreme Court issued its formal opinion on Young’s appeal on August 28, 1952—just days before the opening day of school. Chief Justice Clarence A. Southerland issued the unanimous decision on behalf of the court, affirming the chancellor’s decision in the lower tribunal.65 Southerland rejected Young’s plea for more time for the state to correct for the inequalities entered in the record. He also challenged the social scientific evidence offered in the lower court as insufficient to overthrow what Young called the “long and settled interpretation[s]” of previous court rulings on the issue of

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Black Comprehensive High Schools, Delaware

Pre-1950 Wilmington Howard High School

Post-1950 Wilmington Howard High School

Middletown Louis L. Redding Comprehensive High School

Dover William W.M. Henry Comprehensive High School

Georgetown William C. Jason Comprehensive High School

Figure 5.  Black comprehensive high schools, Delaware.  By Michael Page, Emory University Libraries.

school segregation.66 Southerland affirmed, however, the NAACP’s assertion of inequality between the black and white schools in question as “almost wholly undisputed.”67 The appellate court expressed its sensitivity to developments in the NAACP cases in South Carolina and Virginia. But with respect to the federal courts’ decisions there, it still affirmed Seitz’s tack on the matter of relief. As to remedy, the courts asserted, “we cannot reconcile the denial of prompt relief with the pronouncement of the Supreme Court of the United

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States . . . . To require the plaintiffs to wait another year under present conditions would be in effect partially to deny them that to which we have held they are entitled.”68 Still, the court left open the possibility that Shirley Bulah, Ethel Belton, and the rest of the black students participating in the suit could be removed from the white school: “In affirming the Chancellor’s order we have not overlooked the fact that the defendants may at some future date apply for a modification of the order if, in their judgment, the inequalities as between the Howard and Claymont schools or as between School No. 29 and School No. 107 have then been removed.”69 And once again, the court withheld judgment on the constitutionality of the segregation clause of the Delaware constitution.70 Local actors in the Wilmington suburbs interpreted the state supreme court’s rulings as grounds to desegregate the white schools in their communities. Sarah Bulah took advantage of her new rights under the law and on the first day of school drove Shirley to Hockessin School No. 29. And in a culminating gesture, she asked the principal, Grace Moore, to ensure that her daughter took the bus home before she left her daughter to the day’s studies. Shirley was the only black child on the first day of school, but she was joined by five more in the following months. When the Claymont superintendent, Harvey E. Stahl, learned of the decision, he committed himself to the desegregation of the schools under his charge.71 In the days preceding the opening day of school, the Claymont board met with eleven black students and their parents and decided to enroll the black students in advance of the court’s issuance of an order. On September 4, the black students joined roughly five hundred of their new white classmates at Claymont High School for the first day of class.72 Unfortunately, Ethel Belton had a health condition that precluded her from transferring to Claymont High.73 Young and Miller took exception to the local board’s action in Claymont and instructed Stahl to expel the black students because they planned to appeal the Delaware court’s decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. The state officials were concerned that their case might be undermined if black students were allowed to enroll in white schools. Stahl refused to comply, and the Claymont board and the faculty (with one exception) affirmed their superintendent’s stance. African Americans in the neighboring community of Arden had not been directly involved in the Belton and Bulah cases, but Dr. Leon V. Anderson, a black man who lived with his wife and six children in that town, contacted the local school board to inquire as to whether the Arden Elementary School would admit his younger children. No school official objected, and he enrolled them in the

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school. The state board refused to endorse this decision but did not forward any specific objections to the local board’s decision. Anderson also transferred his older children to Claymont High School. In each case, school desegregation proceeded largely without incident. The white and black students accommodated themselves to racially mixed classrooms and extracurricular activities, despite some grumblings from local white adults. Only one of the four teachers in the Hockessin school, Grace Moore (who was also the principal), admitted to journalist William Peters her support for desegregation. Two teachers, Mildred C. Insinga and Ethel Cheyney, took exception to the manner in which the schools were desegregated, perceiving that reform was imposed upon the community by outside interests. “I’m against this integration, and I’ll tell you why,” Cheyney told Peters. “It was done by an organization that used pressure. It wasn’t done by the State Board of Education or the local people or the State itself.” Cheyney resurrected a variation of arguments that reflected deep-seated fears about the dismantling of laws and customs that enforced distance between the races and black racial subordination, which many whites believed would invite social equality, miscegenation, intermarriage, and the degradation of the white race and culture. “Look at South America, where all the races and creeds have intermarried, and what have they got?” she cautioned. “Lazy, unproductive, backward people. The court decision sickened me, because it gave no value to the individuals. This kind of thing may lead to intermarriage, and then where will we be?”74 Overall, however, white parents were most concerned about interracial social dancing in gym class. Moore addressed this problem by seeking out the permission of more liberal-minded parents in the community to allow their children to dance with their black classmates. Claire Byler, the gym teacher at Claymont High, simply eliminated dancing from the curriculum where there were not equal numbers of black boys and girls in class.75 As school desegregation slowly advanced in northern Delaware, Young applied to the Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari on November 13. Both encouraged and a bit dismayed given the timing of matters, he received a quick response from Court clerk Harold B. Wiley, who informed him that the Court wanted to hear his case along with four other school desegregation cases from South Carolina, Kansas, Virginia, and the District of Columbia that involved the same legal issues. Both parties had only two weeks to prepare their remarks in this consolidated suit, in what would become popularly known as Brown v. Board of Education.76

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Figure 6.  Part of plaintiffs’ legal team in Brown v. Board of Education. Left to right: John Scott, James M. Nabrit, Jr., Spottswood W. Robinson III, Frank D. Reeves, Jack Greenberg, Thurgood Marshall, Louis L. Redding, U. Simpson Tate, and George E. C. Hayes. Courtesy NAACP Legal Defense And Educational Fund, Inc.

* * * On December 9, 1952, the struggle over school desegregation shifted to Washington. The attorneys for the five sets of plaintiffs and defendants had one final chance to alternately advance their challenge and defense of Jim Crow schools before this court of last resort. Here the NAACP honed its challenge into a social constructivist attack on race and racial differences rooted in prevailing social science research and the negative impact of segregation on black citizens. The crux of the NAACP’s argument, as articulated in the appellants’ brief for the Kansas case and in oral arguments before the Court, focused on two broad points. First, the NAACP asserted that the Fourteenth Amendment precluded distinctions or classifications based upon race or color alone. Second, they argued that racial segregation handicapped black students in their educational endeavors and maintained—arguing at length in a social science appendix— that segregation retarded the intellectual development and distorted the personalities of black students, thereby rendering segregated schools by definition unequal. Robert Carter opened on behalf of the Kansas plaintiffs. His oral ar-

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gument set the tone for the rest of the NAACP cases and captured the essence of the NAACP’s direct attack strategy. Here we abandon any claim, in pressing our attack on the unconstitutionality of this statute—we abandon any claim—of any constitutional inequality which comes from anything other than the act of segregation itself. In short, the sole basis for our appeal here on the constitutionality of the statute of Kansas is that it empowers the maintenance and operation of racially segregated schools, and under that basis we say, on the basis of the fact that the schools are segregated, that negro children are denied equal protection of the laws, and they cannot secure equality in educational opportunity.77 States, he continued, did not have the authority to use race as a factor in providing educational opportunities to their citizens, for to do so was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. He then referred to Finding of Fact No. 8 in the lower court case in Kansas, which supported the NAACP’s contention that segregation had a detrimental effect on black children.78 Over the next day and a half, Thurgood Marshall (on behalf of the South Carolina plaintiffs), Spottswood Robinson (on behalf of the Virginia plaintiffs), and George E. C. Hayes and James Nabrit (on behalf of the District of Columbia plaintiffs) offered variations of these arguments to the Court with different levels of success. Redding and Greenberg took their turn at the lectern on the last day of argument on December 11 and continued the organization’s line, even if there was little ground left for originality. Following Carter’s lead, Redding began as follows: “classification on the basis of race to determine what educational facilities may be enjoyed is arbitrary and unreasonable, and because it is arbitrary and unreasonable, it is unconstitutional. We say that such a classification has no relationship to the education of a State’s citizens.” He noted that advances in scientific knowledge had demonstrated that there were no innate differences in intellectual capacity rooted in race and then referred to the findings of fact that had been established in the chancery court regarding the inequalities between the black and white schools and the evidence of harm, as demonstrated by Wertham, inflicted upon students in segregated school systems.79 Greenberg took the second half of their allotted hour and focused on the record of inequalities and damage to black children that resulted from their segregation. He

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stressed that the “inequalities in this case are of a very severe and extensive nature,” and he reiterated Seitz’s point that the original plaintiffs deserved immediate relief. Despite the attorney general’s assertion that plans were in the works to remedy the inequalities, Greenberg pointed out that there was “no evidence on record that equality would occur at any time in the future.”80 And there was a technical problem. The Wilmington Board of Education, which oversaw Howard High School, Greenberg continued, was not a party to the case and thus beyond the mandate of the court. As for the administrative problems that would arise as a result of a decision for the black parents, Greenberg saw no problem: black children, as a result of Seitz’s decree, had already enrolled in previously white schools and there had been no reports of trouble. Greenberg’s mention of psychological damage evoked a response from Justice Felix Frankfurter, who had taken a number of opportunities to grill the NAACP attorneys on the merits of damage arguments in previous oral remarks. Greenberg ought not to have been surprised by Frankfurter’s intervention given the justice’s sensitivity to the technical merits of cases and precedent, as balanced against his humanitarian interests and certain sympathy for the rights of individuals and minority populations. In his reflections on the NAACP’s preparation for the school segregation case, Greenberg recalled, “All arguments were framed to meet Felix Frankfurter’s position. In terms of the oral argument, you had to address yourself to him—he was just more demanding than any of the other Justices, and you had to be ready with tight answers on all technical points, like justiciability and whether all remedies had been exhausted by the parties.”81 Frankfurter was particularly apprehensive about adopting the lower court’s factual findings of injury to black children caused by segregated education in Delaware. Not entirely comfortable with sociologically informed jurisprudence, Frankfurter found himself bound by factual findings that had not been reviewed by the state supreme court and that he himself believed were suspect. Greenberg stressed that the social science evidence had been uncontested and thoroughly reviewed by the chancellor in the original trial: “It is a very full and completely uncontradicted record.” While admitting his respect for Wertham’s work, Frankfurter expressed his concern that “we are here in a domain which I do not yet regard as science in the sense of mathematical certainty. This is all opinion evidence.”82 The justice and Greenberg had found themselves at an impasse of sorts. With that, the argument phase of Brown v. Board of Education came to an end.

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Despite the prominence of the social science testimony, its import temporarily faded as the Court, in a call for reargument, turned its attention to the question whether the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment intended for the clause to apply to education, contemplated the power of the judiciary to abolish segregation, and considered the appropriate time frame in which to enjoin a possible remedy. Through a succession of backroom deliberations, the justices had collectively arrived at the conclusion that Jim Crow schools were no longer constitutionally viable. “What stood in the way was not primarily division on the merits,” Mark Tushnet has noted, “but division over how to justify the result.”83 As the Bulah and Belton cases continued to wind their way through the appellate courts, the state explored further avenues of equalization. In November 1952, the state board discussed a more comprehensive reform program—after the Delaware Supreme Court affirmed Seitz’s decision—in anticipation of other challenges to segregation. This proposed program included the consolidation and reduction of the number of black schools from sixty to twenty and the elimination of many of the smaller schools. They estimated the cost of these reforms, which included adding classrooms, cafeterias, multipurpose rooms, and medical facilities, at approximately $2 million. In conjunction with a number of black parents from Hockessin, school officials revised the grade structure of No. 107 to grades one through four. They transferred the fifth and sixth graders to the historically black Absalom Jones School in Newport and made provisions for transporting those students on their approximately eight-mile commute.84 In a self-congratulatory mood, the state board announced in early September 1953 that it had fulfilled its constitutional obligations by providing equal educational facilities at Absalom Jones and transportation services for the children in the Hockessin School District No. 107. Miller all but bragged that in terms of the school plant, instruction, and educational services, the conditions at Absalom Jones compared most favorably to those at Hockessin, even if the black school still housed grades one through nine. The state board also instructed the local board to redirect all black applications to the No. 29 school to Absalom. It sought permission from the attorney general to expel Shirley Bulah and the small number of other black students from their new school. Young— undoubtedly pleased with the reforms at Absalom Jones because it bolstered his case before the Supreme Court but concerned about appearance of presumptuousness—rejected Miller’s request for approval to expel the black students from No. 29. Still, Miller pressed Young to apply to Chancellor Seitz to

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remove the injunction against the No. 29 school and secure the authority to oust the other black students from that facility.85 School officials also took steps to improve educational opportunities for black students in other communities. On August 27, 1953, after an inquiry from the attorney general’s office regarding plans to improve black education in Wilmington, city superintendent of schools Ward Miller announced a plan to address certain inequalities in the schools available to black students under his jurisdiction. Even as the language of his report was couched in the future tense and often conflated ambitious planning with actual outcomes, Miller reported on the plans to reorganize the grade structures of Howard High School and reassign grades seven, eight, and nine to Bancroft Junior High School. He stressed that the Bancroft grade structure was based “on the lines of the most advanced thinking concerning junior high schools.” Miller also announced plans to consolidate Howard and the Carver Vocational School, to hire a new principal and administrative staff to run the institution, and to devote $75,000 to improve the physical facilities of, purchase new equipment for, and modernize the junior high building. The Wilmington Board of Education, he continued, ultimately planned to spend the grand sum of $350,000 to improve Howard and establish it as a first-class comprehensive high school. The money would fund improvements that had long been identified by educational reformers as necessary for the proper operation of schools, including space for an on-site vocational program, medical suite, faculty lounge, music room, and food laboratory. The funds would also finance renovations to the cafeteria, library, and gymnasium. The district had hired more teachers to reduce class sizes and made provisions for new instructional materials. While Miller stressed that his report ought not be construed as support for segregation (or desegregation), he contended that he had “gone into details here in order that you can see that the educational facilities of the building will equal those available to any high school students in this area.” He also noted improvements at Stubbs Elementary School—“without doubt some of the finest buildings along the Eastern Seaboard”—and Drew Elementary, which were set for completion on December 1. “[F]rom the kindergarten through the 12th grade,” he concluded in a manner likely tailored to appeal to any latent support among the justices for equalization, “educational opportunities for negro children in Wilmington will be equal to those offered to students not only in Wilmington but throughout the state and this region.”86 The next round of oral arguments was a bit rougher for the Delaware

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NAACP attorneys. Not only did they have the unenviable task of making their arguments last, again, in this round of testimony, but the unique nature of Young’s appeal also complicated the NAACP attorneys’ case. As the Delaware courts had declined to comment on the constitutionality of segregation, the crux of the attorney general’s appeal revolved around the merits of the trial court’s demand that the state immediately admit black children to the schools reserved for white children. Young charged in oral argument that the state should have been granted a reasonable amount of time to equalize the facilities before the black students were admitted to the white schools. The constitutionality of segregation, as Young reminded the Court, was therefore technically not before the justices in the Delaware case. If the Court was interested in the applicability of the Fourteenth Amendment to public education in the late nineteenth century, he asserted in a belated retort to the NAACP’s critique of racial classifications, the state’s adoption of segregated schools was not “based upon any declaration of natural or God-made inequality or inferiority of the Negro. Public officials adopted the new constitution in the light of the [ostensibly race-neutral] history and tradition of the people of the State of Delaware as the wisest and most workable and most acceptable method of educating the youth in that State, both white and colored.” Young also attempted to turn the attention of the assembly of judges to the merits of Plessy, ironically, as the basis for progressive reform in the state’s system of public education. Given the state’s paltry commitment to providing anything more than minimum provisions for black education through the late nineteenth century, he argued, “It is evident that [Plessy] and its statutory counterpart in Delaware were, in the cause of education of the Negroes, a long stride forward.” His was a really dramatic—perhaps desperate—attempt to rewrite the history of Plessy.87 In their final appearance at the podium, Redding and Greenberg would have to push the bounds of appellate review to bring their case in line with the other NAACP cases and keep the issue of the constitutionality of segregated schooling before the Court. Greenberg not only sought to prevent the black plaintiffs from being expelled from the white schools once the state completed its equalization campaign, he pushed for a judgment on the constitutionality of segregation itself in the state’s schools: “since this Court has seen fit to address to respondents in this case the same questions which it addressed to petitioners in [the Kansas, South Carolina, and Virginia cases,]” he argued, “we inferred that this Court believed that the constitutional question may be reached in this case.” The Court proved less than sympathetic to Greenberg’s

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inference, and after Frankfurter forcefully addressed the young lawyer’s violation of judicial etiquette they never returned to the historical questions that were up for reargument. A stickler for judicial procedure, Frankfurter took exception to Greenberg’s introduction of a technically irrelevant issue—the constitutionality of segregation in the Delaware case—before the Court and suggested that Greenberg should have cross-appealed. Greenberg reiterated his concern that the students would be expelled if the Court granted the state the opportunity to equalize the black and white schools. At this point, Justice Robert Jackson intervened and concluded this session of the oral arguments. “So far as this [Delaware] case is concerned,” he said, “the most that we can do would be to affirm the decree; but you probably will have the benefit of anything said in any other case that is helpful.”88 Marshall rose in Redding’s place after the recess to cap the NAACP’s argument and attempt to refocus the Court’s attention on the eroding constitutional grounds upon which segregation in education rested. In an extended monologue, he asked the Court to affirm the Delaware Supreme Court’s decision, but he also wanted the Court to impress upon the state court that it was not bound to uphold segregation statutes that permitted the state to return the black students to their original schools even if they equalized the black and white schools. In somewhat tortured language, Marshall contended, The real question involved is as to whether or not the states involved as of now, today, do or do not have power to use race and race alone for the basis of segregation, and that applies . . . in Delaware, which is just beside Pennsylvania. It applies as well there as it applies in South Carolina and Virginia; and therefore, unless there are questions, we submit this case and urge the Court to affirm the judgment of the Supreme Court of Delaware.89 After a brief exchange as to whether the judgment in Belton was the chancellor’s final order, the reargument phase of Brown came to a close. Chief Justice Warren revived the question of whether segregation was harmful to the psychological development of black children and granted the issue its highest legal endorsement after he asked rhetorically in his opinion in Brown: “Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other ‘tangible’ factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities?” In a break with a half-century of constitutional jurisprudence,

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Warren asserted on behalf of the Court, “We believe it does.” And it was especially so in primary and secondary education. Passing over the great sum of evidence on the institutional inequalities seemingly intrinsic to the operation of Jim Crow schools, the Chief Justice focused on the factual findings in the lower courts in the Delaware and Kansas cases, concluding: “To separate [black students] from the others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”90 Warren, it seemed for the moment, had swept Plessy into the dustbin of constitutional history, justifying his decision in the “modern authority” of sociological and psychological works included in the now infamous footnote eleven.91

* * * The Brown decision of May 17, 1954—and the Court’s assertion that “ ‘separate but equal’ has no place”—marked an important shift in African American and American political development. In the challenge to segregated schooling, civil rights activists had privileged desegregation over equalization as the predominant approach to the problem of segregated and unequal educational opportunities. The victory they won in the courts breathed new life into the Fourteenth Amendment as it pertained to the rights of African Americans and struck a blow against the legal and moral foundations of de jure segregation, even as the decision was shot through with weaknesses. The Chief Justice had, as Daryl Michael Scott has noted, “crafted a psychiatric appeal that subtly but effectively conveyed the plight of the victim without censuring the guilty.”92 The Court thus construed the problem associated with racial segregation as one of the mind and mental state and downplayed the extent to which—historically—racial segregation was part of a broader structure designed to politically, economically, and culturally subordinate African Americans.93 If Brown was often presumed to relegate Plessy to the historical past, the Court also declined to censure the system or the white southerners who sought its perpetuation. As Kluger has asserted, it “dismissed [the logic undergirding the institution] as simply no longer fashionable thinking.”94 And despite the NAACP’s assertion that racial classifications were arbitrary and unreasonable, Warren passed over the question as to whether the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited the state from making distinctions between citizens on the basis of race.95

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Still, as political scientist Adolph Reed, Jr., has noted, Brown “signified a victory in and of principle, and it fueled a sense of possibility. The decision energized and emboldened black Americans, conferring on them a sense of equal membership in the polity.”96 If many within the black community still saw merit in the maintenance of historically black educational institutions, Belton, Bulah, and Brown were certainly wins for the Delaware plaintiffs who believed that the state’s educational policies demanding racially segregated schools imposed an unfair burden upon black students. The parents of Shirley Bulah and the other black children involved in the case were now safe in the knowledge that school officials would not remove these children from their new schools even after the state embarked on its mission—some fiftyseven years after the passage of the modern state constitution—to provide equal facilities for black and white students. In this way, the Court’s historic decision promised black residents across the state access to educational resources that had been long denied them and new respect for their rights as citizens. More broadly, the NAACP campaign against segregation in the Jim Crow South and border states and their legal success in the district and appellate courts set the foundation for the construction of the sectional imaginary of de jure segregation as constitutionally suspect and opened an avenue for more challenges to the vestiges of Jim Crow schooling. With the vitality of Jim Crow schools called into question, school desegregation proponents would advance their campaign against the remnants of Jim Crow schools with a new determination.

PA R T I I Eliminating Jim Crow

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“The Delaware Method of Solving Things”

Fresh from the Supreme Court victory on May 17, 1954, the NAACP outlined its approach to subsequent challenges to the constitutionally suspect sectional imaginary of de jure segregation the following weekend in Atlanta. The organization proceeded—in ways it would increasingly and forcefully articulate—on the presumption that Jim Crow schooling was illegal, blacks were immediately due their rights as recognized by the High Court, and black communities should move at once to demand the implementation of school desegregation programs. Members of the national office, including Walter White, Roy Wilkins, Thurgood Marshall, Gloster Current, and Clarence Mitchell, met with representatives from state and local branches of seventeen states and the District of Columbia and approved a program of action. In their Atlanta Declaration, the national board of directors, in a slight overstatement as to the meaning of Brown, declared, “Now that the law is clear, we look to the future” and resolved to move forward in order to translate the Court’s decision into programs of action in the Jim Crow South and border states.1 As to the sectional character of this campaign, “No one—neither Marshall and the NAACP litigation team who developed Brown nor the Supreme Court justices who decided it—considered the possible impact of the decision on northern public schools,” observed historian Thomas Sugrue. All interested parties assumed that Brown applied to Jim Crow schools in the South and border states.2 To this end, the NAACP board instructed the state and local branches in communities that continued to maintain segregated school systems to petition local school boards to dismantle such structures immediately. As to the timelines for implementing desegregation programs, the board expressed sympathy for certain administrative challenges that school boards might face but drew the line at tactics designed to delay the implementation of reforms. They also insisted, in an expansion of Chief Justice Warren’s comment on school desegregation, that reforms should be extended to the assignment of teachers and

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other school personnel. The NAACP pledged their backing for federal support for southern educational systems to overcome the burdens associated with the dual school system and vowed to assist in expanding educational opportunities for all children to meet the Court’s ruling. “Lest there be any misunderstanding of our position,” the NAACP concluded, “we here rededicate ourselves to the removal of all racial segregation in public education and reiterate our determination to achieve this goal without compromise of principle.”3 With Brown at their backs, Redding and other Delaware activists turned their attention to pupil assignment policies that perpetuated Jim Crow schooling. The Supreme Court’s decision and the threat of further legal suits provoked a multifaceted response from state and local officials. The State Board of Education and local school officials in northern Delaware moved rather expeditiously to modify state policy to bring it in line with the Court’s dictates through the implementation of modified attendance zones and voluntary transfer mechanisms that facilitated the desegregation of pupil populations. With the notable exception of the Milford and Dover districts, school officials throughout southern Delaware reacted with much greater reserve. The Milford board’s modest effort to desegregate its high school provoked one of the most dramatic developments in the immediate aftermath of Brown in the form of a white populist uprising—a precursor to what would later come to be known as massive resistance. Unwilling to concede any change in the racial status quo, opponents of school desegregation organized rallies and boycotts, complained that the courts had exceeded their authority, and asserted that desegregation was a communist-inspired plot that, among other things, violated the sovereign authority of white people, undermined white parental authority, and promised amalgamation of the races. This short-lived reactionary movement—led by the National Association for the Advancement of White People (NAAWP) and its president, Bryant Bowles— sent shock waves across a state unaccustomed to such vitriolic tactics, revealed the depths of white opposition to school desegregation in Delaware, and stalled reform in many communities for some years. Still, the NAAWP’s tone and tactics alienated many whites, exposing a rift within the white community and prompting a backlash of sorts and a rethinking of oppositional tactics among area residents. In rejecting this expression of reactionary populism, white moderates sought to chart a path between Brown and massive resistance. They thus began the process of carving out a space for a more “reasoned” response to advancing race reforms that conceded, at least implicitly, to the fact that Jim Crow schooling had been judged unconstitutional

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and counseled a slow and purposeful path for change. This heralded school desegregation opponents’ attempt to balance the newly recognized constitutional rights of blacks with the competing social rights of whites to quality education and “local traditions” of racial reconciliation.

* * * If the state had been committed to preserving segregated and unequal schools before Brown, the State Board of Education moved rather expeditiously to translate the Supreme Court’s decision into public policy. It did so, however, in a manner that reflected the complexities of a tradition of localism in Delaware that had vested political power at the county level.4 In this way, as Sugrue has argued, “The politics of liberalism was ineluctably a politics of place. State and localities became battlegrounds over the meaning and implementation of federal policies.”5 The state board was composed of six members—two from each county—and reflected Delaware’s commitment to equal county representation in the provision of services. The board also mirrored a national sectional divide between the urban and more industrial North, which generally welcomed the High Court’s decision, and the conservative, rural, more farm-based South, whose white residents had long resisted the state’s growth strategies and incursion into local affairs, whether in the construction of the state highway system, increased investments in education, or the liberalization of race relations.6 The state board met in a special session on June 11 to consider the implications of Brown and pledged to carry out the Court’s mandate. It recognized, however, that the conservative political culture of southern Delaware might necessitate a longer transition period than that of northern communities. In a formal statement, the board announced its judgment that local boards of education, in conjunction with community groups, should formulate plans to remove the racial obstacles that segregated black and white students and then submit such plans to it for review. The board invoked the term “nonsegregation”—a passive term ostensibly less offensive than the more active “desegregation,” which for the moment seemed to imply the state’s affirmative duty to dismantle its half-century-old system of Jim Crow schooling—to describe its new policy orientation.7 Given the proximity of the upcoming school year, the state board declined to make any modifications to its transportation policy or faculty assignments in local districts that had not already initiated desegregation plans. In districts

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without preapproved desegregation plans, pupil transfers would be subject to state approval. In late August, the board reiterated its support for the establishment of community committees to promote greater understanding of the desegregation process and set a deadline of October 1 for local boards to submit their plans for approval. Such plans, it advised, could take one of two approaches to reform. Local districts could employ fixed, racially neutral attendance areas to facilitate the desegregation of student bodies, or they could employ a freedom of choice option and allow students to transfer schools on a space-available basis within fixed attendance areas. The state board was far less committal when it came to the future of black teachers, stating only that it was their hope that all teachers would be retained during desegregation. In anticipation of measures that would undermine efforts to desegregate schools, it discouraged the gerrymandering of school districts, the segregation of black students within desegregated facilities, and special examinations for black students who wished to transfer to formerly all-white schools. Local school officials across New Castle County generally welcomed Brown. The Wilmington Board of Education was reserved in its response to the Brown decision when it was first issued, and its members agreed to put off any action on the matter of desegregation until the Supreme Court handed down its implementation decree. But soon after, school superintendent Ward Miller declared on a local radio program that Wilmington public schools were prepared to end segregation. He recognized that there would be some challenges in terms of new pupil placement plans and curriculum changes, but he was confident that these matters could be addressed without too much difficulty. On June 21, the board held an open meeting to consider a number of desegregation proposals, solicit public input, and consider the possibility of desegregating schools that fall. The members did not agree on any sweeping new policies, but they did decide to integrate all summer activities, camps, and summer schools under their supervision. Miller later presented a freedom of choice plan to the board that would establish extended attendance areas and make provisions for parents to request transfers for their children to new schools on a space-available basis. He did not include provisions for the reassignment of teachers, however. This task, Miller decided, was to be delayed until the board could accurately assess new staffing requirements the next year.8 Local NAACP officials seemed satisfied with these first steps. Wagner D. Jackson, president of the Delaware Conference of the NAACP, found “no specific fault with the proposed plan” and endorsed it in a formal statement.

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Jackson did offer a number of provisions that he believed would strengthen the superintendent’s recommendations. To bolster the impending desegregation plan, he sought official pledges from the Wilmington board prohibiting subterfuge, gerrymandering, and any other device for evading desegregation. To foster an atmosphere conducive to reform, Jackson urged the Wilmington board to issue an appeal to concerned citizens on the religious principle of brotherhood, on the American tradition of fair play, and on the principle of equal justice under the law. Lastly, he called for the immediate desegregation of personnel at the beginning of the process. Jackson did object to one aspect of Miller’s plan. He opposed a provision enabling students to transfer from their home attendance area. Such a measure, he predicted, would enable white students to transfer out of schools with majority black pupil populations.9 The Wilmington board, with the endorsement of the Mayor’s Committee on Human Relations, adopted a freedom of choice plan in early July. The elementary schools were to be desegregated first. The board also adopted an open enrollment strategy in the city’s two vocational high schools; this allowed students to transfer between historically black Howard High School and H. Fletcher Brown Vocational High School, which had been reserved for white students, so that students could take advantage of select programs offered at one or the other facility. The board made some provisions for teacher transfers, and all evening and extended educational programs were offered on an open enrollment basis. No changes were instituted in the assignment of junior or senior high school students, but provisions were included for the limited transfers of eleventh and twelfth graders wishing to take classes that were not offered at their own school but were offered at other facilities.10 The Wilmington board implemented its freedom of choice plan in September, and eight of the city’s fourteen elementary schools opened their doors to both black and white students. Such plans were widely adopted by local districts across the South and border states in the period following Brown. The strength of this approach lay, as education scholar William Gordon has noted, in that it had a “ring of democracy” because it allegedly allowed families to choose their children’s schools.11 By allowing students to choose between black and white schools in their home districts, the board could comply with Brown and satisfy the demands of blacks looking to take advantage of their new rights in desegregated school settings. But in eschewing mandatory transfer measures, the board continued to maintain segregated black schools—now in practice rather than law. Freedom of choice enabled

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Wilmington whites who might have been tolerant of a limited degree of race mixing in schools but were reticent about sending their children to a black school that might be most proximate to their home to opt out, thus providing a release valve for any potential opposition to this race reform. Desegregation was thus construed largely as a one-way process, dependent on the initiative of African Americans and white schools’ capacity to absorb black students. The city board must have been confident that such plans would effect a relatively limited amount of desegregation, having anticipated low levels of white parental interest in transferring their children to black schools and certain impediments to black students transferring to white schools against the backdrop of racially segregated housing patterns in Wilmington. Historically African Americans had been concentrated on the east side of the city and the schools that formed the core of the system of black education in the city—Howard High School, Charles R. Drew School, and Frederick D. Stubbs School—were located in this section.12 Blacks’ interest in these means of desegregation suggested otherwise. In the months following Brown, roughly one-third of the 1,836 black Wilmington students requested transfers to previously all-white schools in their attendance areas, a powerful indication of black residents’ continued concerns about the inadequacies of the city’s black schools. Only twentyfour of the 4,667 white students requested transfer to the previously all-black schools in their attendance areas, a powerful comment on the white public’s perception of the state of black education in the city. A small number of black teachers transferred to previously all-white schools, and with assistance from parent-teacher associations, they assumed their new responsibilities without any negative reaction. In a trend that portended things to come, almost half of all black students attended previously all-white schools in the fall of 1955. The migration of white students to black schools remained disturbing low, however. No white students transferred to Howard, Drew, or Stubbs. The Wilmington board completed what it believed was the task of desegregation on February 13, 1956, when it passed a resolution completely banning school segregation in the city. None of the challenges to desegregation or concerns about classroom space, the board concluded, justified delaying the eradication of Jim Crow schools in the city any longer.13 Wilmington suburban school districts responded to the Court’s decision in Brown by implementing modest desegregation programs of their own. Like Wilmington, they also adopted freedom of choice programs that enabled black students to transfer to the previously all-white schools closest to

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their homes. Still, a number of districts maintained historically black, primarily one- and two-room schools so long as demand justified their continued use. As in Wilmington, few—if any—white students transferred to black schools. In the summer of 1954, the Newark, Delaware City, and Alfred I. du Pont school districts submitted desegregation plans that involved the integration of junior and senior high school grades, thus sparing the small number of suburban black high school students—and those mentioned in earlier legal challenges to segregation—the considerable commute to Howard High School. The Claymont School Board also presented the state board with a plan to desegregate its kindergarten and junior and senior high grades and to form a human relations committee. Under this plan, black elementary students were granted transfers to Claymont Elementary School contingent upon the submission of a written application. But the board decided, for the time being, to maintain the black elementary school because of a shortage of classroom space. It further pledged to desegregate the entire district as soon as they had adequate facilities. By the summer of 1955, most of the school districts in northern New Castle County, with the exception of the Christiana and Rose Hill Minquadale districts, had made arrangements to desegregate their entire school programs. The Odessa and Townsend districts, located just south of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal in southern New Castle County, both declined to submit desegregation plans on the grounds of overcrowding.14 If school officials had advanced school desegregation under the auspices of Brown, considerable levels of segregation—albeit not expressly demanded by state law—still persisted in area schools, a testament to the weaknesses inherent in voluntary desegregation programs. Further complicating matters, the persistence of high levels of segregation in suburban schools was undergirded by the process of suburbanization, white flight, and urban retrenchment that would shape school desegregation dramas in the decades to come but for the time being were beyond the scope of the NAACP’s school desegregation strategy. Fueled by the expansion of the World War II munitions industry and later by the continued growth of the chemical industry as it retooled for postwar consumer production, white workers in this economy reaped great benefits and gained an increasing foothold in the suburban housing markets surrounding Wilmington. FHA mortgage loan insurance policies, later supplemented by the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (i.e., the G.I. Bill), provided important federal subsidies for this migration. Indeed, “No agency of the United States government,” historian Kenneth

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Jackson has argued, “has had a more pervasive and powerful impact on the American people over the past half-century than the Federal Housing Administration (FHA).”15 Black workers were denied comparable chances to take advantage of the economic opportunities in this expanding economy that would have enabled them to gain a foothold in the suburbs. The chemical industry was marked by relatively high levels of automation and thus did not provide comparable avenues of economic mobility as those available to black workers in other industrial sectors. Compounding black workers’ problems, E. I. Du Pont de Nemours & Company, the largest and most powerful employer, rejected fair employment practices. It resisted the federal government’s entreaties to enforce nondiscriminatory hiring practices during the war and refused to add the Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) emblem on job advertisements until the late 1950s. In addition, the Urban League, which in other cities provided a conduit into many manufacturing sectors, had not established a presence in the city. Compounding matters for black workers, public subsidies, which fueled white homebuyers’ suburban housing demand, also operated in a racially discriminatory manner. Black homebuyers had far more difficulty in accessing such federally backed instruments. Moreover, federal and state public housing policies compounded residential segregation in the area. In the face of decided suburban opposition to the construction of low-income housing outside the city, the Wilmington Housing Authority was forced to locate public housing adjacent to existing projects, thereby concentrating African Americans in the city.16 Thus through hard work and government support whites gained access to affordable suburban communities like Edgemoor Terrace and Fairfax while blacks, who were systematically denied the same employment opportunities and federal housing subsidies, were largely restricted to select working-class and poor neighborhoods in the eastern part of the city. For all the lack of overt white resistance to Brown and the certain advance of school desegregation in the city and surrounding suburbs, the process of white flight and black urban concentration accelerated after 1954 and created the basic demographic spread over which the distribution of black and white students in the metropolitan area was laid. In the five years following Brown, roughly 5,000 middle-income whites left the city. As foreboding, the percentage of white students in city schools plunged almost twenty percentage points—from 72.9 to 55—according to statistics gathered by the State Board of Education.17

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* * * In southern Delaware, local black activists put into practice the institutional approach, as articulated in the Atlanta Declaration, in the small town of Milford. Milford was a town of roughly 5,000 residents, almost 17 percent of them African American. Orlando Camp remembered his hometown as a fairly peaceful place where whites and blacks coexisted without open conflict but where white paternalistic attitudes prevailed. The town had a diverse economy marked by various agriculture-related industries and was generally regarded as a relatively prosperous and progressive place. Still the color line was rigidly drawn. Schools and public accommodations were segregated. And blacks were proscribed to the lowest-status, lowest-paid, and least attractive jobs. Civil rights activists chose Milford as a site to challenge segregated schooling because it contained a comparatively unified black community that was linked by a network of churches and a local NAACP chapter. As the white community had reacted with apparent indifference to Brown, activists and members of the black community sensed an opportunity to apply the Court’s ruling to public education in the area school system. Negotiations surrounding the desegregation of public schools in southern Delaware began clandestinely in the summer of 1954 in the home of Milford board president Dean Kimmel during an evening visit from Louis Redding and Reverend Randolph Fisher, the president of the local branch of the NAACP and a Methodist pastor. William Kimmel, Dean Kimmel’s son, recalled that the two presented his father with an injunction demanding the desegregation of Milford schools. It was more likely that the activists, armed with the Supreme Court’s May decision, sought a negotiated settlement in line with national NAACP policy and informed the board president of their plans to initiate legal action unless they could work out some more amenable arrangement. Kimmel expressed his concern about the social disruptions that would ensue if they went forward with the NAACP’s demands, but they eventually came to an agreement to admit a small number of black students to the tenth grade at the local high school. As Milford had no high school for blacks, these students would be spared the twenty- to thirty-mile commute to black high schools in Georgetown or Dover. On September 3, 1954, the Delaware State News reported the announcement of superintendent of Milford schools Ramon C. Cobbs that schools would open the following Wednesday, September 8, in Milford. As had been the common practice, Cobbs directed black students in grades one through nine to report to the

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Benjamin Banneker School and white students in all grades to report to the school on Lakeview Avenue. Much to the surprise of many Milford residents, eleven black students—the tenth graders agreed to by Kimmel, Redding, and Fisher—reported to Milford High School on the first day of school. Without any public announcement, the Milford board had effected the desegregation of Milford High School.18 The first days of desegregated education at Milford High School went smoothly. Milford High alumnus Orlando Camp recalled how he was happy to be spared the considerable commute to either Dover or Georgetown, trips that would take at least a half hour with all the stops to pick up the other students. He lived just four blocks—a fifteen-minute walk—from the school previously reserved for white students. Milford High, for him, also represented an opportunity to take advantage of certain classes that were not readily available to most black students at the time. The NAACP made arrangements to transport most of the children to school in private cars. Segregated buses carried two others from more rural areas. Melvin Staten delivered his daughter Madeline in his own vehicle. With no fanfare, they first reported to the principal’s office, where they were welcomed and introduced to school policies and procedures. They were escorted to their homerooms to begin the delicate and often difficult negotiation of assimilating into a community that had no experience with black students. That the black students were split up proved difficult for Camp. I’m sure the school broke us up so that each student would have a chance to blend in with their white classmates, rather than keeping us as one large group of black students. In talking to some of my classmates, this was devastating because it isolated us. It made us feel that we were alone. There was no sense of friendship with our white classmates. This is not necessarily negative; neither side, black or white, had any prior experience in sitting side by side with a common objective, that is, to learn.19 The teachers were polite, if careful not to appear overly friendly. One new student, Edna Turner, did report some hostility from her history teacher. If the academic assignments sometimes proved difficult because of black students’ lack of preparation in previous years, many understood their admission to Milford High School as an opportunity to compete with their white peers in the classroom and on the athletic field. There were no reports of

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trouble, and both white and black students seemed to go about the business of education without incident. Ronald Vann and Camp both tried out for the football team, and the coach told them they had a good chance of making the squad. The other players, they reported, had treated them kindly. “Most every one in the state,” the Southern School News reported, “thought the plan of partial desegregation was going smoothly.”20 However, the apparent peace that had been fostered among the staff, faculty, and students at the high school was shattered by more than a half-century of pent-up white anxiety about the liberalization of policies governing black education, especially after rumors of racial and sexual tensions began circulating throughout the community the following week. It was reported that a black male student had harassed one of the white female students and another had pulled a knife on a white student in a restroom. Furthermore, gossip circulated alleging that the black students intended to attend the annual school dance—undoubtedly a most egregious violation of the “antiamalgamation maxim” that stood at the heart of what Gunnar Myrdal called the “white man’s theory of color caste.”21 The presence of the black students combined with the rumors of their transgressions proved too much for many residents, who organized a protest that coalesced into one of the first massive resistance movements to desegregation in the nation. The roots of white opposition to reforms that promised to expand black educational opportunities dated back to the beginning of the century. With little support from the white populace or elected officials, blacks were pretty much left to their own devices as far as education was concerned. In 1910 there were eighty-one schools just for blacks in Delaware. Historian Robert Taggart has described them as “homemade structures,” built by local blacks with some white support, that lacked the requisite health and safety conditions and basic amenities, including indoor toilets, adequate lighting, desks, and recreational equipment, that informed contemporary school architectural standards. Industrialist and philanthropist Pierre S. Du Pont oversaw a series of reforms in the state finance system that provided a much-needed infusion of resources into black schools. His initiative was met with hostility from local residents, however, who not only resisted the allocation of public resources to black schools but also opposed private interests that were willing to intervene where the state refused. Downstate residents, who were fiercely independent and suspicious of upstate domination, viewed local control of education as a sacred right. To dampen white antagonism, the Delaware School Auxiliary Association, the organization that oversaw Du

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Pont’s school-building effort, often delayed the construction of black schools and even constructed schools for white students to negate any perceived advantage that blacks might gain in educational opportunities. Still, as Taggart concluded, intense white opposition to this initiative jeopardized the entire endeavor. The association completed its construction program by the mid1920s. Nonetheless, the Du Pont-sponsored reforms were insufficient to provide black students with educational opportunities comparable to those provided to their white peers.22 Grassroots protests to reforms in the immediate aftermath of Brown were swift and well organized. The first occurred when 1,500 residents from Kent and Sussex Counties attended an anti-desegregation meeting at the American Legion Hall in Milford on September 17, 1954. Over a thousand people signed their names to a petition placed outside the hall and circulated the next day.23 This nascent resistance movement continued to gain momentum through the weekend after a Georgetown, Delaware, radio station broadcast news of a September 20 protest at Milford High School. The paid announcement invited the public to an open meeting with the school principal and the Milford Board of Education in the school auditorium. “Those who are interested in continuing segregation as we have known it in the past,” the message read, “please be there. Don’t depend on John or Jack. The people who are sponsoring this meeting believe it is your duty to your children and community to be there.”24 Surprised school officials, prompted by news of the planned protest, decided to close school on Monday. The state and local police were also put on alert. Approximately 1,500 people descended on Milford High on Monday, September 20, shouting, “Run Cobbs out of town!” “Keep our schools white!” and “Dynamite the schools!” The throng pushed past police and school officials to occupy the school auditorium, where twenty leaders of the antidesegregation movement, followed by school officials, took the stage and opened an impromptu assembly. Russell Bradley, president of the Lincoln Parent-Teacher Association, rose and declared that the meeting had not been called to discuss the merits of desegregation. Their opposition to this policy was beyond debate. This meeting, he continued, had been assembled to present the school board with the resolution from the previous Friday’s meeting. For all their professed opposition to school desegregation, opponents did not target the merits of the Brown decision itself. These segregationists conceded, if only implicitly, that Brown was the new law of the land and focused instead on the Court’s failure to issue an implementation decree and what

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they believed was the premature admission of the black students to the local high school. Paris Kirby, a relatively wealthy Milford Neck farmer, criticized the superintendent of schools and school board for admitting the black students to Milford High before the Court fixed a date for ending segregation and thus demanded that they be removed.25 In a maneuver that seemed to put school officials on the defensive, desegregation opponents yielded the floor to school officials. Board president Dean Kimmel rose to address the crowd and explain the board’s reasons for admitting the black students to Milford High. Just as he began his remarks, however, the leaders of the opposition, followed by the entire assembly, rose on cue to leave the auditorium as if to impress upon Kimmel their unwillingness to bargain. Bradley then returned to the speaker’s table and asked the assembly to remain. They—the opponents of desegregation—had nothing further to contribute to the meeting, he stated, but the Milford board could facilitate further discussion. Having once again been granted the right to address the assembly, Kimmel explained that the board had decided to admit the black students because it believed it would have faced a court injunction otherwise. He also reminded the audience of the court orders that had been issued to desegregate schools in Hockessin and Claymont. The board had adopted a desegregation plan, Kimmel asserted, and it would not reverse its decision. During the subsequent question-and-answer session, most members of the audience expressed consternation about the lack of advance notice, questioned the legal basis for desegregation, and inquired whether white parents would be forced to send their children to desegregated schools. Howard Lynch, the legal advisor to the Milford board, fielded most of these questions and attempted to explain the implications of the Supreme Court decision. One black person in the crowd did rise to argue that separate schools were unequal schools. But this claim was met with vocal counterassertions that the black schools were equal to, if not better than, many of the white schools. At 11:00 a.m. Bradley closed the meeting and the school board and opposition leadership retired to a closed-door meeting in which the latter formally served their petition calling for the expulsion of the black students from Milford High School.26 The Milford board met later that evening to seek a way out of its difficult circumstance. While crowds loitered outside the meeting room, banged on the windows, and hurled threats at school officials, Kimmel telephoned Reverend Randolph Fisher and asked him whether he would consider voluntarily withdrawing the black students from school until the board could

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gain more public acceptance for the new policy. Fisher took the request and immediately telephoned Redding and Jackson for advice. After some speedy deliberations, the three agreed to grant Kimmel’s request provided the board agreed in writing that the students could return to the school after one week. The board balked at this condition. Kimmel contended that the board was not in a position to offer him anything in writing. Fisher then replied that the children would stay in school. The negotiations having failed, the board put together a statement informing the Delaware Branch of the NAACP that it was preparing to address the legality of the admission of the eleven students with Governor Caleb Boggs and the State Board of Education. The members also gave Cobbs the authority to close the school if trouble persisted. Fisher’s intransigence, telephoned threats to board members’ homes, and one midnight visit to Kimmel’s residence from a group threatening him harm all put the Milford board in a most difficult situation. Cobbs subsequently decided to cancel classes until further notice.27 If state officials had moved with a certain assuredness in their response to Brown the previous summer, grassroots pressure against school desegregation revealed cracks in the political leadership regarding the political and social viability of a systematic reform program. On September 22, Attorney General Young organized a clandestine meeting between Boggs, members of the State Board of Education and the Milford Board of Education, the opposition leadership, and a delegation of NAACP representatives.28 Young presented his assessment of the legal situation. As he would later recall, “My opinion was to the effect that the Supreme Court had spoken and that’s the law of the land and that these children did not disrupt . . . the curricula of the school; they didn’t contaminate anybody; the walls didn’t fall apart and that they had a right to be there.”29 In light of Brown, he argued, the Milford board had not violated the law in admitting the black students, even though it had done so before securing formal approval from the state board. For his part, Bradley maintained his assertion that the board had acted prematurely. He claimed to harbor no particular malice toward the black citizens of Milford, though he expressed concern about admission of the children of black migrant workers. In a not-so-subtle allusion to the alleged degraded health and morals and prevalence of diseases among these students, Bradley claimed that they would “infest the schools.”30 Boggs attempted to position himself as the neutral mediator of this session, even as he expected deference from the black attendees. He took the position, at least implicitly, that the NAACP’s demand that the state live up to its constitutional obligations

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constituted the crux of the problem and largely overlooked the disruptions wrought by those who opposed reform. Boggs later recalled that the meeting engendered mutual understanding and a recognition of the concerns of all parties, even as the governor declined to offer any support to the black students or local school officials who made the decision to desegregate Milford High. Boggs’s “compromise” was ultimately defined as the voluntary withdrawal of the black students. In other words, the governor asked the state’s black citizens to forego their constitutional rights to equal protection under the laws for some indeterminable amount of time until school officials could make suitable arrangements for those rights to be granted without public contest. Disappointed, Redding rejected this solution as “inherently contradictory.”31 In the end, the meeting revealed the extent to which state and local officials sought to abdicate their administrative responsibilities in the desegregation process. In the absence of firm leadership from the governor or the state board, the Milford board moved to extricate itself from the situation altogether. Given their own sense of political and personal vulnerability and the state board’s lack of support, the members of the Milford board resigned their positions en masse. Their decision also reflected an interesting reversal in the long tradition of localism that pervaded the operation of southern Delaware schools. If local officials had long stubbornly clung to the reins of power in their schools, they sought to relinquish that authority when faced with a popular insurgency. “They feel,” Lynch stated, “that they are too close to the situation to accept responsibility for opening the Milford school Monday with Negroes attending without the full backing of the State Board.”32 With the resignation of all the local board members, the operation of the Milford schools fell to the state board.

* * * School desegregation opponents were heartened by the state’s tacit acknowledgment of the validity of the opposition’s position in the governor’s failed attempt at mediation, the state board’s indecisiveness, and the Milford board’s resignation. Their movement gained further momentum the following weekend after four low-flying aircraft, outfitted with loudspeakers, crisscrossed Kent and Sussex counties, its passengers announcing a Sunday meeting of a new organization at the Harrington Airport: the National Association for the Advancement of White People. The meeting’s purpose, they intoned, was,

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Figure 7.  Bryant Bowles, President of the National Association for the Advancement of White People, explains his opposition to school desegregation in Milford, Delaware, October 1954. Associated Press Photo/Bill Ingraham.

“to keep segregation as it always has been in Delaware.”33 This call was an astounding success, as an estimated 3,000 people gathered at the dilapidated hanger to hear Bryant Bowles, who emerged as part of a small cadre of militant far right activists during school desegregation crises after Brown and who anticipated the calls for massive resistance that would echo throughout the South in the following years. A native of the Florida Panhandle, Bowles made his home in Alexan-

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dria, Virginia, and worked out of the national headquarters of the NAAWP in northwest Washington, D.C. He was a former marine and a veteran of the Korean War who located the roots of his radicalism in his aversion to the integration of the armed forces. According to the organization’s state charter, the NAAWP was organized to protect the constitutional rights of “citizens” to maintain segregation between the races. The origins of the NAAWP are murky. It is known that Bowles established the organization in 1953, possibly in anticipation of the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown. Under the instruction and inspiration of New Jersey white supremacist and propagandist Conde J. McGinley, Bowles reframed his opposition to race reform in patriotic garb and further complained that this civil rights movement was part of a broader conspiracy against white Americans.34 In a rally replete with patriotic and biblical symbols, Bowles announced a membership drive, appointed a number of local officers, outlined his agenda, and—most important—called for a boycott of Milford schools. That Bowles received a relatively kind reception certainly reflected grassroots anxiety about the changing race relations and a host of other liberalizing trends in postwar American political culture. The Harrington rally and several subsequent rallies gave Bowles and his fellow NAAWP activists the opportunity to articulate a populist vision that rebuked a wide range of foes, both domestic and foreign, in an unapologetic defense of racial segregation. In their defense was also, as historian Nancy MacLean has noted in her study of earlier reactionary movements, “a medium through which to fight other causes.”35 Through their white supremacist politics, they also expressed suspicion of cosmopolitan elites, distaste for threats to parental authority, misgivings about an intrusive and undemocratic state, and fear of communist subversives. Bowles was careful to impress upon his audiences that the NAAWP was a legal organization—incorporated under state law—that embraced nonviolence and that the organization was not anti-black.36 Distinguishing his group from earlier reactionary populist movements, Bowles stressed that his organization was no Ku Klux Klan. The NAAWP, he argued, “does not wear any white sheets or burn any crosses. And it never will.”37 Indeed, he insisted he had friends among the “Nigras” and recalled how he employed blacks, despite their unreliability, and had donated school workbooks to black students as a youth. Bowles drew the line, however, at activities such as dancing, eating, and other forms of social intercourse.38 The NAAWP was organized to “maintain all social customs now enjoyed and practiced by residents of the United States of America” and to ensure that communities remained racially segregated.39

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Figure 8.  Attendees at an anti-desegregation rally in Lincoln, Delaware, on September 30, 1954 that was called by the NAAWP. This photo shows some of the estimated 5,000 attendees who raised their hands to express their support for a petition demanding that local politicians adopt an oppositional stance against school desegregation. Associated Press Photo/ Bill Ingraham.

NAAWP spokespersons frequently constructed desegregation as a ruse that would facilitate intimate contact between the races and—worse—allow black men sexual access to white women.40 Speakers went so far as to construe President Eisenhower’s faint support for racial equality—manifest in his vague rhetorical position that there should be no second-class citizens and his support for the Civil Rights Act of 1957—as tantamount to support for race mixing. “If the President wants them in his house he may,” contended Maneas Warrington, an evangelical Methodist minister and the president of the Delaware Branch of the NAAWP, “but don’t try to make me do it.”41 These narratives cast black men, if sometimes subtlety, in light of Reconstructionera myths of, as historian Danielle McGuire has argued, the black incubus— that aggressor who preyed on white women.42 “The Negro will never be

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satisfied,” Bowles admonished crowds, forgetting his professed abhorrence of violence for a moment, “until he moves into the front bedroom of the white man’s home and when he tries that a lot of gun powder will burn.”43 Bowles’s followers also invoked Christian doctrine to validate their sexual anxieties, even if such arguments amounted more to vague allusions to biblical texts than precise and accurate citations that specifically sanctioned racial segregation. Evangelist Fred Whitman claimed scripture demanded racial separation and, in a creative interpretation of the Bill of Rights, asked the government to grant them separate schools as a matter of freedom of religion.44 The vice president of the NAAWP, Charles West of Gumboro, also insisted that integration violated biblical law, but he was more blunt: “If God had intended us to associate with the colored race,” he proclaimed, “He wouldn’ta made niggers. He woulda made us all white.”45 At this crossroads of racial and sexual anxiety, segregationists also expressed concerns about the potency of their parental authority. Here, white daughters served as effective props in impressing upon audiences the dangers of desegregation. “Now my daughter is here beside me on this bench,” Mildred Sharp, the secretary-treasurer of the NAAWP, explained in a gesture to her maternal duty to defend racial segregation in the state’s school system, “that is what I am fighting for this afternoon.” She reserved her venom for Philadelphia mayor Richardson Dilsworth, who had reportedly threatened to arrest Bowles should he expand his efforts into his city. During another speech, Bowles brought his three-year-old daughter Denise up to the podium, held her aloft, and asked rhetorically, “Do you think this little girl will ever attend school with Negroes?” to which he answered above a cheering crowd, “Not while there’s a breath in my body or gunpowder burns.”46 He also took particular umbrage at the state’s threat to fine parents who kept their children out of school, a violation of truancy laws. If white parents withdrew their children from school to deprive them of an education, he conceded, they should be fined. But if they kept their children out of school because they believed desegregation resulted in the violation of health laws, then, Bowles argued, their act of civil disobedience was legitimate.47 Through the course of these rallies, NAAWP speakers also attempted to restore an older definition of community, citizenship, and normative political behavior. This calculation depended on a narrowly defined body politic that excluded African Americans, a willed amnesia of the history of institutionalized discrimination and racial inequality, and a rhetoric that cast white people as the unfortunate victims of liberalizing trends.48 NAAWP

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spokespeople thus asserted at rallies that “rock-bottom Americans” had been abandoned by their elected leaders for the interests of an “organized minority.”49 These wily politicians, the evangelist Warrington charged, “must have some dice rolling with some of these colored boys.”50 Warrington’s fears were confirmed in a limited sense. Both major state political parties had indicated positive, if somewhat vague, support for civil rights in their party platforms in preparation for the fall election. And in both cases, the positions were passed without intraparty debate or dissent, surely evidence, in the minds of NAAWP activists, of white politicians’ abdication of their responsibilities to their white constituents. Georgia governor Herman E. Talmadge, in Warrington’s assessment, served as a more fitting, archetypal example of a politician who was willing to stand up for his white constituents in opposition to civil rights. The local preacher argued that the Georgia firebrand was worthy of being the president of the United States.51 Continuing the theme of white victimization, NAAWP officials located the right to segregated education in the nation’s most entrenched political and ideological traditions—those they believed vested ultimate sovereign authority with white people. Warrington considered segregated schooling a social entitlement and equated it with such civil liberties as those ensuring the freedoms of speech, press, and religion. Adopting majoritarian images of the American Revolution, he proclaimed at one rally, “We people here are the Minute Men of freedom.” 52 Bowles espoused his commitment to ensuring that public schools were governed by what he termed the “public,” not by bureaucrats or the courts—the very personification of cosmopolitan elite interests against whom the NAAWP rallied.53 He was particularly critical of what he believed was the Court’s judicial activism and judges’ inappropriate incursions into public policymaking. In an awkward metaphor intended to express his commitment to states’ rights and local control, he proclaimed, “Any person should be able to control his own back yard and not be told how to run it.”54 Testifying to the depths of his animosity toward the High Court, Bowles warmly received the news of the death of Justice Robert Jackson, who had voted to end segregation in Brown but who, ironically, was the most ambivalent of the justices in his support for the decision.55 In rants against what they believed to be the least democratic branch of the federal government, Warrington told one crowd, “We are not going to allow the Supreme Court to jam this ‘thing’ down our throats.” And despite disavowals of violence, he intimated in a particularly hyperbolic moment: “No matter if it means bloodshed,” he asserted, “we will see it through.”56

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In further detailing the conspiratorial elements that were mobilized against southern Delaware’s white residents, Bowles targeted Jewish Americans. In the wake of the New Deal and World War II, the nation had developed a more expansive notion of, as historian Eric Goldstein has noted, “inclusive nationalism” and moved to define itself as the antithesis of the Nazi regime. Jewish soldiers had fought heroically in the war, and a large segment of American Jews had subsequently reached the middle class, especially with support of the GI Bill. Seemingly immune to these cultural shifts, Bowles continued to draw on the image of racialized radicals that reflected anti-Semitic sentiment in the prewar, Red Scare era. Bowles played to this sentiment by suggesting that Jews and Communists stood at the forefront of the movement to desegregate schools, and he expressly implicated the Anti-Defamation League and American Jewish Congress in these purportedly dangerous trends. Warrington charged that foreigners were importing un-American ideas in a scheme to give the country over to foreign interests. And he closely linked Jews, whom he charged with rejecting and later killing Jesus Christ, with these elements. Attorney General Young, who was Jewish, became a particular target of Bowles’s invective. Like many other white ethnics and persons of Jewish heritage, Young had changed his last name (from Yanowitch), and Bowles routinely cited this decision as a sign of the attorney general’s dubious character. Bowles questioned the legality of Young’s name change and suggested that it was part of an effort to maintain a secret alias. Though the Republican attorney general had carried Kent and Sussex Counties in the previous election, such charges regularly garnered great applause from crowds. Bowles also portrayed the NAACP as a shell organization and made a number of references to the “ulterior motives” of those who backed the group. The NAACP’s strength, he surmised, lay not in its considerable membership or the popularity of its goals within black communities but with a large network of major contributors and lawyers, presumably Jews, who used blacks as fronts for their nefarious schemes. It was beyond Bowles’s comprehension that blacks would have been unhappy with Jim Crow. Instead, he considered them dupes in a larger communist-inspired conspiracy to set the races against one another.57

* * * The Milford boycott—the most manifest expression of broad-based opposition to desegregation—proved a success. Seventy percent of the white

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students failed to show up for classes on Monday, September 27. Many parents undoubtedly supported Bowles’s position, but others kept their children home because they feared a violent outbreak. Though no violence occurred when school opened, about 50 people—including a throng of reporters— gathered outside the school and jeered the empty buses before being dispersed by police. Ten of the eleven black students originally admitted to Milford High showed up for school; eight arrived in private cars and two arrived by school bus, and all were provided police escorts. The boycott held throughout the week, despite slight fluctuations in attendance levels, as the vast majority of white parents kept their children out of school. And Bowles continued to give speeches and conduct membership drives at well-attended rallies throughout Sussex County.58 The NAAWP-inspired rallies also spilled out into the streets. Small groups of protestors continued to gather outside Milford High. White parents who persisted in sending their children to school reported receiving phone calls, sometimes threatening violence, urging them to withdraw their children from school. A large wooden cross was burned in the field across from the school. Motorcades of cars filled with teenagers cruised the town, especially its black section, with placards reading “Kick ’em Out,” “Stop Integration, Help Segregation,” “Join the N.A.A.W.P.,” and “Help Now, Live in Peace.” Bowles also organized sympathy boycotts in schools throughout Sussex County, leading to dramatic declines in school attendance in the Ellendale, Millsboro, Lincoln, Ocean View, and John M. Clayton school districts.59 The political vacuum created by the mass resignation of the Milford board provided another opportunity for those allied with the goals of the NAAWP to expand their influence and reverse the course of school desegregation. In order to fill the vacancies, a number of prominent citizens—including, it was rumored, members of the opposition—met on September 30 in a closed-door session to appoint a new board. They faced a problem, however: state law dictated that the serving members of the local board were responsible for appointing new members in the event of a vacancy. To address this problem, Kimmel and board member William V. Sipple, Jr., withdrew their resignations and appointed new members to fill the remaining vacancies. They then immediately resigned from their positions and the newly appointed members selected two more people to fill those vacancies. The new Milford board thus included Edmund F. Steiner, David B. Greene, George Robbins, George F. Adams, and John Rosa—all prominent businessmen in the community who opposed desegregation. Shortly after the appointment

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of the new board, the members traveled to Dover to meet with the governor. Six hours after their conference with Boggs, in their first official act as a body, they announced the expulsion of the black students from Milford High School and the resegregation of local public schools.60 Portraying desegregation as an affront to the education rights of white students, the board announced its decision “in the interest of the welfare of the children and the community as a whole to remove the eleven Negro students from the enrollment records of the Milford school.”61 The reassignment of the black students, the new board concluded, was up to the State Board of Education. They then appealed to white parents to return their children to classes. The state board, conceding to the local board’s tactics, sent official letters to the parents of the black students that evening and notified them that transportation to the nearest black high school would be made available for their children the following Monday.62 Bowles and his followers interpreted the new board’s decision as a resounding success and celebrated at a “victory party” of 2,000 supporters. In a subtle indication of a growing rift within the white community, however, Bowles withheld support for the new board, which had begun to publicly distance itself from him and his organization. The NAAWP and the Milford board apparently disagreed about the role Bowles had played in the decision to expel the black students from Milford High. Bowles had earlier claimed that he had an agreement with the governor that the black students would be removed after the board was reconstituted. But Steiner, the newly appointed president of the Milford board, refuted Bowles’s allegation that such an arrangement had been made and denied that the governor had advance knowledge of the board’s final action. Indeed, all the members of the new board denied their membership in the NAAWP, even as Sharp maintained that the NAAWP considered Adams a friend and had submitted a list of names for consideration on the new board. Bowles did, however, urge his supporters to give the board a chance.63 In the wake of the Milford board reorganization and the expulsion of the black students, school desegregation proponents leveled a sophisticated critique of the white power structure and vowed to continue the legal battle. Kenneth Clark, in an interview with Walter White, blamed Governor Boggs: “If the Governor had had the strength and the sense of responsibility of his office he would have made it clear that he would not dignify people who broke the law. Had he done so, the lawbreakers would have been stopped quickly.”64 Wagner Jackson condemned the decision as “surrendering to the

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illegal actions of a lawless mob.” In a strongly worded statement, he not only denounced the public officials who made the decision but also questioned those who stood idly by and allowed it to happen. “We did not believe this rule by mob and threats of violence could happen here in Delaware,” he protested, “but we, like they, must now admit that we were wrong. Where and when, we ask, does it end?” Redding immediately filed a temporary injunction with the Delaware chancery court. On Saturday, October 2, he asked Vice Chancellor William Marvel to order the immediate return of the black students to Milford High. Marvel rejected the request, but he scheduled a hearing for Tuesday, October 12. The hearing on the temporary injunction, held before the Court of Chancery in Georgetown, underscored the ambiguous legal status of the black students who wished to enroll in desegregated schools given that the Supreme Court had yet to issue their implementation decree. All hundred seats in the courtroom were filled when the proceedings began that morning, and a couple hundred more people, many of whom had come at Bowles’s behest, gathered outside. Bowles was unable to attend the hearing; arriving late, he settled instead outside with the crowd of onlookers under the trees. The hearing lasted two hours, punctuated occasionally by the crowd’s applause in response to some of Bowles’s impromptu remarks. Redding was the first to present his arguments to the court on behalf of the plaintiffs. He began by asserting that he was not challenging the authority of the new board, in spite of questions surrounding the appointment of its members, but was contesting the decision to expel the black students from Milford High because this amounted to a denial of their rights to desegregated schooling. Citing Brown and the state law that authorized anyone under twenty-one to go to school, Redding argued that these students were entitled to attend Milford High, the only public high school in their district. The other educational opportunities available to black students in Dover and Georgetown were not equal, he continued, given the considerable distances the students would have to travel, and, thus, the newly constituted Milford board had no legal authority to expel the students.65 On behalf of the Milford board, Lynch acknowledged the Supreme Court’s opinion that segregation in education was unconstitutional. He continued to assert that the local board was not obligated to desegregate because the Court had yet to issue a decree. “The docket leaves unanswered,” he contended, “all the vital questions.” The chancery court should thus refrain from issuing an injunction sanctioning the readmission of the black students. Such an act

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would be at best “presumptuous,” he maintained, and at worst “potentially embarrassing” in that any policy implemented might have to be dismantled after the Court made its ultimate decision on remedy.66 Continuing to figure his arguments in line with the prevailing jurisprudential winds, Young now sided with the black students. The attorney general had been a target of a vicious letter writing campaign and threats following the string of anti-desegregation rallies throughout the southern part of the state. The police even had to be employed to provide security for his daughter’s wedding.67 Still, he submitted a letter to accompany Redding’s petition in support of the board’s decision to admit the black students. Young appeared as a friend of the court but did not claim to speak on behalf of the state or the State Board of Education. He was a lame duck attorney general, as his term was due to expire after the election the following month. Young implored the court to grant Redding’s temporary injunction. It would embolden state officials, he stressed, in their work to apply the Court’s decisions to local schools and counter the social disruptions wrought by opponents of desegregation. Young then proclaimed, “The state will go to every source available to preserve law and order, if it is necessary for our Governor and the United States Senators to take these Negroes by the hand and lead them into that school.”68 This final gesture was met with laughter and applause from the gallery, but it was more wishful thinking than the avowed position of the state’s highest officials. The response of those implicated in Young’s audacious declaration revealed the continued reticence of the state’s highest officials, who were anxious to avoid the impression of overtly supporting any specific effort to further school desegregation. Governor Boggs declined to comment on the attorney general’s remarks but also refused an NAAWP request to suspend and prosecute Young for official misconduct. Delaware’s junior Democratic senator J. Allen Frear, Jr., who was running for reelection that November, distanced himself from the controversy, declaring meekly that he was on the side of law and order. The matter of school desegregation, he concluded, was before the courts and it was not his place to insert himself into the debate. Delaware’s senior Republican senator John J. Williams, however, addressed the matter more forthrightly. A Millsboro native, he was mildly supportive of efforts to extend civil rights protections to African Americans. In the late 1940s, he had voted to end a southern filibuster aimed at undermining a Fair Employment Practices bill and expressed support for federal anti-lynching and anti-poll tax legislation, but Williams was more reserved in his support

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of this phase of the civil rights movement. As the controversies surrounding Milford High moved into the courtroom, he made his first public statement on the matter at a Republican assembly in Hartly. Here, as many of his constituents expressed support for Bowles’s cause, Williams counseled adherence to the rule of law. He took exception, however, to Young’s defiant posturing in Georgetown. His own view of the Court’s decision notwithstanding, there was no alternative but to uphold the law, and he admonished voters not to use the decision against Eisenhower, Boggs, or other Republican candidates in upcoming elections. Local communities, he continued, should be granted the ultimate responsibility for devising a proper solution to the problem of school desegregation.69 School desegregation proponents faced their next setback when Marvel issued his ruling on October 14. Marvel had been compelled to withdraw from the Parker case, in which Collins Seitz had presided, because he served on the University of Delaware Board of Trustees. Now he had an opportunity to reenter the fray in the contest over segregation in primary and secondary schools. His ruling was a moral victory for the plaintiffs, as he granted Redding’s request for relief. Citing the earlier decision in Belton v. Gebhart, he noted that “the right to equal protection of the laws  .  .  .  is a personal and present one.”70 And, on the basis of Brown, the plaintiffs were entitled to attend Milford High School in spite of the fact that the justices had yet to craft a decree. Jackson commended the decision: “[It] moves our state and nation one step closer to the eventual elimination of the embarrassing disparities between our principles and practices.”71 But in a curious move, the vice chancellor withheld serving his order, thus delaying the readmission of the black students until defense counsel Lynch could file an appeal for a stay with the state supreme court. The black students, in the meantime, were transferred to the William C. Jason Comprehensive High School in Georgetown.72 The more conservative Delaware Supreme Court weakened the plaintiffs’ claim to desegregated education when it met to address Lynch’s appeal for a stay two weeks later. After arguments and a brief recess, Chief Justice Clarence A. Southerland issued his opinion on behalf of a unanimous court, overturning Marvel’s ruling and rejecting the plaintiffs’ request for readmission to Milford High. Here, the High Court’s failure to issue its decree proved grounds for delay. “We are convinced,” Southerland asserted, “that there are serious questions of law touching the existence of that legal right. This Court, we think, should be given sufficient time to examine these questions without

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disturbing the status quo as it existed upon the filing of the suit.”73 Southerland then set November and December deadlines for the submission of briefs upon which the court would rule on the actual merits of the case. Brown may have been the law of the land, but because the Court had yet to craft an implementation decree neither the state nor local school board was required to implement desegregation for the time being. As if to affirm the grassroots foundation of the court’s decision, a number of purportedly independent community groups conducted public polls in November and December 1954. Less an accurate measure of public opinion than an effort to impress school officials, judges, and the public of the depths of community opposition to desegregation, these polls were designed, administered, and published as means of constructing a picture of a mass public aligned against civil rights advances. These surveys were unscientific, nonbinding referenda, and their methods varied across school districts. Some districts relied on voter rolls to determine voter qualification; others did not. Blacks were prohibited from participating in most polls; most declined to cast ballots where they were allowed to vote. The language of the ballots also varied. Some asked the voter to vote either for or against integration; others for or against segregation. Not surprisingly, the predominantly white electorate overwhelmingly opposed the desegregation of schools. In Harrington, voters were asked whether they supported equal educational facilities for black students, and by a margin of 192 to 30 they voted no. Notwithstanding their questionable techniques used to create these polls, they were widely reported in the press. (Even Attorney General Young would report the results to the Supreme Court in the state’s brief on the remedy in Brown.) The numbers were gleaned from various news reports. Some local press accounts reported slightly different results, but they certainly indicated overwhelming opposition to desegregation. On occasion, as was the case in Hartly, the voter tallies exceeded the population of the town.74 Beyond Milford, local school boards across southern Delaware ignored the state board’s post-Brown June and August memoranda requesting that local boards submit desegregation proposals for review by October 1, 1954. As part of a larger program of what legal scholar Michael Klarman has characterized as delay and evasion, the vast majority of local boards declared their intent to await the Supreme Court’s implementation decree before submitting their proposals to the state board. Others simply refused to submit plans, citing overcrowded conditions and the lack of adequate facilities to accommodate the transfer of black students to white schools. The Seaford Board of

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Education was the one southern district to submit a plan. It proposed, in a most conservative gesture to Brown, to desegregate their schools on a onegrade-per-year basis over twelve years—but only after the Supreme Court issued its mandate.75

* * * The Delaware Supreme Court began its formal review of the legality of the Milford board’s decision resulting in the expulsion of the black students from Milford High School in December 1954. Its focus was whether Brown was law or a mandate was required to order local districts’ compliance with the Court’s decision. Despite Chief Justice Warren’s May 1954 opinion, Lynch maintained that the plaintiffs had no right to admission to Milford High School until the Court made its decision on remedy. Marvel’s temporary injunction ordering the black students readmitted should therefore be reversed. In an indirect reference to the uprisings that followed the desegregation of Milford High, he continued, the threats of violence, while not specific grounds for the denial of an injunction, should also dictate a cautious and conservative approach. Redding, now with the support of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), rejected this position. He insisted that the Supreme Court had ruled that racial segregation in education was unconstitutional and therefore the state’s constitutional and statutory provisions mandating school segregation were null and void and the expulsion of the students was thus improper. Redding also dismissed as irrelevant Lynch’s assertion that the threats of violence should be taken into consideration by the court.76 On February 8, 1955, Justice Southerland issued his decision that would, for the time being, give Brown meaning on the local level. He first sought to direct attention away from the popular reaction to the desegregation of Milford High School—what he termed “deplorable incidents”—and to address the vital question of whether the local board had the right to admit the black students to the school previously reserved for whites. Brown, he forthrightly acknowledged, nullified state laws mandating segregation in public education, and black students had the right to attend public schools on a desegregated basis.77 But, he counseled, the decision did not direct the immediate desegregation of schools. “Until the remedy shall be fixed,” Southerland concluded in a manner that surely must have frustrated Redding, “the right is not a present enforceable one. States having segregation laws are not

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required, at the moment, to desegregate their schools.”78 Southerland then turned his attention to the legality of the Milford board’s decision to admit the black students. The state board, the Chief Justice noted in an attempt to resolve longstanding tensions between the state and localities and clarify the responsibilities of state and local officials, had the ultimate responsibility of determining educational policy under state law. And in the fulfillment of those responsibilities, it had undertaken a program that it believed to be the proper step of gradual desegregation with the advice of the attorney general. Central to this policy was the requirement that local boards submit desegregation plans to the state board for approval. “No pupil,” the court noted in its formal summary of state board policy, “may be accepted by any school from other schools until the desegregation plan has been approved.”79 The Milford board, Southerland found, had violated this policy. He also acknowledged that they had acted in good faith: “but the hard fact remains,” he concluded, “that with the best of intentions they exceeded their powers under the law.”80 The Delaware Supreme Court had exposed a chasm between the constitutional rights owed the state’s black citizens and their entitlement to remedies for such violations and revealed a serious weakness of Brown. Without the specific articulation of a remedy by the Supreme Court, blacks had won the recognition of a constitutional right from the nation’s highest court that local boards of education were not obligated to recognize as a matter of public policy. Thus there existed in Delaware parallel systems of desegregated and segregated schools for black students. Black students were eligible to enroll in schools previously reserved for white students where the plaintiffs had prevailed in the Belton and Bulah cases and where local districts in northern Delaware voluntarily instituted desegregation plans. But throughout the remainder of the state, the court had postponed that right to attend desegregated schools and the local districts continued to maintain segregated schools as a matter of law and policy.81 School desegregation in southern Delaware in the year following Brown had been effectively stalled.

* * * Despite the apparent unanimity of sentiment among white residents on the matter of desegregation in southern Delaware, many of them—particularly those who had not formally aligned themselves with the populist uprising— chafed at the atmosphere of fear and intimidation, the missed days of school, and Bowles’s continued belligerence. June Shagaloff, coordinator for the

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Committee of Social Science Consultants for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, reported that a number of white teachers had resigned from Milford High, citing their refusal to work in a school system under mob rule. Some white families put their homes up for sale, and local black residents instigated a small-scale boycott of businesses associated with the NAAWP. With the desegregation crisis settled for the moment by the courts, moderate whites began to articulate their own position on the issue. Though clearly ambivalent about race mixing and opposed to school desegregation, these moderates nevertheless wanted to distance themselves from Bowles and his followers.82 If many in the white community were sympathetic to Bowles’s stand on the Brown decision and his opposition to the desegregation of local schools, many more were troubled by his efforts on tactical grounds and concerned about the potential costs to white residents as a result of his continued belligerence. As the editors of the Laurel State Register asserted, “The basic issue  .  .  .  is no longer one of segregation or non-segregation. It has become one of law and order. Either we live under the law and respect duly constituted authority, or we live in anarchy.”83 Conservatives had traditionally hailed the principle of social order as part of their larger opposition to New Deal liberalism, civil rights movements, and the left. In southern Delaware, the extralegal means of the protests—the boycotts, occasional cross burnings, and protest parades—represented, for many white residents, a similar threat to social order, the triumph of emotion over reason, and an affront to the measured ways that, it was contended, the community had traditionally addressed its problems. The editors of the Delaware State News stressed that these emotions needed to be kept under control. Reverend Robert W. Duke of Dover saw the outcomes of Bowles’s activism as the triumph of mob rule and the legitimization of violent threats. The problems associated with school desegregation thus demanded intelligence, imagination, patience, and courage. Emotions and fears, he appealed, had to be kept in check, lest they be used against the community in the Supreme Court’s future deliberations.84 Other commentators expressed concerns about Bowles’s efforts because they brought much unwanted attention from the national and international media to the state’s small, relatively insular communities. Jack Beach, Milford bureau manager for the Delaware State News, noted with some trepidation the arrival of reporters from the Wilmington papers, Baltimore Sun, New York Tribune, New York Times, and London News Chronicle. “The publicity Milford is getting couldn’t be bought for a million dollars,” Beach bemoaned.85

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Commentators argued that the reporting painted a skewed picture of the community. According to journalist and frequent op-ed contributor Harry C. McSherry, the Milford incident was not representative of the “Delaware method of solving things.”86 Beach acknowledged that the “Average Delawarean” and the rabble-rousers shared a common opposition to desegregation. He asserted, however, that those who resorted to such undesirable means to achieve their goals and who had been able to garner a disproportionate amount of attention from the media were a minority in the community and generally from the “lower” classes. “It was painfully evident,” he commented, “that the people who were eager to crowd around the reporters and television cameras and tell the world what they thought about integration hadn’t graduated from Miss Till’s finishing school.”87 A frequent and often controversial contributor to the opinion pages, L. Lee Layton made a similar distinction between average citizens and the troublemakers. “Gradually, parents who are ambitious for the future of their children will send them to school,” he stressed. “At the end, the children still boycotting the schools will be largely those who are not too much into book larnin,’ anyway.”88 Critics of Bowles and the other opposition leaders also chided them as rogue elements of Delaware political culture and framed their disapproval in Cold War terms. Radicals and other left-leaning reformists were most often the subjects of red-baiting campaigns. Still, white detractors of Bowles also evoked the specter of communism to censure those on the far right of the political spectrum.89 A Townsend, Delaware, resident wrote requesting that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover investigate the situation in Milford. “Wouldn’t it be well to look up this man? Possibly he’s a Communist disseminator of the 1st order,” he inquired. “He’s certainly making a MUX in Milford!”90 One Milford resident, who described herself as “An American who doesn’t want to be taken in unknowingly by communists,” personally contacted the director requesting information on the NAAWP after the organization had distributed copies of the National Forum, the organization’s publication.91 At times, Bowles’s critics explicitly accused the firebrand and his followers of communist sympathies. “[The NAAWP] isn’t something trivial,” warned a letter writer under the pseudonym Terribly Upset. “It’s the tool of communism hiding under the cloak of Americanism.” The author was also concerned that, given Bowles’s tendency for disruptive tactics and heated rhetoric, his work would reflect poorly on the nation as a whole in its battle with the Soviet Union for the hearts and minds of the world’s nonwhite peoples.92 “The . . . bad results,” according to Layton, “will be . . . the joy of the

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Communist world over and the grist for their propaganda mills in Asia and Africa.”93 Bowles’s detractors were careful to offer balancing criticisms of civil rights reformers as part of the white moderate response to Brown. It was not enough to brand Bowles and his movement as extremists. In order to maintain a political middle ground, commentators cast the NAACP and NAAWP as moral equivalents and in similarly radical terms. No matter that the NAACP had framed their challenge to school segregation as part of the larger struggle against segregation and implemented measures to purge its membership roles of communists, critics claimed the civil rights organization was subversive and charged it with equal responsibility for the social disruptions that had swept across southern Delaware.94 Beach charged that “without the NAACP, there would never have been a need for the NAAWP.”95 He also characterized the NAACP as far outside the mainstream of black public opinion on school desegregation. After all, local whites knew—or, as Gunnar Myrdal observed among white southerners, asserted they knew—the innermost desires of their black neighbors.96 If blacks really wanted desegregation, they contended, they would have moved north where they could attend integrated schools without disrupting community relations. In southern Delaware, blacks had the friendship and trust of the white man, Beach asserted, something the Supreme Court could not bestow.97 As local whites increasingly turned against the NAAWP, state officials initiated a public relations and prosecutorial campaign against Bowles for a variety of alleged violations of state law. In late September the Delaware State Police conducted an investigation of Bowles and the NAAWP “in the public interest and for the public protection” and strategically divulged information about Bowles’s criminal record to the press in order to disparage his character. The public statement included information about a prior arrest in Baltimore and warrants that had been issued for him in Tampa, Florida, and Bel Air, Maryland, for passing bad checks. The Journal-Every Evening also included a photograph that closely resembled a mug shot.98 In early October, Young filed suit in the Court of Chancery to revoke the NAAWP’s charter “for the alleged abuse and misuse of its powers and privileges” and to attempt to prohibit it from operating in the state. He also issued subpoenas for the organization’s financial records. Young’s complaint contained a host of grievances including violating the rights of both black and white residents, inciting racial tensions and hatred between citizens of the state, and initiating a program of intimidation against local school board members. Picking up on

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a rising tide of arguments that distinctions based on race or color were legally suspect, Young charged the NAAWP with encouraging, “by means of mass hysteria, mob rule, boycott and dissemination of race prejudice, the closing of public schools in sympathy with its plan to deprive Negro children of the right to attend public school because of their race, color and ancestry.” He also accused the organization of intimidating whites to get them to support the boycott and encouraging them to violate the state’s compulsory education laws. Bowles, on the order of Governor Boggs, was later arrested on two charges of conspiracy to violate these laws.99 Bowles had also garnered attention from federal law enforcement officials. Arthur B. Caldwell, who had been the head of the Civil Rights Section of the Department of Justice since 1952, contacted Boggs that September to share with him some information he possessed regarding the agitator. Caldwell’s contact was not meant as an official communication between the Justice Department and the state of Delaware. Caldwell had received some information regarding Bowles through informal channels, however, and wished to forward it to other interested parties. The information he sent Boggs was quite damning and detailed a number of indictments that Bowles had accumulated in 1953 for passing bad checks.100 In a separate act, Boggs and Delaware state officials had also contacted the FBI for assistance in accumulating information regarding Bowles and the NAAWP. Hoover had yet to officially order the third COINTELPRO program against “white hate groups,” but he had already directed agents to begin collecting information on other such groups. Hoover had always viewed the black freedom movement as a greater threat to national security than anything else. Still, as historian Kenneth O’Reilly has noted in his assessment of the relationship between the FBI and similar groups like the Ku Klux Klan, he ordered his organization to monitor white reactionary organizations because they threatened “the peace and stability of middle America” and undermined the credibility and “the good name of the anti-civil rights movement.”101 On the basis of information gathered from surveillance operations of NAAWP activities in previous months, the Washington field office subsequently conducted what was termed an “Internal Security-X” investigation. The bureau then put Bowles under close surveillance, and Hoover himself ordered his agents to make arrangements for informants to monitor Bowles’s activities and those of others in the organization in Maryland, New York, and Florida, where Bowles maintained contact with Willis V. McCall, sheriff of Lake County. The notorious McCall had been involved in the Groveland Four case in which four black men were

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convicted of raping a white woman. After the Supreme Court had reversed their conviction on the grounds of racial discrimination in the jury selection process, McCall shot two of the men while transporting them to another venue for a new trial. He claimed he shot the men in self-defense after he suffered a flat tire, despite the fact that the men—Walter Irvin and Samuel Shepherd (who was killed in the incident)—were handcuffed together at the time. FBI agents disguised as telephone company representatives also searched Bowles’s residence, a point to which Bowles made repeated reference during his speeches in southern Delaware. When his case finally came to the Delaware Court of Common Pleas, Bowles was found guilty and fined $300 on the charge of violating school attendance laws, although the charges were ultimately overturned on appeal.102 Bowles cited the state’s prosecution of his activity as further evidence of the heavy hand of a dictatorial state and exploited it to transform himself, at least in the minds of his followers, into a “kind of semi-martyr, the helpless victim of governmental persecution,” according to Time magazine correspondent Robert Hagy. In the long run, however, Bowles proved to be a poor leader—more attractive at a distance (from the NAAWP’s national headquarters in Washington) than at the local level. Indeed, Bowles only managed to alienate many native Delawareans after he moved to the area. “He does not improve with daily association,” Hagy reported, continuing, “many who worshipped him at a distance have discovered that they don’t like him at close hand.”103 After school officials expelled the black students from Milford High School, Milford returned to its pre-Brown equilibrium for the time being. Thus Bowles was denied his raison d’être. As popular enthusiasm for his efforts further waned, he began to direct his ire at his followers and former supporters for their insufficient dedication to the NAAWP’s cause. By the middle of 1955 the white community had largely shunned Bowles and he was effectively rendered a pariah. In a July meeting in Harrington, he condemned his former followers for their infidelity and announced his plans to resign his presidency and return to Florida.

* * * In the months following Brown and the Court’s designation of the sectional imaginary of de jure segregation as constitutionally suspect, civil rights activists had pushed to advance desegregation in primary and secondary schooling across the state. In northern Delaware, school officials responded to

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school desegregation proponents by taking a fairly proactive position on the Brown decision and reformulated their attendance zones and pupil assignment policies that, with the support of local activists, opened the doors of schools previously reserved for white students across the Wilmington metropolitan area to black students. When reformers pushed for the application of Brown in school districts in the southern part of the state, school officials and white residents reacted with considerable obstinacy and refused demands to liberalize their pupil assignment policies, especially after Bowles and the NAAWP took to the streets in response to the modest steps toward desegregation in Milford. But for all the obvious drama and disruption wrought by Bowles and the NAAWP, this reactionary populist movement—as a sustained and systematic response to Brown and the advance of civil rights movements—failed. It was far more important for the white reaction it elicited. White moderates, on the middle ground between massive resistance and Brown, thus began the process of crafting a more sustained response to activists’ demands and a new segregationist politics—one that took account of the historic decision but sought to exploit a certain reserve and vagueness in the Court’s indictment of de jure segregation to dictate the pace and scope of reform on their terms. In this new context, activists and policymakers on both sides of the issue and the mediating jurists thus readied themselves for the struggle over the future meaning of Brown in a manner that attended to blacks’ newly recognized constitutional rights and the competing social claims of whites.

Chapter 4

“If We Must and Are to Have Integration”

With the Supreme Court’s call for re-argument on remedy, the issue of school desegregation returned to the national stage and the parties to the case engaged in debates as to the pace of the desegregation of public schools. In briefs and oral arguments, the NAACP team took the position that the Court should order the implementation of desegregation programs as soon as— chief litigator Thurgood Marshall said—the “prerequisite administrative and mechanical procedures” allowed.1 With a clear set of policies and the firm enforcement of the laws by public officials, he continued, a September 1955 deadline was within the bounds of reason. Any further delay would result in a “serious and irreparable injury,” Marshall continued, given the Court’s reasoning on the effects of segregation on the mental development of black children, and would only embolden opponents of desegregation. The attorneys commissioned by the states, for the most part, attempted to focus the Court’s attention on the growing hostility expressed by whites toward desegregation and the real possibility of violence if desegregation plans were implemented. These communities needed time, they argued—and far more time than the NAACP assumed—to facilitate a peaceful transition to desegregated schools. Furthermore, the state contended, the district courts—which were presumably more sensitive to local conditions—should be given oversight over the implementation process.2 The Delaware case was unique in that the plaintiffs had been victorious in the lower courts. On the whole, recently elected attorney general Joseph Donald Craven demonstrated less overt commitment to the defense of segregation compared to his colleagues from South Carolina and Virginia. During his appearance at the lectern, he readily acknowledged the binding effect of Brown. As to remedy, Craven asked for a simple affirmation of the lower court’s decision and requested that the case be remanded to the state courts. Redding highlighted the constitutional and practical problems associated

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with the twofold system of education that had emerged in the wake of the state supreme court’s decision: the plaintiffs in the Belton and Bulah cases had the right to attend schools previously reserved for white students, as did black students in local districts that voluntarily moved to desegregate their schools in light of the State Board of Education post-Brown desegregation policy directive. But where white resistance was most pronounced throughout southern Delaware, black students were still denied this right. A decree requiring forthwith desegregation of all public schools, he told the Court, would address a disjunctive situation and put all schools on an even keel.3 The Supreme Court, in deliberations over a remedy, found itself in the difficult position of weighing the plaintiffs’ right to desegregated schooling against the chance that some white communities would violently resist any decision that threatened their perceived racial entitlement to segregated education. “The solution, it turned out,” recalled Mark Tushnet, “was to say less rather than more.”4 Indeed, the Court opinion outlining the procedures that would overturn almost a century of law, custom, and practice was merely seven paragraphs—four pages—long.5 The Court noted the substantial progress that had been made in Delaware, as well as in Kansas and the District of Columbia, while acknowledging that Virginia and South Carolina had decided to await the Court’s ruling on relief. Chief Justice Warren agreed with the states’ attorneys that the lower courts, which were assumed to be more sensitive to local conditions, were in the best position to oversee the desegregation process. He expressed faint sympathy for the states’ assertions that many among the white populace were not prepared to accept desegregation in their communities. “But it should go without saying,” Warren countered, “that the vitality of these constitutional principles cannot be allowed to yield simply because of disagreement with them.” The defendants must “make a prompt and reasonable start toward full compliance” with Brown and desegregate their schools. Warren thus reversed the judgments in the Kansas, Virginia, South Carolina, and District of Columbia cases and affirmed the judgment in the Delaware case. In a last directive, the Court also instructed— however imprecisely—the district courts to take such steps “as are necessary and proper to admit to public schools on a racially nondiscriminatory basis with all deliberate speed the parties to these cases.”6 In their implementation decree, Warren and his colleagues gave further—if still vague—substance to the constitutionally suspect sectional imaginary of de jure segregation. With the historic decisions of Brown and Brown II behind them, reformers continued to advance the NAACP’s direct

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attack strategy, now against the vestiges of Jim Crow segregation in Delaware and gradually expanded black students’ access to desegregated schools. As the legal grounds of Jim Crow eroded, state officials abandoned their states’ rights arguments and in concert with local school officials formulated a defense of segregated schools rooted in a new whites’ rights politics. Here, in the wake of the Milford incident, they forwarded a line of arguments that privileged white students’ right to quality public education. To this end, school officials evoked the efforts of Bryant Bowles and the NAAWP—and the extent to which the boycotts disrupted the education of black and white students—as a foil against which to continue to craft a more moderate oppositional politics rooted in gradualism and to insulate white educators and students from black educational authority, institutions, and traditions. They also cited certain structural and administrative barriers and achievement gaps between white students and their black peers—a function, ironically, of the disparities between segregated white and black school systems—that necessitated the maintenance of segregated schools. This strategy proved effective in thwarting the implementation of a statewide desegregation plan for some years, even as black students were eventually granted access under subsequent court orders to schools historically reserved for whites throughout the state. The rationalization undergirding this approach to reform ensured that no white students were transferred to black schools, that desegregation would be largely a one-way process, and that the burdens of reform would be transferred onto historically black institutions and black administrators, teachers, staff, and students. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Congress and President Lyndon Johnson invigorated the sectional imaginary of constitutionally suspect de jure segregation and delineated the boundaries with de facto segregation in a manner that led to the demise of Jim Crow. Faced with the possibility of losing federal funding, state and local officials expunged the vestiges of the Jim Crow school system and closed an important chapter in the state’s history of segregation. Still, this advance—against the backdrop of recurrent white opposition—left unanswered new questions about the place of African American minority interests and equity in systemically desegregated school systems.

* * * With the legal justification for segregation removed and a mandate—if somewhat vague and a bit oxymoronic—Louis Redding and the NAACP

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continued their campaign to compel, through petitions and more lawsuits if necessary, state and local school boards to institute immediate and comprehensive measures to desegregate the schools in southern Delaware. To this end, Redding sent letters, in line with NAACP protocols, to the Christiana, John M. Clayton, Laurel, Seaford, Greenwood, Milton, and Milford school districts on behalf of a number of black parents requesting the admission of their children on a nondiscriminatory basis to schools in those districts. His requests denied in each case, Redding forwarded his inquiries to the state board and asked its members to demand a prompt and reasonable start to desegregation.7 The state and local school boards’ failure to act on Redding’s requests highlighted the continued reticence of school officials to move forward with school desegregation in the wake of the Brown implementation decree. Further indicating the emerging regional disparities in terms of white tolerance of and opposition to school desegregation, sixteen of sixty-two local school districts across the state indicated that they would permit black students to enroll in white schools that fall. All but the Dover Special School District were in New Castle County. Seven districts did not respond to the state board’s requirement to submit plans. The remaining districts, most located south of the canal, cited overcrowded conditions in schools and unfavorable public opinion in their communities as grounds for delay. Bowles may have been technically banished from the state, but the president of the Milford board, Max Corder, made allusions to the interracial and intraracial disruptions at public meetings in March 1956 as grounds for justifying further delay in desegregating the schools under his authority. Harry G. McAllister of the Laurel Board of Education claimed ignorance of Redding’s petition, but, in a manner that reflected southern whites’ interest in insulating the matter of local race relations from more national liberal trends and—more precisely—the intervention of organizations like the NAACP, he believed that the matter could eventually be worked out if the community was left to its own devices: “until our colored people come without any pressure and say they will be morally and educationally better off,” he asserted, “then if we must and are to have integration, we will have it that way, but the people in Sussex County will not tolerate pressure from any organization.”8 In what sociologist Gunnar Myrdal described in his epic American Dilemma as “moral escapism,” in which whites frequently contended that “there really is no Negro problem,” McAllister, posing as an expert in African American public opinion, contended that “[blacks] are perfectly happy.” He

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also went so far as to cite the recent modernization campaign instituted to allay blacks’ demands for entrée into white schools and contended that they had access to a high school—albeit distant—that was better than that available to whites. William H. Boyce, speaking on behalf of the Seaford School District, complained that southern Delaware was being “picked on” and countered that relations between the races were friendly on an individual level, even if the races did not interact socially.9 The state board subsequently denied Redding’s requests, even as it acknowledged the Supreme Court’s recent decision. Evoking the ghosts of Milford, the board rooted its rejection of Redding’s request in the social disruptions that had appeared across southern Delaware the previous year. Thus it took the position “to go as far as possible with the United States Supreme Court’s decision but not to try to push communities so far that they would rebel and refuse to do anything.”10 George Miller reminded Redding that communities in Delaware differed in attitudes and traditions and that many districts lacked adequate facilities to desegregate their schools. The desegregation process, which was understood as a local matter, would thus take longer in some communities than in others. Taking advantage of the vagueness of the implementation decree, Miller ultimately concluded that the board had fulfilled its obligations under Brown II, which set no specific date for desegregating public schools.11 Having exhausted all administrative remedies, Redding filed suit against eight intransigent districts on May 2, 1956. His complaint—here, an extension of the direct attack strategy against southern-style Jim Crow schooling in the post-Brown period—was straightforward. The school boards’ recalcitrance served as the basis for the suit. He contended that the boards had declined to admit the plaintiffs solely on the basis of their race and demanded that they take steps to reorganize their districts and eliminate segregation in their schools. And in line with Marshall’s rejection of gradualism and piecemeal approaches to reform at the NAACP’s 1955 annual convention, Redding further asserted that desegregation in the school districts in question should be implemented in fall 1957.12 If the NAACP suit brought to light the interracial conflict that was a constitutive element of school desegregation, it further exposed and aggravated the often tense relationship between state and local authorities—a federalism problem writ small—in matters related to education. In the first decades of the twentieth century, local authorities in southern Delaware had been particularly opposed to liberal reforms in education policy, despite the fact that

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southern Delaware schools ranked among the lowest in the nation on measures of per pupil expenditure, annual teacher salaries, and spending for new buildings, equipment, and sites. Thus they had opposed the passage of a new school code in 1919 that, among other things, transferred much local control of schools to state authorities in an effort to modernize the public school system. Indeed, support for the code split roughly along the north-south fault line of the state. Localism and racial reaction intersected after philanthropist Pierre S. du Pont initiated a black school construction plan in 1919. Du Pont’s investment of roughly $200,000 through the Delaware School Auxiliary Association (DSAA) undergirded a vast expansion of the black school system— a system systematically starved for public investment since the state began funding black schools in 1881—within four years. It produced such ends, however, only over considerable opposition from local whites who had in the past burned black schools and complained that enough money was already being spent on those institutions.13 If state and local authorities sought to retain authority over educational matters, officials in both camps now sought to project the ultimate responsibility for desegregation onto one another as part of their strategy to slow the pace of reform. The state board took the position that the responsibility for drawing up desegregation plans lay with the local boards, as codified in the set of desegregation protocols that had been approved earlier by the Delaware Supreme Court. For their part, the local boards cited fervent and widespread community opposition to desegregation among their white constituents and concerns that any desegregation plan would be ignored or met with violent opposition. The Milford incident provided them with this essential pretext to slow the pace of reform. Now they argued that they did not possess the resources to maintain the necessary law and order that would be required to facilitate even the first steps toward desegregation. As to the matter of school administration, the local boards asserted that the power to desegregate schools ultimately rested with the central authority of the state board. And in a kind of concession to the centralizing tendencies of state education reform, they employed a novel “single community” argument that held that the implementation of any particular desegregation program in one district without the synchronized implementation of similar programs across the state would arouse further emotion and ultimately lead to more violence. The institution and enforcement of countywide programs in Kent and Sussex, the local boards contended, could thus only be initiated and maintained by the state board.14

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The NAACP campaign received its first legal approbation in post-Brown Delaware when Judge Paul Leahy issued his ruling in Evans v. Members of the State Board of Education on March 6, 1957. As he noted in his opinion, his responsibility was to assess whether or not the state had made a prompt and reasonable start toward desegregating the schools. Against the measure of the sectional imaginary of de jure segregation constructed by the High Court, he found that the state had not and directed local school officials, in accordance with the state board’s rules, to submit desegregation plans within thirty days. Leahy then instructed the state board to submit its plan to the court within sixty days, to be instituted in fall 1957. In subsequent hearings on July 9, Redding asked the court to consolidate the now six cases and to demand that the state board take formal responsibility for overseeing the desegregation process. One week later, Leahy ruled in his favor in Evans v. Buchanan, and effectively enabled the NAACP to challenge school segregation on a statewide basis.15 He recognized that state-sanctioned segregation continued to be practiced in some public schools and that the plaintiffs were entitled to attend school on a racially nondiscriminatory basis. The state was thus enjoined, he maintained, from continuing the practice of segregation in education. Leahy also refuted the state board’s assertion that it was beholden to the actions of the local boards because they were more familiar with local conditions. Under state law, the judge countered, the state board was charged with control of the public schools and thus ultimately responsible for overseeing the consistent and uniform desegregation of the schools in districts that had not already instituted some kind of desegregation plan. The decision was a victory for the plaintiffs in that the court demanded the advance of school desegregation in the spirit of Brown and, for the moment, resolved the state-local contest. The court failed, however, to address a number of important practical questions regarding whether the ruling was limited to the school districts named as parties to this case, the real and perceived problems of overcrowding in schools, and what actually constituted a desegregated school.

* * * For all the state board’s public opposition to school desegregation, the members had begun making preliminary arrangements for a statewide plan in the months preceding the court’s ruling in anticipation that Leahy would order such a plan. Under the auspices of the district court’s mandate, the state

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board continued to work on the formulation of a uniform statewide plan—in a not-so-subtle inversion of the Supreme Court’s timetable for remedy—at “a deliberate rate rather than a speedy rate,” beginning with the lower grades.16 The state board set about formalizing transfer procedures, schedules, and— as important—limitations to racial reform. The state board found the legal justification for its position in Judge John Parker’s decision in Briggs v. Elliott, in which the appellate judge deduced that the High Court had determined that the state was prohibited from maintaining segregation as a matter of law but not required to actively mix pupil populations.17 Taking his cues from the South Carolina jurist, Miller thus concluded of the court’s decision in Evans that “the order applies to desegregation rather than integration. This does not contemplate mass migration of children. The Fourteenth Amendment does not require that all the colored children be compelled to attend white schools, but that the children shall have a choice.”18 The state had made a commitment to removing pupil assignment policies that demanded racial segregation. Still, the board also established its opposition to more extensive measures that would insist on the transfer of black and white students to achieve desegregation in schools. If local boards in Kent and Sussex Counties had been willing to cede authority to the state board in decisions regarding desegregation, they reasserted their sovereignty over desegregation policies in subsequent negotiations with state authorities over the pace and scope of reform programs in their communities. The local boards were particularly opposed to the court’s order recognizing black students’ right to admission in the white schools in question at the beginning of the upcoming fall term. State board member Irvin S. Taylor contended that the board should proceed with fulfilling the court’s request, but Ralph Grapperhaus, a board member from Selbyville in Sussex County, recommended a more cautious approach. Many residents of southern Delaware were firm in their commitments to the separation of the races, he argued in a manner that reflected the continuing legacy of Milford. These prejudices, as had been expressed after Brown, had to be addressed with “the right kind of education in human relations.” After more discussions, a majority of the state board agreed to submit a letter to Craven requesting he enter an appeal on their behalf to the court’s previous ruling. Considerable progress had been made in fulfilling the Supreme Court’s mandate in Brown, the state board claimed, but more time was required. “[T]he Court, in the interest of sound progress and proper educational adjustment,” Miller notified Craven, “should give judicial recognition to the need for constructive

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patience and understanding.”19 The ghosts of Milford now explicitly informed the state board’s position on school desegregation. Despite the fact that chief deputy to the attorney general Herbert L. Corbin had previously asserted in a meeting with the state board that it had considerable authority over local boards, Deputy Assistant Attorney General F. Alton Tybout resurrected the idea before the appellate court that the statutory power to affect transfers was ultimately vested in local districts and, thus, the state board could not force local boards to desegregate.20 John Biggs, Jr., chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, was none too sympathetic to the state board’s hands-off arguments. “The contention of the members of the State Board of Education,” he found on May 28, 1958, in the next round of Evans, “that the mandates of that body have no force upon the local school boards and the persons who comprise them is erroneous.” The Delaware Code, Biggs continued, established the state board as the “central administrative force in Delaware’s system of public education and . . . not a mere powerless reviewer of actions taken by local school boards.”21 The state board was thus responsible for formulating and submitting a plan—and this must be accomplished without further delay. As if to assuage fears that such a plan would involve a radical reorganization of the public school system, Biggs reminded the parties—and the white populace who continued to harbor misgivings about desegregation—of the limitations of the lower court’s rulings: the state board was not required to achieve the wholesale racial integration of pupil populations. As the “Briggs dictum” ordained, local boards were merely enjoined from refusing admission to black students on the basis of their race.22 With the problem of school administration settled but the details of local desegregation plans still looming, the state and local boards reconvened to explore further means of delaying the implementation of any substantive desegregation plan for downstate communities. Soon after the court’s ruling, over one hundred officials from school districts throughout Kent and Sussex Counties, along with state board members Grapperhaus and Harold English, who was from Laurel, met to discuss the implications of the court’s decision. They subsequently joined with local officials to endorse a resolution calling on the State Board of Education to appeal the appellate court’s decision. In mid-June, the attorney general filed a motion for an appeal before the Supreme Court, but the High Court refused to review the district court’s order the next month. The justices’ refusal to hear the state’s appeal represented a legal setback for the state and local boards, but it still had practical value:

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desegregation in districts that refused to initiate any school desegregation process was delayed for another school year.23 With all legal appeals exhausted, the state board shifted gears and set out to formulate a minimally demanding desegregation plan for local districts that had not yet submitted plans for approval. Under the courtordered deadline, districts had 105 days to accomplish their task. As the court’s first deadline approached in January 1959, divisions racked the state board. The focus of the often angry disputes revolved around whether to begin desegregation in the elementary or high school grades. In subsequent meetings with intransigent boards, five black principals, and the president of the state chapter of the parent-teacher association, the state board devised a plan that they believed balanced the demands of the court with perceived widespread opposition to too-radical reforms.24 The state board presented what they believed was the most politically palatable and conservative approach to the district court on March 17. Citing recurring concerns about local opposition that “might affect the entire education program” and school overcrowding, this plan—adopted widely as a means of thwarting civil rights advances—involved the desegregation of all first grades that fall, followed by the desegregation of a grade per year for the next eleven years. Under this approach, full desegregation would thus be achieved by 1970.25 The scheme initially met a cool reception from southern school administrators who seemed to oppose any plan, but as the hearing date approached most local boards endorsed the state board’s plan. For his part, Frederick Massado, president of the Delaware Conference of the NAACP, considered the state board’s twelve-year plan utterly unacceptable and promised that his organization would submit its own plan to the court for consideration. Building on the national organization’s stance as articulated at previous conferences in Atlanta and Atlantic City, the NAACP plan involved the total, immediate, and simultaneous desegregation of all grade levels and demanded that students be assigned to the schools geographically proximate to their homes. Building upon the state board’s interest in modernizing and consolidating school facilities, the NAACP proposed closing more than forty mostly one- and two-room black schools and ten white schools to advance the desegregation and modernization of public education in the state. Out of concern for the potentially harmful consequences of desegregation on black administrators and teachers, it also called for the utilization of all existing school facilities—including black schools—deemed adequate by the state board.26

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* * * Notwithstanding the split among the members of the state board and the continued tension between the state and the local boards, there was one position around which state and local officials could agree: that a NAACP counterproposal, which called for the immediate and complete desegregation of the districts in question, was entirely unacceptable. On February 11, the state board thus unanimously rejected the NAACP’s plan on structural grounds. The state claimed it lacked the facilities to implement such radical changes by the fall of 1959. The proposal was also problematic, the members contended in another allusion to ways in which the advance of racial reforms violated the spirit of the dictum in Briggs, because it undermined the rights of whites, in that “the Plan forces [white] children to go to desegregated schools” and thus undermined their freedom to choose their educational institutions.27 In the years surrounding the Brown decision, the state board’s desegregation guidelines had always relied on voluntary means. In theory, school enrollments were open to all students in a racially nondiscriminatory manner—black students could transfer to white schools, and white students could transfer to black schools. In practice, however, black students transferred to white schools but precious few white children transferred to black schools. The possibility of white students in black schools had emerged time and again in state board meetings and had been repeatedly dismissed as untenable. Still, school officials harbored no expectations that white students would be asked to or would actually transfer to any black school. In this sense, the legacy of institutional inequalities between black and white schools served as grounds for thwarting reform and the state dug in its heels to insulate white citizens from what it now acknowledged—at least implicitly—was the deleterious legacy of the Jim Crow era. In another attempt to shirk its constitutional responsibilities, the state board again contended that it lacked the necessary authority to effect such a dramatic reorganization of the state public school system; only the General Assembly had the authority to undertake such reforms. The board also expressed concern that the NAACP plan would undermine the educational standards of the entire school system and involve considerable construction costs as school districts attempted to accommodate the flood of black students. If the state must initiate a desegregation plan, the state board finally contended in another not-so-subtle reference to Milford, a much more gradual plan would be “most conducive to public acceptance without public disorder.”28

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Bowing to the prerogatives of opponents of the NAACP plan, the district court sanctioned the state board’s gradualist twelve-year plan in late April.29 In his opinion, Judge Caleb R. Layton cited the problem of adequate facilities, the difficulties associated with the extensive relocation of vast numbers of students, the need for the General Assembly’s sanction of school closures, the financial liabilities associated with school construction, the problem of assimilating large numbers of black students whose level of academic achievement was assumed to be lower than that of their white peers, and finally—in a manner that played to the assumed sectional character of the state—“the impact of integration upon a predominantly Southern society.”30 In this last reason, the legacy of Milford loomed large. The court conceded, at least implicitly, that white people’s prejudices and lack of self-restraint were justification for continuing to deny blacks their constitutional protections promised under Brown and the Fourteenth Amendment. The district court faced a dilemma, however: the Supreme Court’s September 1958 ruling in Cooper v. Aaron, also known as the Little Rock Nine case. In fall 1957, governor Orval Faubus, citing the prospect of white violence, announced his decision to mobilize the Arkansas National Guard to prevent nine black students from entering Little Rock Central High School. The black students finally gained admission to Central High after the intervention of the Eisenhower administration, which cited the supremacy of federal law over state authority and then, indirectly, the rights of the Little Rock Nine to attend Central High under Brown. The next year, the High Court declared that the historic decision was the law of the land, not to be trumped by violence and disorder, and had a binding effect on the states. If the Court still failed to elaborate exactly what “all deliberate speed” meant, it was unequivocal on one matter: “The constitutional rights of respondents are not to be sacrificed or yielded to the violence and disorder which have followed upon the actions of the Governor and Legislature.”31 In a feat of legal contortion, Layton drew a distinction between the Arkansas and Delaware cases. If the High Court had privileged federal authority over massive resistance, Layton reframed the controversy as one of educational rather than constitutional rights. In his assessment, the fundamental issue in the Little Rock case revolved around whether integration should take place at all. But in the case before him, Layton supposed that the operative question involved the most sensible way of implementing a desegregation plan. Technically, Cooper still controlled, but as a practical matter the court found that such demonstrations of massive resistance as occurred in

Figure 9.  Six-year-old Corinne Bordley on the first day of desegregated schooling on September 9, 1959 at Caesar Rodney Elementary School in Camden-Wyoming, Delaware, after the U.S. District Court approved the state board’s twelve year, grade-a-year desegregation plan. Bordley was one of roughly a dozen black students who were part of the first wave of students across southern Delaware who took advantage of voluntary desegregation plans to attend schools previously reserved for white students. Associated Press Photo/Bill Ingraham.

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Little Rock and Milford had a direct and negative impact on the cause of public education—as opposed to blacks’ rights to equal protection of the laws. The jurist had thus effectively privileged the educational rights of white students above the constitutional rights of black children. In Brown, Chief Justice Warren, in his ruling on segregation, stressed the importance of education in assimilating citizens into a democratic society and providing them with a means of upward economic mobility. In a most creative and selective interpretation of Brown, Layton asserted that such open disrespect for law and order undermined the cause of education and thus desegregation had to be delayed. To do otherwise, he continued, victimized both black and white students.32 For all its limitations, the twelve-year plan did finally open the doors of some white schools in a number of intransigent school districts for a small number of black students whose parents requested transfers. In the fall of 1959 two black students enrolled—without incident—in the Sussex County school districts of Bridgeville and Rehoboth. Twenty-six black students enrolled in school districts across Kent County, including Felton, Dover, Milford, Caesar Rodney, Smyrna, and Clayton. Thirteen black students enrolled in the previously segregated southern districts of Marshallton, Newport, Hartly, Lewes, and Seaford the following fall. Dover school officials, who had welcomed a select number of black students to Dover High School in 1954, used the twelve-year plan to expand the district desegregation plan to include primary schools.33 If Layton’s decision represented a step forward in that it mandated a statewide—if slow to be implemented—desegregation plan, it gave legal sanction to certain cultural arguments for delay rooted in white opposition to reform and left school desegregation proponents wanting a more comprehensive and speedy approach to racial reform. Redding thus appealed Layton’s decision in October 1959. In his challenge to the constitutionality of the twelve-year plan, Redding argued that the district court’s ruling “completely deprive[d] the plaintiffs of any rights to desegregated education,” as his clients were all well beyond the first grade.34 Recently appointed attorney general Januar D. Bove, Jr., argued on behalf of the state board that the evidence and finding of facts were sufficient to affirm the lower court’s decision and that problems related to space and finances were sufficient causes to warrant such a gradual approach. Attorney James M. Tunnel, representing four downstate school districts, took up Layton’s arguments and attempted to focus the court’s attention on the harm that desegregation would impose on white children—

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“those people who are not the culprits.” The introduction of academically inferior black students (trained, ironically, in Jim Crow schools), he contended, would have a detrimental effect on the academic standards of the entire educational system.35 The U.S. Court of Appeals proved far less sympathetic to the cultural and educational arguments made by the district court and sided with the plaintiffs’ appeal to the twelve-year plan. It found that the plan contravened Leahy’s 1957 decision and violated the spirit of Brown. Indeed, the court held that the evidence employed to justify the arrangement was “fraught with unreality.”36 To those concerned about impending chaos, Judge Biggs dismissed the defendants’ warnings about the negative impact that a flood of black students would have on the educational system should the court demand immediate desegregation. “It has been the experience in school desegregation that a large number of Negro children do not seek integration even when offered the opportunity,” he asserted. “This is common knowledge.” He put to rest the state’s arguments about white backlash and allegations about the negative emotional impact and educational disruptions that widespread desegregation would have on the state’s white residents. It had been six years, Biggs complained, and he asserted that during this period the residents of the state had become more accustomed to the idea of desegregation and would accommodate themselves to “our democratic way of life and to our republican form of government.” There was no longer, he deduced in a manner that gave more substance to the Supreme Court’s implementation decree, any reason to deny blacks the constitutional protections afforded by the Fourteenth Amendment that had been articulated in Brown.37 The High Court, expressing little interest in wading back into the school desegregation morass, denied the state board’s appeal. The members thus set to planning and instituting a more comprehensive freedom of choice plan that would produce more positive results. This new statewide plan, filed with the court at the end of 1960, was quite progressive compared to past arrangements. In the first phase, the board proposed to admit all black students desiring transfers to white schools in the fall of 1961, and they planned a spring registration drive to determine how many black students would request transfers. In the next stage, the board proposed changes to the state school code and urged the governor and General Assembly to cease operation of districts that did not offer a comprehensive primary and secondary school program. The practical impact of the proposal would be to eliminate most black school districts that had never offered the full complement of primary

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and secondary grades, and reduce the number of districts from 92 to 29. If anyone harbored concerns about future white backlash against the advance of civil rights reforms, this measure provided state officials with an allegedly nonracial means of desegregating the public schools under the guise of district consolidation.38 The district court endorsed both phases of the state board’s plan in February 1961. Taking into consideration a number of Redding’s concerns, it prescribed measures aimed at precluding the obstructive aspects of pupil assignment laws that had slowed or halted school desegregation in many southern communities. Thus the court declared that transfer requests would not be subject to the adequacy of the school facilities, provided there was not a great influx of black students to white schools. The court also made clear that black students would be permitted transfers to schools previously reserved for white students or desegregated schools that were closest to their residence.39 That a black school might be closest to black students’ homes was also removed as a cause for denying them admission to any white school. The agreement on the statewide desegregation of public schools, the court held, was an important achievement and would aid in answering many of the political and logistical questions that all would face in the future. “It will serve,” Judge Wright concluded, “as the laboratory in which [a new school code] will be conceived and reduced to practice. It may also, in some areas, actually result in the ultimate goal of a wholly integrated system.”40 Redding’s commitment and persistence had paid off: black students in formerly Jim Crow schools had gained access to desegregated schools as a constitutional right not subject to the whims of white popular reaction, intransigent school officials, or claims of their alleged educational deficiencies. The percentage of black students across the state attending school with white students rose from 44.7 percent in 1960 to 57.8 percent in 1964. In northern Delaware, where local school boards had taken fairly proactive steps to dismantle segregated systems, the percentage of black students attending school with white students steadily increased, even if desegregation was largely a one-way avenue. Progress was certain—if slower—in downstate school districts, where opposition to desegregation was still more entrenched. Black students in these districts were slower to request transfers to white or desegregated schools and the state continued to maintain schools in its historically black school districts. While officially open to white students, these schools remained essentially racially identifiable black schools, as few white parents chose to transfer their children to these facilities. Furthermore, black

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students in southern black schools accounted for the majority of the more than 30 percent of students who continued to attend the racially homogeneous schools the state continued to maintain as essentially black institutions.41 The refusal of many blacks to take advantage of desegregated schooling was a matter of great frustration to NAACP officials who expressed a certain lack of sympathy toward blacks’ commitment to schools born of the Jim Crow era. Redding explained blacks’ unwillingness to take advantage of desegregated schooling opportunities in cultural—and pathological— terms. “The principal barrier we have in this state today to complete public school integration,” he asserted at a regional conference of the NAACP, “is the lethargy, the apathy, the indifference . . . of the Negroes who would be benefited in taking advantage of the opportunity that is legally theirs.”42 The civil rights stalwart seemed to overlook blacks’ traditional commitment to historically black institutions—now in the context of recent advances in black education in the state, a function, ironically, of continued public investment in black education originally designed to dull support for desegregation. Black Delawareans had long exhibited great loyalty to the institutions that sustained their educational aspirations through the Jim Crow era. Many parents cherished, as education historian Vanessa Siddle Walker has stated, “the affective traits, institutional policies, and community support that helped Black children learn in spite of the neglect their schools received from White school boards.”43 Black administrators and teachers such as Edwina B. Kruse, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Pauline Young, and George A. Johnson, devoted themselves to increasing the educational capacity of institutions like Howard High School, the flagship of black education for the first half of the century. They worked to institute classical education programs, recruit talented faculty, and, create a culture “de rigueur.” These educators, as historian Judith Gibson has noted, tailored the mission of black education to the political and social life of black communities with the goal of earning full citizenship for blacks.44 Black loyalty to these institutions only increased with the expansion of the comprehensive high school system in the 1950s and 1960s in southern Delaware, especially once these schools compared even more favorably with the high schools that had historically served white students only. William C. Jason Comprehensive High School, for example, had a fully certified staff, and many of the teachers held master’s degrees. Black high school graduation rates also increased throughout the early 1960s. To many blacks, it did not matter that they had the right to attend desegregated high schools in their

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communities. These new, proximate black schools and the quality of educational opportunities afforded by them represented an attractive alternative to white schools.45 To defend the continued operation of historically black primary and secondary schools, the state board conducted a poll in 1961, the results of which suggested that an overwhelming majority of black residents in the southern Delaware communities of Slaughter Neck, Ellendale, Milton, and Lincoln supported the continued operation of a consolidated black high school. The surveyors sought to provide a description of African American educational desires. In their poll, however, they offered—at least implicitly—a prescription that reflected the ongoing support of the continued operation of black schools as a means of precluding the mass influx of black students into schools populated by white students, against the backdrop of continued white opposition to civil rights.46 In this way, the board continued to advocate alternatives to a comprehensive desegregation plan, even as it implemented statewide freedom of choice plans that led to desegregation in all districts. Ever committed to desegregation, NAACP officials thus considered a black school organized by the state board construction campaign an intentional effort to perpetuate segregation. The civil rights organization challenged the legitimacy of the state board’s poll. Reverend Maurice Moyer, president of the Wilmington Branch of the NAACP, questioned the purpose and propriety of the poll, as it was hastily organized by Delaware school board members from southern Delaware amid debates over an omnibus school construction bill that allocated more than a halfmillion dollars for black schools. The poll was also organized, he noted, without the consent of the Wilmington representative on the board, who was more supportive of desegregation.47 School desegregation proponents also complained that powerful administrators of some small black districts actively worked to persuade residents to keep their children in black schools: “bad leadership dominates,” the vice president of the Sussex County chapter of the NAACP, Lorenzo Chandler, complained. “The men who could help knock down segregation fear they will lose their jobs. We’re fighting ourselves in this area.” Littleton Mitchell, president of the Delaware Conference of the NAACP, also reported that white employers used subtle forms of economic pressure to compel black parents to keep their children in black schools.48

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On June 10, 1964, senior senator from Delaware John J. Williams cast the 67th vote for cloture, effectively ending debate on the civil rights bill before the Senate. “When Williams softly answered ‘aye,’ another senator exclaimed, ‘That’s it!’ ”49 Civil rights advocates had just secured the necessary votes to end the longest filibuster in the body’s history since the cloture rule had been adopted in 1917. The U.S. Congress had passed, and President Lyndon B. Johnson would later sign into law, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that among other things prohibited discrimination in public education and demanded that students be assigned to schools—and within those schools—without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin. Congress also granted attorneys of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department the authority to file lawsuits and authorized federal officials, under Title VI, to cut off federal aid to states that continued to maintain segregated districts.50 On January 22, 1965, Delaware state superintendent Richard Gousha, on behalf of the State Board of Education, endorsed the “Statement of Compliance with the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare Regulations Under Title VI, Civil Rights Act of 1964,” thus committing the state agency to a set of nondiscriminatory practices, and the state of Delaware formally moved to dismantle its de jure segregated, dual school system the next month. With specific reference to Brown and the 1961 Evans decision, the state board resolved to withdraw its support for the vestiges of the segregated public school system. As a first step, it recommended that local school districts voluntarily cease operating segregated schools. It also pledged to withdraw its support for systems that did not “meet minimum academic standards, have adequate physical facilities, or provide pupils with an education equal to and uniform with that generally available throughout the State.” In a tacit acknowledgment of decades-long complaints from civil rights and educational activists, the state formally recognized the problems endemic to segregated black schools more than a decade after blacks sought entrée into white schools. Although the state had moved to withdraw support for “those aspects of the existing public school system that result[ed] in the education of the children of the State upon a segregated basis,” it still construed those features of segregated education to mean the system of historically black schools that had educated generations of black children across Kent and Sussex Counties.51 Seventeen black school districts were therefore ordered to cease operation by the fall of 1965; six more were ordered to do so by the following fall. The state board extended what it called the “phase-out” of black comprehensive high schools in southern Delaware, setting closure dates of September 1967 for William

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W. M. Henry Comprehensive High School and September 1970 for William C. Jason Comprehensive High School. Only one of the schools scheduled for closure in fall 1965 had a racially mixed pupil population. The board thus ensured that no white students would suffer what many whites undoubtedly believed was the indignity of transferring to a black school. The state still faced a considerable challenge in fulfilling the federal government’s mandate in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 at the beginning of the next calendar year, given the prevalence of segregation in the southern counties. Most of the schools throughout Kent and Sussex were predominantly white or black. And a number of black schools remained totally segregated. No white students were enrolled in the Henry or Jason high schools. Such was the case, too, in the historically black Booker T. Washington, West Harrington, Benjamin Banneker, Star Hill, T. D. Clayton, Richard Allen, Paul L. Dunbar, DuPont, and Frederick Douglass elementary schools, as well as in a number of one- and two-room schools in communities farther south.52 Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) policies published in April 1965 allowed for a couple of means of achieving compliance under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. HEW authorized geographic attendance zones that were established on a nonracial basis, effectively replacing the dual school systems that existed across the state. It also sanctioned freedom of choice plans that allowed students to choose among the public schools in their communities in which they were previously assigned according to their race.53 HEW did insert requirements that attempted to prevent discriminatory practices school districts had previously employed as a means of complying with court rulings while still thwarting the desegregation of pupil populations. For example, it demanded the implementation of clear and readily available announcement, preregistration, and enrollment procedures. HEW also attempted to address issues of overcrowding that might result from freedom of choice plans that were often cited as grounds for denying black students access to white schools. Where overcrowded conditions existed, HEW determined that students would be assigned to the schools nearest their homes or in line with nonracial attendance zones. Such measures promised at least a modicum of reform in cases where black and white students had been transported past the white or black schools in their communities to maintain segregated schools. HEW also called for the desegregation of faculty and staff and the elimination of discriminatory practices in other services, such as transportation related to school-affiliated facilities, activities, and programs. And in a corrective to the ambiguities inherent in

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the Court’s “all deliberate speed” dictum, it detailed a schedule against which compliance would be assessed. Each school system was required to submit a desegregation plan for all schools under its authority by the beginning of the 1965–66 school year. HEW set fall 1967 as the target date for actual desegregation of all grades.54 In many cases, the state’s implementation of the phase-out plan proceeded relatively smoothly. Most Delaware school districts essentially adopted the Princeton Plan, which consolidated students from particular grades in two or more schools in a single school. HEW determined that sixteen districts, most located in New Castle County and the Wilmington metropolitan area, were in compliance with the civil rights law by the end of the 1964–65 school year. A number of school districts from communities previously marked by concerted resistance to desegregation also moved to implement reforms in line with the HEW-approved rules. The Seaford Special School District board, for example, met on June 7 to consider the impact of the civil rights bill and its subsequent responsibility to desegregate its district. It later approved a plan to be submitted to the Office of Education through the state board. The imperative for the submission, as stressed in statements from superintendent of public schools Kenneth Madden, was school officials’ concerns about the potential loss of federal funding. Seaford school officials thus acknowledged the persistence of legally suspect, all-black schools in their districts, if only implicitly, and prepared for an open and extensive registration process that would take place annually. Preference would be given to pupils choosing the schools closest to their homes, thus removing overcrowding as a barrier to desegregation. Officials also pledged to offer transportation on a nondiscriminatory basis. The Seaford plan also made preliminary provisions for reassigning black teachers whose services were no longer required in formerly all-black schools because of decreased enrollment. The board intended to effect the strategy by September 1965, and HEW approved it July 15.55 The Caesar Rodney Board of Education submitted its plan for approval the same month. It had achieved a modicum of desegregation in the district under the May 1961 freedom of choice plan. Now it pledged to close the all-black Star Hill School and transfer the almost 200 black elementary school students along with their faculty to the W. B. Simpson and Allen Frear elementary schools. The Star Hill facility, described as “an attractive nine-room structure” and just ten years old, was to be preserved as a sixth-grade school for students from Simpson and Frear. The historically black William W. M. Henry Comprehensive High School would

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continue to serve grades 9 through 12 and operate on a freedom of choice plan, effectively preserving it as a black school until its accelerated scheduled closing in September 1966. All transportation in the district would be offered without regard to race. This plan, the local board argued, “eliminate[d] completely the factor of race, color, or national origin of pupils as a factor in their initial assignment.”56 The Rehoboth Special School District made arrangements with the historically black West Rehoboth Elementary School District No. 200 to receive the roughly one hundred black students and their three teachers, cafeteria manager, and custodian in what appeared to be a relatively smooth transition.57 Progress was such that in August, Howard E. Row, assistant superintendent for the State Board of Education, announced that the board had accomplished its first goal of phasing out the small black schools throughout southern Delaware. Black students were also transferring out of the Henry and Jason schools—247 black students remained at Henry; 173 remained at Jason. Forty-four districts were then in compliance with HEW guidelines, and ten more plans—all in southern Delaware—had received preliminary approval.58 That the state’s desegregation plan proceeded smoothly in general did not squelch all forms of opposition to these reforms. Like southern opponents of civil rights remedies, white Delawareans now complained that they suffered from discrimination at the hands of federal officials based upon their regional identity as border state whites. In an indirect reference to the exceptions made for communities that maintained racially imbalanced schools in the civil rights act, these Delaware residents, like their fellow citizens to the south, protested that they had been targeted by the federal government while their northern neighbors, especially in major metropolitan areas, had received a collective exemption from desegregation mandates.59 Even as the John M. Clayton School District Board of Trustees moved forward with their desegregation plans, members demanded that “immediate steps should be taken to protect the people of the State of Delaware from discrimination in the allocation of Federal Funds.” To this end, they requested that the state board ask Governor Charles Terry to take the requisite steps “to protect the interests of our tax-payers and pupils.”60 In further highlighting their identity as border state residents, white Delawareans complained that their Deep and Upper South compatriots had been granted the luxury of time in dismantling their dual school systems in that HEW was permitting them to maintain freedom of choice plans for a number of years. The most concerted and broad-based expression of this opposition came at a June 23 meeting

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between federal officials and state and local school officers. Looking at HEW’s handling of desegregation in communities in the South, superintendent of schools in Laurel Donald Van Sant resuscitated arguments, first articulated in the wake of the Milford incident, about the considerable hardships that white Laurel residents would be forced to shoulder. He asserted that the systematic desegregation of his district would “create a tremendous psychological problem for the communities to change and understand what is developing.”61 F. Robert Mercer of Lewes, in a not-so-subtle allusion to the white community’s need for more time, was perturbed that Deep South districts were permitted to maintain freedom of choice plans for a longer period than were Delaware districts. Frederick Baker, of the John M. Clayton School, asked, “how can Delaware be forced to accept something earlier than the other [southern] states?” James Beebe, of Lewes, touted his district’s record but, with tacit criticism of the state’s treatment vis-à-vis the North and South, complained that federal law did not apply to the country as a whole. “The government,” he was recorded saying, “can arbitrarily say that you must do this in one district and you must do that in another district, not only in states but other areas.”62

* * * HEW revised its guidelines for school desegregation plans in March 1966. Building on the principles established the previous year, U.S. Commissioner of Education Harold Howe II tacitly conceded to a point raised by local critics of federal policy: the prevailing guidelines did not apply to the problems of allegedly de facto segregation in major metropolitan areas. He noted, however, that HEW was gathering data for analysis in preparation for future work in these areas. Still, he touted the accomplishments of his agency over the previous year. In a statement announcing new school desegregation guidelines, Howe asserted, “There are about 2,000 school districts that must file desegregation plans in order to qualify for Federal assistance. All but about 70 of these have now filed plans in accordance with the Guidelines—an achievement many thought would be impossible to attain a year ago. This is about ten times as many plans as have been processed by the courts in the more than 10 years since the 1954 desegregation decision, and the great majority of plans are from school districts which a year ago had not yet taken any steps to desegregate.”63 HEW also focused on the particular problems associated with faculty desegregation, small schools, pupil assessments, and the ineffectiveness of free-

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dom of choice plans. In a reverse of almost ten years of federal thinking on school desegregation that largely relied on the good faith of white officials, the new guidelines focused on quantifiable results as opposed to process and required that school districts demonstrate actual progress in the desegregation of their schools. Here, HEW expected school districts to demonstrate that freedom of choice plans actually resulted in the desegregation of pupil populations and shifted the burden of reform from parents—particularly black parents who were expected to negotiate transfer protocols—to school districts. Still, federal officials did allow for limited use of freedom of choice plans where they proved effective in dismantling dual school systems. The rising standards seemed to have some effect. That same month, the Department of Public Instruction reported that all but five Delaware districts were in compliance. The remaining five were scheduled for approval on June 30.64 In an undated report, state school officials summarized their desegregation efforts conducted in light of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in a confidential memo covering the period between May 1954 and July 1966. The study was a significant—if also a singular and subtle—acknowledgment of the ways in which white resistance had shaped the trajectory of school desegregation after Brown. As significantly, the authors recognized the power of federal intervention to facilitate the reforms that were first demanded in the 1954 and 1955 Brown decisions. The report acknowledged that the freedom of choice plans implemented over the previous decade at the behest of school desegregation opponents had proven inadequate in producing the systematic desegregation of the state’s public schools. “The most striking observation in the history of Delaware’s school desegregation,” the report concluded, “is that the courts, alone, unaided by legislation, are inadequate for the achievement of rapid progress.” The phase-out plan, implemented in light of Title VI and the “prospect of losing Federal funds unless the Civil Rights Act were complied with,” produced this result. The authors of the report also set Delaware apart from southern states and at the forefront of the reform movement. “Delaware desires that other states, less far along the road reach the same goal,” they concluded. “Since Delaware has successfully hurdled the obstacles to integration, Delaware is in a position to recommend the most effective aids to such action.”65 For all the state’s self-congratulation, black Delawareans continued to search for greater equity in the implementation of the reforms designed to eradicate de jure segregation. The most pointed expressions of dissent from black communities were in response to the means of satisfying federal

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mandates and, in particular, the state’s plan to close historically black comprehensive high schools—new and modern facilities staffed with many highly trained professionals. In 1935, W. E. B. Du Bois had lamented the state of race relations and expressed his pessimism over the possibility of blacks receiving proper education in white institutions. He asserted “that a separate Negro school, where children are treated like human beings, trained by teachers of their own race, who know what it means to be black in the year of salvation in 1935, is infinitely better than making our boys and girls doormats to be spit and trampled upon and lied to by ignorant social climbers, whose sole claim to superiority is ability to kick ‘niggers’ when they are down.”66 Du Bois thus concluded that in theory blacks needed neither a segregated nor a mixed school. They needed quality education that could be best provided by black institutions and personnel who were sensitive to the particular position and needs of black folks in the interwar period. The educational landscape of 1965 in Delaware was quite different when James Hardcastle, supervisory principal of the Henry school, and other black educators mounted their defense of black schools. Whereas Du Bois offered a rather self-avowedly metaphysical—if somewhat fatalistic defense—of the separate school long neglected by white officials, his activist and professional descendants sought to balance their commitments to integration with a defense of black personnel and schools bolstered by an infusion of public resources. Hardcastle summarized the complicated position that many black teachers had historically embraced in response to desegregation and articulated the fundamental challenge they faced in the wake of the state board’s February 1965 resolution to Governor Terry. “Our faculty would have you know that we are for total integration,” he insisted, “however, our philosophy is in conflict with that of the State Board of Education, as to the method of attaining that goal.”67 Black educators were quick to recognize the ambiguities and inequities inherent in the state board’s phase-out plan with regard to the fate of historically black schools. The Board of Trustees for the Henry school complained to Woodrow Wilson, the only black member of the state board, that they had been effectively excluded from the desegregation decision-making process after they learned secondhand of the board’s decision to terminate grades seven and eight from the Henry school as part of its phase-out plan. Hardcastle and others were particularly concerned about the fate of black students in schools previously reserved for white students that were now regarded in many black circles as inferior to the schools available to blacks. The Henry school was fully accredited. Twenty of the faculty held bachelor’s degrees;

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nineteen held master’s degrees. Only one was classified as holding a certificate. If Henry students were transferred to schools previously reserved for white students, “many of these [black] students may be sent back to a situation where that school may not be accredited and instruction is given by teachers now holding Temporary Emergency Certificates,” Hardcastle noted. Clarence Norwood, chairman of the Board of Trustees for the William C. Jason Comprehensive High School, made similar assertions in his correspondence with the governor. Far from an educational backwater, he argued, the Jason school was fully accredited and was staffed with well-qualified educators. The state board, he argued, was making an unwise decision to cease the operation of the school in its phase-out plan.68 The parent-teacher associations (PTAs) of the Henry and Jason schools mounted unequivocal defenses of their schools given, as the Jason PTA noted in its campaign, the “superior education program” offered there and opposed the state board’s desegregation plan on these grounds. To this end, the organization went on record as endorsing the preservation of the Jason school as a comprehensive high school as originally conceived by the state board and the Board of Trustees. And in a move that testified to blacks’ concerns about the burdens that their communities would have to shoulder in the reform process and the limits of black support for the emerging civil rights consensus, the PTA vehemently opposed the February resolution and any effort to change the status of the school to anything other than that of a desegregated facility.69 The Henry PTA took a similar position, asserting that the state board should abandon the term “phase-out” and adopt instead the term “consolidate” because the latter term left open the possibility of incorporating the Henry facilities in the desegregation process.70 State and local school officials met on March 1, 1965, to make preparations to transfer the middle school students to surrounding districts and discuss the future of the Jason school and its staff. State officials agreed not to adopt a formal policy regarding the phase-out or consolidation process, but local districts did agree to absorb black districts commensurate with their capacity to receive their students. They planned to transfer Jason students to the formerly white districts in which they resided and enroll all new registering students in those districts. The Jason school would also cease accepting new students and institute a hiring freeze. The meeting attendees also began discussions about the future utilization of the Jason school. Among the possibilities, Gousha suggested that they might convert Jason into a junior college, a downstate division of the University of Delaware, an academic high school,

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or a vocational high school. He also introduced the possibility of consolidating local districts in Sussex County and designating the Jason facility as a racially mixed county high school. A meeting among Kent County school officials regarding the future of the Henry school the next day produced similar results. Hardcastle took responsibility for compiling a vacancy list for the teacher reassignment process and overseeing the transfer of black teachers. There was some discussion about the future of the Henry facility. It was assumed that plans would be made for the Dover Special School District to assume responsibility for the school.71 The boards of trustees for the Henry school and the Dover Special School District subsequently met to work out the details of a merger. Left with few options but to fall in line with the state board’s February resolution, the Henry board agreed to close the Henry school and transfer the property to the Dover district—on the condition that the administration and secretarial staff, teachers, custodians, and cafeteria staff would be retained in the formerly white district. “[T]he Board,” Hardcastle noted, “very simply and sincerely feels that since the Dover Special School District will be getting such a wonderful and splendid plant with brand new sections being added at this moment, worth $3½ million when completed, the least that can be done is to agree to the four points suggested.”72 The Dover board was happy to agree to the terms of the Henry board’s proposal, although it wished to work out the final details of the merger.73 The various school boards met again to finalize the details of the merger in August, at which time the Dover board expressed excitement about absorbing the Henry school into its district. They agreed “the entire venture [would] be a cooperative one with both administrations working together for a smooth program.” But if the merger marked the culmination of a decadelong struggle to desegregate the state’s public schools, the union still reflected certain inequities inherent in the phase-out plan and threatened to undermine black educational authority and tradition. Under the plan, Hardcastle would be removed from his position as supervisory principal and the white principal of the Towne Point School would assume leadership of the Henry school. It was agreed by the boards that the Dover board would do everything in its power to place Hardcastle in a comparable position after the phase-out. The high school program at Henry would also be discontinued and the facility would be transformed into a middle school.74 The Dover district agreed to employ the Henry teachers in September, although only in proportion to the number of units created by merger, along with the entire Henry staff.

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Dover school authorities would assume responsibility of the Henry school on June 30, 1966, instead of September 1967 as originally conceived in the February 1965 resolution. After the 1965–66 term, the facility was converted into the William Henry Middle School. A similar process occurred at the Louis L. Redding Comprehensive High School in New Castle County. Opened in the 1953–54 term, the facility was closed in 1966 and transferred to Middletown School District 60 and converted to the Redding Middle School.75 A similar process proceeded at the Jason school, albeit at a slower pace and to a different end, in large part because of continued black intransigence. As Gousha reported at the beginning of January 1966, “the Parent-Teachers Association and certain members of the Board of School Trustees are not yet convinced that the phasing out of their school is the appropriate approach.” In a manner that miscast blacks’ concerns about the inequities inherent in the consolidation process, he complained, “To put it rather crudely, these people on occasion give the impression that they want all of the rights prescribed in the Civil Rights Act and the Constitution of the United States, except that they would also like to maintain a private Negro community centered on a school.”76 School board member Hiram N. Lasher recommended in correspondence with Governor Terry that the Jason facilities be converted to a vocational-technical and community college. To do so, he reasoned, would attend to blacks’ concerns about access to educational opportunities in the county and, indeed, provide expanded educational opportunities for the entire school population in the region. After the facility was closed, it was renovated for use by the Delaware Technical & Community College system.77 By the end of 1966, all historically black schools in the state had been either closed or assimilated into consolidated school systems, with the exception of the Jason school, which was scheduled to be completely phased out by June 1967 and again well in advance of the original phase-out date. In Sussex County public schools, once marked by massive resistance and where desegregation had unfolded at a slower rate than in New Castle or Kent County, HEW advisory specialist Hobart Corning reported that the desegregation process had proceeded relatively smoothly. School officials had finally consolidated schools long organized, both formally and informally, on the basis of race, and local school districts integrated several school activities. For example, the county high school band and chorus were integrated. The countywide track meets were conducted on an integrated basis, and the county student council had both black and white members. On a professional level, Jason teacher Harrison H. Short was elected vice president of

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the Sussex County Teachers Association. Two Jason faculty members served on the Middle States Evaluation teams. And a Jason faculty member served as the editor of the publication of Delaware High School Principals Association. After a review of the state’s voluntary desegregation plans in May 1967, John Hope II, the director of the regional Equal Opportunities Program, concluded that all the remaining districts had dismantled the vestiges of their dual school systems.78

* * * Even as school districts desegregated their pupil populations, questions persisted about the fate of black administrators and teachers in newly consolidated and desegregated school districts across the state. If the state moved with firm determination to reformulate its pupil assignment policies to bring them in line with the federal mandates inherent in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the process of personnel transfers raised a number of questions as to the future of black administrators and educators in the state. The state board made only passing reference to the future of black administrators, teachers, and other employees in its 1965 resolution, recommending only the “efficient use of staff ” in consolidated districts.79 In June, it issued a subsequent “request” that local districts provide opportunities for black teachers in proportion to the number of black students received in each district.80 No white teachers—or only a relative few—were vulnerable to dismissal, given the state’s emphasis on closing historically black schools to facilitate the desegregation of the entire system. The ambiguous status of black teachers—and the state’s failure to issue a firm commitment to their placement—in this environment caused considerable apprehension in black educational communities. In the discussion of the future of the Henry faculty, Hardcastle expressed concerns about the fate of administrators and teachers of the Henry school when the institution ceased operation. Would they be guaranteed positions in integrated districts? Would their salaries be cut? The state board, Hardcastle noted, had not addressed any of these particulars in its resolution. The Henry school PTA also demanded that the state board adopt a formal policy to protect the positions of school personnel during the consolidation process.81 After the trustees of Ellendale School Nos. 125 and 195 had agreed to consolidate, Louis Redding, on behalf of the trustees of historically black school No. 195, expressed concern to the Department of Public Instruction about classroom observations

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conducted on black teachers and not, apparently, on white teachers. “This has had an unsettling effect,” he contended, “and the trustees and teachers are questioning whether the real purpose of this is to deprecate the professional standing of the teachers.”82 To address the challenges that black teachers were facing, the Education and Employment Committees of the Delaware State Conference of Branches of the NAACP mobilized in support of black teachers in Middletown. The local white community and school board of Middletown School District No. 60 had expressed considerable animosity to desegregation in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The school board had also rejected attempts to desegregate its schools after Brown and dismissed requests by the historically black Middletown School District No. 120 for meetings regarding the consolidation of the two districts. Local authorities also questioned the legality of the February 1965 resolution shortly after it was passed. There was also considerable opposition among the white citizenry to a recent tax referendum that was necessary for the smooth merger of the white and black school districts.83 In light of the failed referendum and concerns that the newly consolidated district would not have sufficient funds to merge, the NAACP committee expressed particular concern about the future of black teachers. The trustees of District No. 120 had agreed to dissolve their district prior to the state board phase-out date provided that their faculty would receive placements in the merged district. As of late June, however, there were seventeen vacancies and nineteen black teachers awaiting placement. Only one had been “unofficially” accepted. The NAACP noted that District No. 60 had employed a white teacher from Florida before any of the black teachers were reassigned, a decision that activists believed was in contravention of both the “spirit and letter” of the 1965 resolution. “The Phase-Out Resolution,” committee members James Washington and Mary Baker complained, “should have terminated any contacts District #60 had with prospective out-of-state applicants until applicants in District #120 and other Phase-Out district applicants had been considered.”84 The board of District No. 60 later abandoned its freedom of choice policy and adopted a Princeton Plan, which led to the desegregation of area schools.85 Still, it remained aloof to complaints by the black teachers and the NAACP. Given District No. 60’s intention not to employ the teachers in its locality on a nondiscriminatory basis, the NAACP requested that HEW assess the district in light of its compliance procedures. The board of Middletown School District No. 60 later offered three black teachers positions and two accepted

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offers. The district then hired eighteen new teachers from outside the district, leaving eleven black teachers from District No. 120 unemployed. For all the state’s failure to proactively address the transfers of black educators, the 1965 resolution did provide the groundwork for a certain degree of progress in placing black teachers and administrators in newly consolidated districts. Such was the case in Milton, where the local board initiated the process of integrating the black teachers into the consolidated district. Eleven of the teachers in the geographic area signed contracts with the district; the fate of the others was unclear. Five received no offers, and one retired. In late July, seventeen of the thirty-one black teachers in the sixteen small schools slated for closure throughout southern Delaware were assigned to integrated school districts. The remaining teachers were classified as retired, no tenure status, or having substandard certificates. Four were still available for employment. The Department of Public Instruction did offer three administrators and black teachers supervisory positions. Two rejected their offers: one accepted a position in the Dover Special School District, and the other decided to keep his position at the Jason school and later seek a different form of employment. The third accepted a position as supervisor of manpower management in the department.86 More progress was reported the next month. At the dawn of the 1965–66 school year, roughly 100 black teachers who had taught in black schools were scheduled for reassignment. A relatively small fraction of teachers failed to make the transition, largely because of retirement or certification issues. The fact that the Delaware State Education Association (DSEA) took a public position supporting black teachers helped facilitate this process. The DSEA urged the state to prepare a detailed list of black teachers whose positions were scheduled for phase-out, and the DSEA leadership met with school officials and the governor to make arrangements for black teachers in integrated districts. It also lobbied legislators to detail the state’s legal responsibilities to black teachers and served as a liaison between black teachers and the U.S. commissioner of education when the former had concerns and complaints about their treatment. The DSEA commended the state for its placement of black teachers in September, and it pledged its support for black teachers as the desegregation process continued to unfold. The William Henry Comprehensive High School Association had sought clarification regarding the tenure rights of its black teachers when, as a result of the phase-out process, they lost their positions. In response, Charles Harris, executive secretary of the DSEA, reiterated the organization’s support in this matter and pledge to go

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to great lengths to protect the positions of all who were qualified. This position was reiterated at subsequent meetings of the Interracial Committee and Executive Committee of the DSEA and the organization intervened in cases that were dismissed without sufficient cause.87 After further entreaties from educational and civil rights activists to recruit the rest of the black teachers in the remaining black school districts, the state board issued another resolution regarding black teachers that attended a bit more precisely to their fate.88 If the 1965 resolution implied the voluntary hiring of black teachers, the state board issued a directive dated February 25, 1966, ordering “ ‘local home district[s]’ shall accept and employ teachers from the previously all-Negro schools in direct proportion to the number of units of children being assigned.” To this end, it prohibited local districts from hiring new teachers through the end of the phase-out process “so long as a fully-certified teacher is available for the vacant position; if that teacher is available because of the ‘phase-out program,’ and as long as the ‘home school district’ has not employed a number of phase-out teachers equal to the units of children reassigned to that school on the basis of the September, 1965, certified enrollment figures.”89 Black secondary school teachers still faced the possibility of dismissal where the relatively low number of black transfers to consolidated districts failed to necessitate the proportional transfer of black teachers. Still, the state board compiled a detailed list of teachers who were still available for hire by local district officials and urged them to hire excess teachers even in cases where the teacher-student ratio fell below that demanded by state law. These changes in the state’s administration of school desegregation, along with HEW’s increasing interest in the desegregation of teachers as part of the larger project of providing equal educational opportunities, supplied an additional impetus to propel reform. The Board of Trustees of Middletown School District No. 60, for example, eventually offered contracts to every professional staff member of Middletown District No. 120, even if the consolidated district refused to recognize black teachers’ tenure earned within the black district. Across the state, 106 black teachers were under contract by the beginning of May for the next school year. Hardcastle, now the outgoing supervising principal of the Henry school, was left with the difficult task of sending termination letters to 27 Henry teachers before the next school year. The Capital School District later appointed Hardcastle as assistant superintendent of the desegregated district.90 In another set of negotiations that further revealed the limits of the Civil

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Rights Act of 1964, the Board of Trustees of historically black Millsboro School No. 204 objected to the disparate treatment meted out to black and white teachers in the consolidation process. Four black teachers had been dismissed, yet all white teachers had retained their positions. The trustees questioned why the burdens of reform were not shared more equitably between black and white teachers. They also objected to the fact that black teachers—certified teachers, many with years of experience—were required to essentially apply for their new positions in the desegregated district. “Why should the teachers be asked to have an interview,” they inquired, “if the white teachers are not asked the same thing?”91 At this point, the state’s sympathy for black concerns began to reflect an increasing fatigue with black complaints. “We agree that it’s most unfortunate that we must take the legal steps of notifying certain teachers of dismissal because of reduction of services,” Gousha and Row informed Elmer Bethards, chairperson of the Board of Trustees of the Millsboro School District No. 204. “Any major change in our society is likely to cause temporary pain for some group.” The state had decided that the dissolution of black schools, the school superintendents reminded Bethards, was the means to achieving school desegregation in Delaware and the courts and federal government had affirmed this approach. The trustees also communicated to Gousha the local black community’s interest in forming an integrated board in the combined district that preserved for the community some modicum of governance over the education of their children that they enjoyed in the black district. Here, the state board drew the line and framed school desegregation as just another social reform that came with some unfortunate—and inevitable—costs. “This situation is no different from any Delaware consolidation,” Gousha and Row simply stated. “Negroes, or farmers, or business men, or any special interest group may have as much leadership influence and be elected to as many boards as they seek when they put forth solid leadership in the community.”92 Black communities would thus have to work through the ostensibly democratic electoral process to secure adequate representation on school boards in the future.

* * * If the Supreme Court, building on its ruling in Brown, gave further—if still imprecise—meaning to the historic decision in its demand that the state proceed with “all deliberate speed” with the desegregation of public schools, Louis Redding and others gave further substance to the sectional

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imaginary of de jure segregation as constitutionally suspect through a succession of legal rulings that facilitated rising levels of desegregation in the public school system but still enabled the operation of functionally segregated colored school districts under the guise of a dual school system. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, school officials dismantled the state’s dual school system. At the intersection of outcomes demanded by federal court rulings on state and local matters and the passage of federal civil rights legislation, reformers had thus secured a fairly sectionally defined and concretized definition of de jure segregation that cast “southernstyle” segregation as constitutionally and morally suspect. In this context, Jim Crow, as a foundational principle in schools, public accommodations, and employment, met its formal end in the South and border states. These historic formations also provided the basis for that other sectional imaginary, de facto segregation, which insulated communities outside the geographic and temporal bounds of Jim Crow from intervention by federal authorities. As school desegregation advanced, there was another fundamental shift in African American educational activism. Black activists had previously complained about the state’s failure to live up to the standards of equality allegedly inscribed in Plessy in their challenges to Jim Crow. Having secured these victories, civil rights activists and black educators expressed increasing concern about matters of equity in desegregation plans by the mid-1960s, especially with regard to minority rights and employment opportunities within desegregated districts. Indeed, opponents of reform were successful in slowing the pace of reform and ensuring that it was crafted in light of whites’ interest in minimizing their exposure to the vestiges of the system, diminishing the authority of black administrators and teachers over white staff and students, and transferring the burdens of reform onto black educators and teachers. The NAACP thus focused its lens on the hiring and retention of black educators in desegregated districts, particularly in Kent and Sussex counties. Especially below the canal, the NAACP noted, “the black community lost its advantage in status and policy-making, by the obliteration of black school board members and administrative positions.” Civil rights liberals had advocated for desegregation as the primary means of addressing the institutional inequalities between the educational opportunities available to black and white students. Equalization, as an alternative end, had been largely cast aside. Now issues of equity emerged in tension with school desegregation as a means of black freedom, equality, and citizenship.

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PA R T I I I Extending Brown’s Mandate

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Chapter 5

“The Other Side of the Milliken Coin”

The challenge to the problem of racial segregation in public education in the 1970s began, in a sense, with one unlikely activist: Marilyn Harwick, a white substitute teacher with two daughters enrolled in David W. Harlan Elementary School and P. S. du Pont High School. The city of Wilmington was experiencing profound demographic changes with the flight of white residents to neighboring suburbs. This trend was accompanied by a veritable exodus of white children from the city’s schools, an increase in the absolute number and percentage of black students, and a steep decline in the white public’s perception of the public school system.1 Thus Harwick observed firsthand what she believed was the decline of public education in the city. “There’s no doubt about it. Academic standards were declining as the black enrollment increased,” she later recalled in language that reflected increasing concern in popular and social scientific circles about the intersections between race, poverty, and pathology in black communities. “The other problem was discipline—not just minor infractions, but serious matters,” she continued. “Many of the white teachers were intimidated by the black students.”2 After her older daughter graduated from P. S. du Pont, the flagship city high school, in 1970 Harwick withdrew her younger child from the public school system, rented a house outside the city, and enrolled her in suburban Mount Pleasant High School. The lifelong Wilmington resident cherished the diversity of her neighborhood and city life, however, and maintained her Wilmington residence. Harwick’s subsequent efforts were a variation of a number of white responses to the “urban crisis” that befell many American cities.3 Many white residents, as historians have aptly detailed, responded to these ills by moving to the suburbs and distancing themselves from the city. Others, however, dug in and engaged in a variety of efforts to rehabilitate decaying urban landscapes and reinforce the metropolitan connections between city and suburb.

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In Harwick’s estimation, stemming the tide of white middle-class flight was the way to rehabilitate the city. Along with other white Wilmington residents who were concerned about the “ghettoization” of the city, she successfully lobbied mayor Harry Haskell to pass an ordinance prohibiting homeowners from displaying “For Sale” signs, which activists believed gave the impression of a mass exodus from the city. They also admonished real estate agents and local corporations for encouraging their professional clients and employees to purchase homes in the suburbs instead of the city. They were unsuccessful, however, in overcoming the considerable structural barriers to city-suburb segregation or securing broader commitments from public or private interests to reverse the increasing racial and class fragmentation of metropolitan space. Homogeneous track zoning laws made it virtually impossible to place public housing outside the city. Suburban opposition also succeeded in blocking the passage of county building codes that were prerequisites for federally assisted building projects and did well to postpone the creation of the New Castle County Housing Authority (NCCHA) until 1972. And even then, the NCCHA failed to build any housing units, only making available a few rental properties in the Southbridge community, which was just within the southeast boundary of the city. On the educational front, the Wilmington Board of Education, then governed by a white majority, rebuffed a proposal to build a high school in the city that activists believed would be attractive to current and prospective white residents. And suburban districts rejected a voluntary transfer proposal that would enable city students to transfer to the suburban high schools in neighboring Mount Pleasant and Alfred I. du Pont districts.4 Having exhausted these options, Harwick and a number of supporters tried a different approach in an attempt to encourage whites to retain their Wilmington residences: the dispersion of black students to schools throughout the metropolitan area. If many white residents left the city because of the terrible state of the schools, the logic went, such dispersion promised to spread the underlying causes of school decay—defined by them as concentrations of academically challenged and disruptive black urban students— across the metropolitan area in small enough numbers such that they could be productively managed. White middle-class city residents and prospective white homebuyers would thus have fewer incentives to leave the city and move to the suburbs. Advocates believed dispersion would close the increasing racial divide that marked Wilmington and its suburban ring. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights endorsed this concept as an educational reform

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measure in its 1967 publication Racial Isolation in the Public Schools. Growing out of the 1966 Coleman Report, which endorsed racial integration as an essential component of improving black educational achievement, Racial Isolation linked black disadvantage with racial isolation, arguing that black students in majority white schools performed better than black students in predominantly black schools. Steeped in racially paternalist damage imagery that posited blacks as objects of pity, the authors of the study advocated the dispersion of black students to majority white schools as a means of closing the achievement gap.5 Against this epistemological backdrop, Janet Greenwell, the president of the Wilmington Parent Teacher Association, enthusiastically endorsed the measure. Harwick and another concerned resident, Phyllis Ploener, then approached attorneys Gerald Kandler, Irving Morris, and Joseph Rosenthal for assistance.6 The attorneys, who worked on behalf of the Delaware chapter of the ACLU, were also concerned about the demographic trends in Wilmington schools and the growing percentages of black students—but on constitutional grounds. “Isolating Wilmington as a black school district was neither constitutionally permissible as I understood the Brown decisions nor in the interest of the black minority or the white majority,” Morris recalled. “Dividing our nation along racial lines was not in keeping with the promise our nation made to all its people of equality before the law.”7 After advising Harwick and Ploener that, for tactical reasons, it was necessary to recruit black plaintiffs who had legal standing in any lawsuit, Morris then prepared a complaint to present to the court and approached civil rights stalwart Louis Redding for assistance.8 Morris and Redding thus prioritized the constitutional rights of blacks—as opposed to urban renewal—as their primary concern, but the regionalism that undergirded Harwick’s efforts remained an essential thrust of this next round of challenges to a persistent segregation born of the urban-suburban divide in public education in Delaware. This chapter explores the struggles surrounding school desegregation as they moved north to Wilmington in the 1970s, when school desegregation proponents took a self-consciously metropolitan approach to the problem of segregated schooling in the wake of white flight and urban retrenchment. In a most expansive expression of the NAACP’s direct attack campaign, they highlighted the breadth of state-sponsored discriminatory housing and education acts that had the simultaneous effect of restraining black and expanding white housing choices, and fueled racial segregation in metropolitan area schools. Reformers thus embraced a broader conception of de jure segregation that

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challenged the sectionally inflected dichotomy between suspect de jure and inoffensive de facto segregation that the civil rights movement had helped make popular in the previous decades. Now, in essence, civil rights attorneys claimed that no matter the function of school segregation—whether in pupil assignment policies or residential housing patterns—the racial divide, given the state’s practice of discriminatory education and housing policies, was de jure in nature. School officials and white suburbanites, intent on thwarting the imposition of remedies that promised to integrate metropolitan area schools, mobilized again to oppose and later minimize the scope of a court-ordered metropolitan remedy. They forwarded a number of complaints—largely fashioned in the language of the rights of white suburbanites to send their children to neighborhood schools—that stressed white suburban innocence and black cultural pathology. Thus they cast white suburbanites and the public institutions they held dear as distinct from the southerners of times past and Jim Crow schools that were generally dismissed in legal discourse and popular opinion as constitutionally and morally suspect. As opposed to school desegregation proponents, opponents of reform sought to preserve the vitality of the sectional imaginary of de jure segregation and brace the distinctions between de jure and de facto segregation, the latter alleged to be a function of race-neutral economic and cultural factors. That the court once again proved sympathetic to desegregation proponents and their reevaluation of the sectional imaginaries of de jure and de facto segregation broadened the avenue of reform and enabled the extension of the NAACP’s direct attack strategy beyond the geographic and temporal boundaries of the Jim Crow South. Still, school desegregation opponents were not vanquished, and they managed to exert a profound influence in the remedial phase of the litigation. Here, one can discern the possibilities of the school desegregation campaign as it adapted to the changing structural and discursive terrain of post-Jim Crow racial segregation. At this point, too, the limits of reform were evident. White suburbanites were able to write into the reform script inequities that further transferred the burdens of reform onto black institutions and students when, ironically, change was exposed to the democratic winds of legislative and executive processes.

* * *

Newcastle County, 1970

Wilmington Elsmere Newark

Newport New Castle

Percentage of Black Population (census tract) 0-6 6.01 - 17 17.01 - 35 35.01 - 59 59.01 - 98

Middletown

Figure 10.  Black population, Wilmington Metropolitan Area, New Castle County, 1970. By Michael Page, Emory University Libraries.

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The structural features of segregation that haunted Harwick and her supporters had deep roots in state actions. Restrictive deeds, originally conceived by suburban developers to ensure racially homogeneous development, served to largely preclude black migration to the surrounding suburbs in the first half of the century. County government officials continued to employ such deeds when they assumed primary responsibility over land use regulations in 1954, guaranteeing that the vast majority of blacks who had migrated to the metropolitan area in the previous decades would be restricted to living within the city. Bankers, real estate brokers, and suburban civic associations actively opposed open housing legislation, and the state effectively countenanced housing discrimination until 1968 when the General Assembly finally passed legislation prohibiting discrimination in purchase and rental of homes. White suburbanites, albeit infrequently, resorted to violent retribution against black homeowners who attempted to move into predominantly white communities. Such was the case in Collins Park, a suburban community just south of the city. The first black family was driven from the community after white teenagers vandalized their home and the homeowner was shot in 1957. Two years later, George Rayfield and his family moved in. Area residents bombed their home twice, destroying the structure. Black homeowners with means were able to establish a small foothold in the suburbs. Real estate developer Leon Weiner built a development in Oakmont for blacks just south of the city and adjacent to the Southbridge Housing Project. The Oakmont project was sustainable because this process of suburbanization proceeded on a segregated basis.9 With Redding’s assistance, the ACLU attorneys enlisted a group of black parents with school-aged children in Wilmington schools who were also concerned about rising percentages of black students and declining standards in the city schools. Each agreed to participate for similar reasons. Jeanne and Clifton Lewis joined the suit after Redding visited their home. Mrs. Lewis had been Redding’s secretary two decades earlier and knew his reputation for civil rights activism. Their oldest daughter had graduated from P. S. du Pont High School, but they sent their two younger children to (mostly white) private schools because they were concerned about the decline of academic standards in the city schools and believed that cross-racial contact was an important element of their children’s education. Lillian Richardson, a prominent community activist, agreed to join the suit, citing concerns about the concentration of black students and the decline in the quality of public schools. Wilber Carr had been hesitant to send his children to suburban

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schools but believed they were not being academically challenged in the city’s schools and agreed to participate in the suit.10 Morris and Redding’s subsequent effort to secure institutional and financial assistance revealed a myriad of cross-cutting positions of different groups, as various interests continued to grapple with the potential impact of different strategies of addressing the continuing problems of segregation and inequality. The attorneys first approached the Wilmington Branch of the NAACP. The local branch was initially cool to the idea of supporting the suit when it was filed in 1971, citing concerns that black staff, faculty, and students would have to bear the costs of reform and that a successful suit would undermine the authority of the Wilmington Board of Education, which was an increasingly important site of black political power and patronage in the city.11 On August 3, 1973, however, branch president James H. Sills, Jr., announced the organization’s intention to join the suit as an intervening plaintiff, pledged financial assistance, announced plans to initiate a public relations campaign to educate Wilmington residents about the implications of the lawsuit, and offered help in formulating a desegregation plan: “Our present Wilmington and New Castle County School systems do not currently meet this crucial constitutional need.” Referring to the social science research that undergirded earlier school desegregation challenges, he asserted, “In their two segregated school systems, they actually help to engender and promote some of the distorted racial attitudes and racial myths, which so effectively work against the constitutional principles of a free and open democratic society.”12 In his support of the suit, Sills was also careful to address the matter of community control, a potentially countervailing impulse to desegregation that was gaining increasing support in black communities frustrated by the uneven and slow pace of school desegregation across the nation.13 If activists had previously secured victories in the courts and Congress that struck blows against the institution of Jim Crow segregation, their successes spoke less precisely to blacks’ longstanding struggles for black political empowerment that increasingly suffused assessments of school integration and the most appropriate means of achieving educational reform. In this light, black commentators in Wilmington began to assess the Wilmington Board of Education through the prism of black power and community control. The modern iteration of black power traced its most proximate roots to Stokely Carmichael’s call for “Black Power” during the 1966 Meredith March, the Congress of Racial Equality’s declaration of independence from the civil rights movement, and the black political convention and assembly

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movement that, broadly speaking, sought black self-determination in political, economic, and cultural terms. In matters of education, black and white activists and educators hotly contested, as historian Jerald Podair observed in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis, the terms of equality, segregation, and pluralism in decisions on staffing, curriculum, and school funding in making school administrators more accountable to the black citizenry and redistributing decision-making power from centralized bureaucracies to local communities.14 In this vein, the editors of the black monthly People’s Pulse called for greater black representation on the Wilmington Board of Education.15 They also made a special effort to refute charges from within the ranks of the civil rights establishment and white liberal circles that such efforts were a refutation of movement ideals and tantamount to black racism. “Contrary to the fears of many whites,” they counseled, “blacks have no desire to make the Wilmington School system an ‘all black thing.’ Blacks are not seeking power ‘in isolation,’ but power only in relation to their numbers and their capabilities.”16 In his provocatively titled “Name of the Game: Power!” editorialist Bart Hare criticized the city school board’s paternalistic approach to its constituents in supporting a program of community control. He argued, “The power game in Wilmington takes many forms. Some of the most devious and abusive forms are the ways and means that the Wilmington Public School System used to enforce its close to complete control of all formal educational programs at the elementary, junior, middle and high school levels. The rationale is very logical and absolutely untrue: ‘We are the professionals and we know what good education is!’ ” Hare went on to cite a number of specific transgressions: school administrators and the mayor, he charged, had lobbied successfully to undermine initiatives that would have facilitated more public—presumably black—involvement in federally funded education programs, administered a “personal and prying school survey” of city students without the permission or input of their parents, and failed to include parents in the review and approval of a reading program funded by the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.17 The national organization of the NAACP, in line with a renewed spirit of ideological and strategic flexibility in the late 1960s, had expressed support for the concept of community control at their 1969 national convention. So too did local branches of the NAACP express certain sympathy for this political impulse and in this way, despite the claims of activists and historians that black power and community control represented a break from civil

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rights liberalism, activists embraced community control as a complementary extension of earlier efforts rooted in civil rights liberalism.18 In 1972, Elaine Miller, a member of the education committee of the Wilmington Branch of the NAACP, had complained, “blacks have little or no part in deciding educational policy in the state and are not fairly represented in the Chief School Officers Advisory Council, Department of Public Instruction, the State Board or the Delaware School Boards Association.”19 Sills now blended the liberal democratic elements of these two political currents. He rejected the notion that the reorganization of area schools precluded blacks’ active participation in school affairs. Community control of public education, in his assessment, did not require that black parents live in close proximity to their children’s schools. “Parents whose children attend a particular school,” he stressed, “regardless of where they live, constitute within themselves a community of interests and educational beliefs which should have a significant impact on the operations and educational programs of that given school.”20 Sills also insisted on a distinction between the liberal democratic elements of community control politics in black communities and the segregationist imperatives in the neighborhood school concept—a class-based, ostensibly race-neutral rallying concept of suburban busing opponents cited to oppose court-ordered busing.21 The NAACP’s principled support of this case was complicated by more practical institutional considerations, however, when the branch president, citing legal technicalities and an earlier-than-expected start to the court hearings, later announced the organization’s withdrawal from the lawsuit. This was most likely the result of developments at the Legal Defense Fund (LDF). Morris had earlier approached Jack Greenberg, now director of the LDF, to get his opinion on the feasibility of the suit. Sills and Morris remembered that LDF attorneys believed the Delaware case was weak. Still, Greenberg suggested they contact William Taylor, director of the Center for National Policy Review (CNPR), for advice. Taylor, in turn, referred them to Memphis civil rights attorney Louis R. Lucas. Lucas was a former assistant U.S. attorney in New Orleans and in the civil rights division of the U.S. Justice Department, where he litigated a number of suits against Jim Crow laws in Louisiana and neighboring states. He had practiced law in an integrated firm in Memphis and had litigated more than a dozen school desegregation cases, including suits in Columbus, St. Louis, Richmond, Detroit, Memphis, Indianapolis, and Hartford. Still, the Delaware State Conference of Branches endorsed— and would continue to support—the action of the Wilmington board and the

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civil rights attorneys throughout the liability and remedy stages of the litigation, although more informally.22 With Lucas on board, the metropolitan strategy for the desegregation of Wilmington area schools was set. School desegregation proponents had increasingly looked to metropolitan strategies to challenge segregation in education in the post-Jim Crow context. The LDF had developed metropolitan strategies in suits in Charlotte, Detroit, and Richmond.23 The roots of the framework for the metropolitan strategy deployed in the Wilmington case can also be traced to a December 1970 conference on metropolitan school desegregation that was hosted by the CNPR and the Potomac Institute. Taylor called the conference amid increasing concerns about segregation between cities and suburbs. “It was decided,” the “Summary of Proceedings” stated, “that it would be useful to initiate discussion with practicing lawyers, civil rights and education experts and law professors on the broad application of Brown v. Board of Education and its progeny in a practical manner to major metropolitan centers.”24 Drawing on recent litigation experiences in Richmond, Hartford, and Jersey City, among others, the organizers recognized that the problem of school segregation required a strategy particularly suited to segregation in this new context. And alternatives to reform, such as subsidized housing programs and fair housing laws, were, in and of themselves, inadequate to overcome the increasing segregation in metropolitan area schools. Continuing the line of strategic thinking developed decades earlier by Charles Hamilton Houston, the participants held fast to the belief that the courts were the most fruitful avenues for reform. To this end, Lucas, LDF attorney Norman Chachkin, and Richmond lawyer George Little stressed the importance of showing de jure segregation and government involvement. Taylor also stressed the importance of focusing on de jure forms of segregation and avoiding strategies that relied on the courts’ recognition of de facto segregation as grounds for determining that segregated schools were unconstitutional given the courts’ inconsistent rulings. He supported efforts that concentrated on discriminatory intent in the construction of district lines, discriminatory actions that furthered residential segregation, and past discriminatory education policy.25 The conference participants recognized the contested political terrain on which they intended to proceed and acknowledged considerable levels of black disillusionment with school desegregation and the competing imperative of community control. If the 1966 Coleman Report, served in part as the sociological rationale for the development of this metropolitan strategy,

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Chachkin still cautioned that the report should not be used to imply that blacks could not get a sound education in predominantly black schools. Thus Jean Fairfax, director of the Division of Legal Information and Community Service of the LDF, stressed the need for a dynamic campaign that transcended the politics of civil right liberalism and community control: I believe that a comprehensive approach which is not focused just on the mixing of children would greatly enhance the potential for metropolitan desegregation. We should be developing total strategies which include community control, the development of curriculum that reflects the black experience, the restructuring of grade levels, the introduction of innovative educational concepts, etc. The same persons who are advocating metropolitan school desegregation should also be actively involved in the development of strategy for meaningful community control by black and poor [parents] over the education of their children.26 To this end, she recommended initiating meaningful communication with community control advocates and stressed the need to cultivate broad community support for a metropolitan litigation strategy, especially in the early stages of planning. Robert Carter, who had presided over a 1966 NAACP conference in which the organization had endorsed metropolitan remedies, affirmed Farifax’s position, adding that blacks’ interest in community control simply reflected a commitment that white parents widely expressed to an educational system that was accountable to its constituents.27 Funding remained the last obstacle to continuing the suit. On the advice of city solicitor Victor F. Battaglia, Sr., and Mayor Haskell the ACLU attorneys approached the Wilmington Board of Education. The newly appointed, black majority Wilmington board (and indeed the city as a whole), as revealed in a 1966 study by the Center for Field Research and School Services in the School of Education at New York University, was also weighing the relative benefits of desegregation and community control politics in their efforts to fashion reforms to meet the needs of the many educationally disadvantaged students in the city. The NYU team had conducted a systematic review of the educational programs and facilities of the Wilmington School District. As part of their study, they interviewed a wide spectrum of the urban community, including members of the Wilmington Board of Education, to assess reactions to the team’s proposed solutions to the problems associ-

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ated with overcrowding, the physical condition of schools, and vocational reform. The responses, while not attributed to particular parties, revealed a wide range of opinion as to the relative merits of school desegregation as part of a larger program of school reform. In a line of questions related to long-range educational planning, some respondents emphasized improvements in the quality of education and placed less importance on desegregation. Hiring more blacks in administrative, supervisory, and counseling positions, others asserted in related comments, would reinforce educational programs, and constructing more middle schools would help alleviate overcrowding. In response to questions regarding the future of Howard High School, respondents indicated their preference for preserving the historically black institution in the belief that it best met the needs of the student body and the community. Transferring students and faculty from Howard, the researchers recorded, was thought to be burdensome for students and parents in terms of time and cost of transportation. Strengthening Howard, in contrast, would serve as a positive force in the community and potentially attract whites to city schools. Respondents also indicated a preference for greater attention to black history and culture in the curriculum. In contrast to those who believed in increasing the capacity of Wilmington’s educational institutions, the NYU researchers also recorded support for more integrationist approaches to school reform. Respondents recommended that future school construction take place in areas likely to attract integrated pupil populations and proposed the dissolution of the Wilmington school district in order to achieve racial balance in city and suburban schools. In broader comments on regional reforms, some respondents expressed interest in urban development plans that would reverse demographic trends, as well as innovative and compensatory programs to ensure high educational quality after racial balance was achieved.28 Divisions within the Wilmington board revealed the continued tension between those who focused on the desegregation of area schools and those who concentrated on greater funding for and black control over urban schools. The three white members of the board favored supporting the suit. The black members were split, however. Board member Hermania Garrett did not see the educational imperative for joining the case and believed the suit a cynical attempt to reduce tax rates in the city. Robert Mitchell concurred and was also concerned about the potential negative impact that a ruling for desegregation would have on the power and authority of the Wilm-

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ington board. Board president Reverend Lloyd Casson and Roy Wagstaff were sympathetic to the concerns of their fellow black board members, but they were also committed to the cause of integration. With some reluctance, they voted to support the case. The Wilmington Board of Education, in a final 5–2 vote, adopted a resolution agreeing to join the case as an intervening plaintiff on June 19, 1972. Casson articulated the board’s position that reflected an extension of commitments to school desegregation. His position also signaled a repudiation of president Richard Nixon’s opposition to school desegregation, in which the chief executive advocated support for major financial assistance programs as a substitute for forceful executive action designed to advance desegregation.29 We feel there is sufficient evidence to support the plaintiff ’s case that the state has acted to create segregated school systems. But our decision to enter the case as plaintiffs was based primarily on our educational commitments. The majority of us reject the idea that some magic wand of dollars, as visualized by President Nixon, could ever provide quality of education in racially isolated schools. It is our opinion that any child . . . white or black, city or suburb . . . who attends a uniracial school is educationally disadvantaged and is being denied an equal educational opportunity.30 School desegregation proponents had thus succeeded in cobbling together a coalition and the necessary resources to wage a concerted challenge to segregation in metropolitan area schools.

* * * Lucas, with Redding at his side, brought to bear the full weight of the metropolitan strategy in arguments before the court after failed attempts to settle the case with the state. Building upon the strategies honed in previous segregation suits, plaintiffs’ counsel contended that the state continued to maintain a racially segregated, dual school system in New Castle County. They were particularly critical of provisions in the 1968 Education Advancement Act (EAA), a school reorganization measure designed to consolidate the state’s patchwork of small school districts, which they contended confined Wilmington students to city schools and prevented the state board from ex-

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ecuting earlier court mandates demanding the dismantling of the dual school system. In advancing the metropolitan strategy, Lucas also underlined the reinforcing intersections between residential and school segregation and the interdependent relationship between Wilmington and its metropolitan periphery. Never conceding that the record of segregation was a function of informal mechanisms, he asserted that state actions that established or enabled housing discrimination also contributed to school segregation and suggested—if only implicitly—that the dichotomies between de jure and de facto were false. Their goal, as Lucas had earlier explained to the president of the state conference of the NAACP, Littleton Mitchell, was a two-way desegregation plan that transcended the municipal boundary between city and suburb.31 To this end, plaintiffs’ counsel called a number of expert witnesses who provided anecdotal and social scientific testimony to substantiate their case. To make it clear that the state board had an official responsibility to oversee all public schools and was thus formally responsible for overseeing a segregated school system, Lucas called state superintendent Ken Madden before the court to explain his agency’s responsibility for authorizing and financing local school construction, overseeing all transportation services, and administering and funding school districts. Madden did so and also acknowledged that the state board had worked in conjunction with the General Assembly in formulating school district boundaries. To highlight the state’s continued maintenance of a segregated school system, Lucas directed the court’s attention to the history of the EAA. The EAA was, on its face, a crowning achievement in the modernization of public education in the state. Progressive educators had embraced school centralization as part of a modernization effort to transfer authority from neighborhood interests to citywide school boards and broaden educational opportunities. Delaware reformers finally bowed to the tide of reform in the 1960s and adopted the measure, which mandated the reduction of the number of existing school districts to between twenty and twenty-five and required that each district contain student populations ranging from 1,900 to 12,000. School districts like Wilmington that encompassed over 100 square miles or enrolled more than 1,900 pupils were exempt from consolidation. The problem, as Lucas argued, was that the EAA set coterminous city and school district lines and precluded any redistricting plans that merged sections of Wilmington with suburban districts. It essentially set aside Wilmington as an overwhelmingly black district.32

Figure 11. Delaware school districts, 1969. Courtesy Delaware Public Archives.

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In questioning public officials, Lucas exposed the state’s failure to dismantle the remnants of its Jim Crow school system. Public officials had taken the position that they had already fulfilled their obligations under Brown v. Board of Education, a 1961 court order demanding the implementation of a statewide desegregation plan, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Any measurable desegregation, they contended, was a function of personal choices and market forces. Under sharp questioning from Lucas and Judge John Gibbons, state legislator Clarice Heckert admitted that no one brought the 1961 court order to her attention when the EAA was under consideration. She noted that she had proceeded under the assumption that the public schools had been effectively desegregated in 1964 or 1965, when the state board had dismantled the last black school districts. Heckert contended that the drafters of the EAA endeavored—in line with Governor Terry’s objectives—to consolidate smaller public school districts in the late 1960s, not modify large existing ones or promote desegregation. Superintendent of the Newark School District and vice chairman of the county superintendents George V. Kirk, who had served on the EAA planning committee, testified that he remembered discussions about the increasing racial isolation of Wilmington. He recalled, however, that planners had proceeded under the assumption that desegregation had already been completed in the city when they designated Wilmington as a distinct school district.33 Lucas also drew attention to the extent to which public officials selectively emphasized the significance of municipal boundaries when devising education policy in a manner that promoted segregation. Plaintiffs’ attorneys introduced into evidence a number of interdistrict arrangements between the city of Wilmington and New Castle County in the late 1960s and early 1970s in which the two municipalities agreed to transfer or share responsibilities for metropolitan area parks and golf courses, area-wide land use policies, tax assessments, and disposal of solid waste. In contrast, the EAA imbued a new sanctity into Wilmington’s municipal boundaries and precluded any subsequent efforts to further school integration between city and suburb, even as a number of suburban school superintendents testified about longstanding interdistrict educational arrangements. District superintendent David K. Fauser of suburban Mount Pleasant School District and Superintendent Kirk testified about the longtime practice of cross-district transfers and area-wide schooling, especially in special education and vocational training, in New Castle County. Both conceded that those interdistrict arrangements had educational merit. Heckert admitted that she had opposed measures to integrate

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Wilmington and suburban schools and objected to interdistrict busing provisions as a means of achieving racial balance in schools in the late 1960s, even as she also acknowledged previous interdistrict relationships between city and suburbs. In a manner that further highlighted the discriminatory nature of reform, she also testified that she sent her own children to white schools in Wilmington in 1954 even though her family resided in the suburban Alfred I. du Pont District. Indeed, the plaintiffs also exhumed state documents testifying to the fact that more than a thousand white suburban students crossed district boundaries to attend city schools in 1955 when city schools were considered superior to suburban schools.34 The plaintiffs then expanded their challenge to the de jure/de facto binary. Here, Lucas summoned witnesses to speak about the structure of statesponsored residential discrimination in the metropolitan area and its effect on the racial profile of area schools. Witnesses testified that the state’s real estate primer advised agents to follow the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB) code of ethics that counseled—at least formally through the late 1950s—against introducing blacks into white residential areas. In detailing the limited housing opportunities available to blacks, they also noted that only 7 percent of the listed properties in the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) of the Greater Wilmington Board of Realtors were designated as “open” and thereby available to prospective minority buyers.35 The testimony of local blacks added a human dimension to this historical record, especially as it related to the day-to-day practices of the real estate industry. Municipal court judge Leonard Williams offered some of the most powerful testimony regarding the challenges that black homebuyers faced as they sought to purchase property in predominantly white residential areas. Realtors declined, after discovering he was black, to show him properties; homeowners, after personal inquiries, refused to sell, citing their desire not to “break” the neighborhood. Williams told the court how he had resorted to subterfuge: he had asked one of his friends, a white lawyer, to inquire about a property in the prestigious Rockford Park area of the city. The friend visited the house and was impressed. Still, Williams, like any wise homebuyer, wished to see the property himself, so he put on some old army fatigues, mussed his hair a bit, and posed as an electrician’s helper who had been hired by the white lawyer to inspect the house. After deciding to purchase the house, Williams had his friend negotiate the sale of the property then transfer the deed to Williams and his wife. At the time of the trial in 1973, Williams noted, they were still the only black family in the neighborhood.36

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In addition, a number of black realtors recalled institutionalized forms of housing discrimination and testified about the difficulty their black clients encountered when they attempted to buy homes in white residential areas. Realtor Ann T. Guerke recalled her difficulties obtaining listings for black clients in the predominantly white suburbs. She also told the court of incidents of overt hostility from suburban residents when she showed houses to prospective black buyers. On one occasion, a white neighbor, brandishing the “For Sale” sign that he had pulled from the ground, threatened her and her clients. Realtors Lester Small, Jr., and General L. Jackson testified to various forms of racial “steering.” They described the economic imperative beneath an industry standard—born of racist assumptions—in which agents felt compelled to guide white clients to homes in white areas and black clients to homes in black areas. Small and Jackson also illustrated how the real estate primers encouraged such practices and gave details from the NAREB code of ethics. Under this code, agents pledged not to sell homes “to persons whose character ‘will be clearly detrimental’ to property values.” Realtors also described how agents regularly designated listings with an “O” (for open housing) if these properties were available to non-white buyers. Open housing was, not coincidentally, rarely available in the suburbs. There was some debate before the court about whether these provisions were still formally in effect at the time of the trial, but Jackson emphasized that the Greater Wilmington Board of Realtors (later known as the New Castle County Board of Realtors) opposed open housing legislation passed in 1968 that prohibited such practices. In line with Lucas’s overall strategy, Small also stressed the validity of the widespread assumption that the racial makeup of schools governed consumers’ housing choices: “You sell homes in New Castle County based on the school district.”37 Plaintiffs’ counsel called University of Wisconsin sociologist Karl Taeuber to lend social scientific substance to the testimony offered by Williams, Guerke, Small, and Jackson. Taeuber spoke about the reinforcing links between housing and schools and dispelled notions that residential segregation was a natural or, at best, innocuous phenomenon in providing the court with further evidence of institutionalized housing discrimination. He dismissed notions that segregation in Wilmington was the result of people’s alleged affinity to associate with others of their own class or own racial or ethnic group. “Racial discrimination in the housing market,” he told the court, “is a principal cause of these [segregated] housing patterns.” He explained the interdependent relationship between segregated schools and segregated

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neighborhoods and the great significance that homebuyers ascribed to the racial makeup of the student population of schools. Building upon earlier testimony, Taeuber also presented the court with a detailed consideration of segregation in metropolitan schools. According to his index of segregation, Wilmington and the surrounding suburbs measured 81 on a scale of 0 (no segregation) to 100 (total segregation)—up nine points from 1960. He then offered a compelling argument for a metropolitan remedy—for if the Wilmington Board of Education adopted measures to achieve racial balance only in the city schools, the segregation index for the metropolitan area would decline by less than one point. “ ‘Desegregation’ within the city of Wilmington,” Taeuber concluded, “would do nothing to end the pervasive area-wide segregation between black Wilmington schools and white suburban schools.”38 In refuting the body of evidence forwarded by the plaintiffs and opposing the metropolitan remedy, the state sought to invigorate the legal distinctions between the sectional imaginaries of de jure and de facto segregation. Here, defense counsel embraced Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as the law of land to argue that the public officials had fulfilled their constitutional obligations when they dismantled the dual school system and thus eradicated the vestiges of the de jure segregated school system. To the extent to which the court might find evidence of segregation in metropolitan area pupil assignment patterns, they essentially argued that such outcomes were purely accidental—the result of non-education-related factors that were beyond their responsibility to address. In contesting the charge that the state had determined to segregate black students in predominantly black city schools, defense counsel dismissed the charge that the state had engaged in intentional acts of discrimination in education policy. Chief counsel for the defense William Prickett argued that any segregation of the Wilmington School District, which had customarily enjoyed a great degree of autonomy, was the function of tradition, not discrimination. Assistant state superintendent Howard E. Row, one of the chief designers of the EAA, denied any discriminatory intent in the execution of the act on the stand. The act’s provision that precluded the fusion of Wilmington with the surrounding suburbs, he asserted, was not designed to isolate Wilmington, as the plaintiffs contended, but to perpetuate a longstanding tradition of autonomy normally enjoyed by the city school district. Row also testified that state officials had operated under the assumption that school desegregation had been completed in the state with the phase-out of the last black school district in 1967. Attorney Bruce Stargatt also denied that the act was designed to

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“ghettoize” Wilmington or that any laws had been violated, even as he conceded that he believed that Wilmington had been set aside in order to gain the necessary support for the act in the legislature. Former state superintendent for public instruction Richard P. Gousha returned from Milwaukee, where he had taken a new position, to testify for the defense. Ironically, Gousha’s district in Milwaukee was involved in an ongoing school desegregation controversy in which public officials and residents were struggling to balance the competing imperatives of community control politics and desegregation in the implementation of a citywide desegregation program. He told the court about his efforts to desegregate southern Delaware schools during his tenure on the board and claimed that they had succeeded in this goal of eradicating de jure segregation. The court and federal government mandates fulfilled, Gousha recalled how authorities then directed their attention toward consolidation. He also testified that federal authorities had informed the state board that Delaware was the first southern state to completely desegregate its schools. Legally, the former superintendent’s reference point was the district court’s 1961 judgment. Believing they had complied with this order, he had thus felt no obligation to submit subsequent reorganization plans to the court for approval.39 In a further attempt to exonerate the state, Prickett also advanced a “black complicity” argument. Thus he called witnesses who supported the state’s argument that any segregation that existed within the system had been produced with the consent of black public officials. Given their acquiescence to such reforms, he continued, the plaintiffs’ complaints were offered in hindsight and in the light of unfavorable outcomes. Herman Holloway, the only black member of the State Senate, testified that he recognized that the EAA would restrict a large fraction of black public school students to Wilmington city schools. He explained his support for the act, in the face of widespread opposition from suburban legislators to any legislative alternatives, as a means of gaining some financial benefits for the Wilmington School District and support for an open housing bill. Prickett also called Wilmington school superintendent Earl Jackson, the first African American to hold that position. Jackson could not recall the precise details of the Wilmington board’s failure to object to the EAA. He remembered, however, how his complaints to state officials about the increasing segregation of Wilmington students fell on deaf ears. Jackson also reiterated his concerns about the past board’s attendance policies that enabled white parents to transfer their children from predominantly black schools to avoid desegregation.40

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* * * The district court found the plaintiffs’ arguments compelling and ruled in their favor on July 12, 1974, thereby establishing a legal finding of constitutional violation and effectively erasing the legal distinction between the intent and outcomes of state policy. While the defendants cited the fact that the Wilmington Board of Education had in fact adopted “racially neutral geographic attendance zones” and on some level had fulfilled its duties under Brown, the court found that enrollment figures indicated that “all of the pre-Brown colored schools that remained open continued to be operated as virtually all-black schools.”41 Judged against the standards of Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (where the Supreme Court had mandated that districts had an affirmative duty to eliminate from public schools “all vestiges of state-imposed segregation”), the court found that the black schools previously segregated by law continued to be maintained as “identifiably black” and that these schools comprised a “substantial proportion” of the twenty-two schools in Wilmington. Jim Crow—the system born in the early twentieth century—therefore still existed in Delaware schools. The court failed to pass judgment on the constitutionality of the EAA, however, and did not specify a remedy. It did order the State Board of Education to submit two desegregation plans—one that proposed to redistribute students within the city and another that offered to integrate students from the city and the surrounding suburbs. The court also invited the plaintiffs to suggest alternative plans.42 The court’s reserve in commenting on the constitutionality of the EAA certainly gave it time to reflect upon a growing anxiety within the broader community about the possibility of a desegregation plan that mixed city and suburban students. Public opinion, particularly among white suburbanites, had already begun to turn against the idea of a metropolitan desegregation plan. A small nonscientific survey of area residents conducted in July 1974 by the staff of the Wilmington Morning News revealed overwhelming opposition to busing as a means of overcoming the racial imbalance between city and suburban schools. Indeed, the grassroots sentiment undergirding the state’s opposition to the plaintiffs’ challenge came to the fore during a series of programs organized by the Delaware Committee on the School Decision (DCSD) in January the next year. The DCSD was conceived by New Castle County executive Melvin A. Slawik and established through executive order by Governor Sherman W. Tribbitt to educate the public about developments

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related to the suit. About 1,500 members of the metropolitan community attended a series of DCSD public meetings. In the wake of disruptions that marked other communities where busing programs were being implemented, organizers designed the workshop to educate the public about the merits of the different desegregation plans and ensure a peaceful transition. The public—more specifically, white suburbanites who were opposed to any interdistrict remedy—used the gatherings to vent their opposition to reform.43 White suburban school officials and residents had generally acquiesced to Brown’s mandates and the local boards’ adoption of freedom of choice plans in the years following Brown. However, white suburbanites opposed school desegregation plans that required the transfer of significant numbers of black students from city schools to suburban schools and—worse—white suburban children from suburban schools to city schools and, unlike previous plans, involved obligatory transfer mechanisms across the city-suburb boundary. Steeped in the language and logic of suburban populism, white suburbanites revived and revised many of the central tenets of white backlash against school desegregation from the previous decade. They expressed their frustration with the courts’ alleged exercise of undemocratic power and the judiciary’s meddling in affairs best left to majoritarian legislative initiatives. Program attendees also complained about the lack of information provided by school authorities and expressed concern that they would have little input in the formulation of any desegregation remedy. They also filtered their critiques through the lens of a rising tax revolt, an ideological component of the process of suburbanization in the metropolitan area. A metropolitan desegregation plan, in the minds of many, promised higher taxes, given the historically lower tax rates in the suburbs. The public dialogue also reflected whites’ continued anxiety about interracial conflict and the culture of pathology, an increasingly popular explanation for the alleged urban decline in black communities. White suburbanites expressed concerns about violence that would accompany the mass transfer of white and black students, as evidenced in recent events surrounding Boston busing measures and the subsequent social disruptions and carnage. They were even more concerned, however, about social disorganization within black communities and the manner in which the alleged breakdown of social relations in the city undermined the operation of the Wilmington public schools. A number of attendees complained about the low quality of Wilmington city schools, questioning the adequacy of city school buildings, books and other instructional materials, and educational standards. At one meeting at Concord High School, Reverend Robert

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B. Moore lambasted city students for their poor motivation, which he believed affected their teachers’ attitudes toward education. In an act of willed amnesia as to the volume of evidence of housing segregation presented at the trial, an audience member at the same meeting contended that if blacks wished to attend suburban schools they should move out of the city.44 Another participant at a meeting at Brandywine Springs School asserted, in a manner reminiscent of Bryant Bowles’s patriarchal defense of segregated schools, “I won’t have my daughter bused to Wilmington. If going to jail for 30 days would relieve her, I’d do it tomorrow.”45 Things got particularly rough at a public meeting at William Penn High School, where many of the 700 in attendance, citing a conspiracy to change their opinion of desegregation, packed the auditorium and refused to split into smaller discussion groups that the organizers believed would facilitate more constructive dialogue. They then proceeded to boo and jeer the speakers for the remainder of the meeting.46 The district court’s caution in commenting on the constitutionality of the EAA was also informed by developments in the Supreme Court, which was then deliberating on Milliken v. Bradley, another school desegregation case that involved significant levels of segregation in Detroit, Michigan. Two weeks after its initial ruling, Chief Justice Warren Burger, in a manner that reflected the Court’s embrace of the constitutional distinction between the sectional imaginaries of de jure and de facto segregation and forms of discrimination enshrined in state educational policy and residential segregation, overturned a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit decision. The Supreme Court, while affirming the findings of fact in the lower courts, rejected the district court’s metropolitan remedy in Detroit. Rejecting evidence of the intentional violation of the rights of black city students, the Court declared that school district lines were virtually sacrosanct, elevated local control of schools to a revered political tradition, and de-linked the problem of school segregation and residential segregation. In effect, the Justices exempted suburban communities from court-ordered desegregation remedies short of unequivocal evidence of discriminatory intent. For the courts to rule otherwise, the majority concluded, would supersede the structures of local governments and insert the court into matters of segregation that were de facto in nature.47 “The controlling principle consistently expounded in our holdings,” Burger asserted in a manner that greatly limited the range of school desegregation mandates, “is that the scope of the remedy is determined by the nature and extent of the constitutional violation.”48 Milliken effectively insulated

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suburban residents from any interdistrict remedy because the court deemed them innocent of any constitutional violation. The decision was a significant defeat for the NAACP and greatly narrowed the avenues of reform, particularly in metropolitan areas and in communities outside the bounds of Jim Crow. On news of this decision, the district court in the Delaware case demanded a re-argument on the impact of Milliken and the scope of the court’s remedial authority. It also invited suburban districts to join the case.

* * * After waiting for the Court’s guidance on the matter of school desegregation in the metropolitan context in its Detroit case, the district court more forthrightly articulated its stance on liability on March 27, 1975, and provided the basic framework in which the community would resolve the problem of citysuburb segregation. Judge Caleb M. Wright authored the majority opinion for the three-judge panel, joined by Chief Judge John Gibbons. Observers believed that Gibbons, a Newark native, had long been concerned about black urban retrenchment and white flight and thought the state had a constitutional obligation to address racial imbalance in schools.49 In the years following Brown, Wright had rejected Redding’s argument that the state had an affirmative duty to promote desegregation through the reorganization of school districts. “If races are separated because of geography or transportation criteria,” he ruled, “it is no concern of the Federal Constitution.”50 More than a decade later, however, Wright had significantly modified his opinion as to what constituted suspect forms of segregation. The jurist acknowledged the guiding precedent of the High Court’s decision and its pronouncement about the relationship between the remedy and the constitutional violation. He invoked the logic of Milliken to the opposite effect in Wilmington, however. In Milliken, Justice Potter Stewart argued that the roots of housing segregation that produced a core of racially identifiable black city schools were “unknown and perhaps unknowable.”51 Wright, in contrast, acknowledged the broad scope of discriminatory actions in state-sponsored education and housing policies that shaped the racial demographics of the Wilmington metropolitan housing and pupil assignment patterns in the court’s determination of liability. The outmigration of white residents from the city and increase in the number of black residents in the previous two decades, the court concluded, “resulted not exclusively from individual residential choice and economics, but also from assistance, encouragement, and authorization by governmental policies.”52

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In acknowledging the record of interlocking constitutional violations in housing and education policies, the court forwarded an expansive definition of de jure segregation that acknowledged intersecting networks of school and housing policy and effaced the distinctions between the sectional imaginaries of de jure and de facto segregation. Wright cited eight violations. The 1936 FHA mortgage underwriting manual had promoted racially and economically homogeneous neighborhoods. There was also evidence of an extensive record of discrimination in the sale and rental of private property before the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Racially restrictive covenants, albeit unconstitutional as of 1948, continued to be recorded in New Castle County deeds until 1973. Officials had failed to remove discriminatory language from the Real Estate License Act and Primer until 1970, and the legacy of such neglect was still evident. The Greater Wilmington Board of Realtors established the MLS system and designated as “open” properties available to prospective black buyers in 1965. The court cited statistics gathered by the State Human Relations Commission in which 51 percent of city but only 7 percent of suburban listing were open. The New Castle County Housing Authority, under pressure from suburban neighborhood groups, focused construction of public housing in the city of Wilmington, in effect concentrating poor and minority families there. The Wilmington Board of Education had adopted optional attendance zones that enabled white students to attend schools outside their home attendance area, creating proportionately larger black school populations. Finally, the court found evidence that the state had subsidized interdistrict transportation of white students to private and parochial schools. In contrast to the Detroit case where the High Court de-linked housing and school policy, embraced the notion of fragmented metropolitan space, and essentially let suburban districts off the hook, Wright concluded that “de jure segregation in New Castle County was a cooperative venture involving both city and suburbs.”53 Then the court turned its attention to the constitutionality of the EAA, which mandated the exclusion of Wilmington from the state’s consolidation plan, despite the framers’ assertion that they did not intend to discriminate against blacks. The act, Wright acknowledged, was racially neutral on its face; the process of school reorganization was not purposefully discriminatory, and both black and white legislators supported its passage.54 But in light of recent rulings in which courts had recognized the educational value of reducing racial isolation, the EAA denied the state board the opportunity to consider and potentially address the impact of the measure on levels of racial isolation

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in area schools. “To the extent that ‘racial characteristics’ was effectively excluded from this list of legitimate educational criteria for reorganization,” the court deduced, “the exclusion of Wilmington from the Board’s power under the Educational Advancement Act constitutes a suspect racial classification.”55 Given the state’s past resort to interdistrict arrangements in transportation matters and private and parochial school subsidies, Wright further expressed doubt as to the educational merits of new district enrollment caps and claims about the historic sanctity of district boundaries. With no firm practical basis upon which to justify the passage and implementation of the EAA, the racially discriminatory exclusion of Wilmington served as the remaining rationale for the legislative act. Wright thus concluded, “the language of the Act excluding Wilmington from consideration by the State Board for reorganization violates the Equal Protection Clause. Moreover, the unconstitutional exclusion of Wilmington from eligibility for consolidation plainly constitutes an ‘inter-district violation’ under Milliken v. Bradley.” And for good measure, he reminded the reader of Burger’s demand in the Detroit case that “it must be shown that racially discriminatory acts of the state or local school districts, or of a single school district have been a substantial cause of inter-district segregation.” The state of Delaware, through the provision of the EAA, thus continued to maintain racially identifiable schools.56 The court finally dismissed arguments about the impracticality of future interdistrict arrangements. The population of New Castle County was less than one-tenth that of the Detroit metropolitan area, and school officials had plenty of experience with interdistrict arrangements. The court once again ordered the parties—and anyone else who wished—to submit alternative intra- and interdistrict desegregation plans to the State Board of Education for review. Given the recent Supreme Court rulings, school desegregation proponents were thrilled with the Evans ruling. “The majority opinion,” Redding informed the LDF’s New York office, “I would consider, as the other side of the Milliken coin.”57 NAACP counsel Nathaniel Jones concurred: “With great relish and delight I read the excellent majority opinion which placed Milliken in a hopeful context.”58

* * * The court’s recognition of constitutional violation in state education and housing policies recast the parameters of the struggle to effect a comprehensive desegregation program in the Wilmington metropolitan area. The question before the parties was now not if state and local authorities had the legal

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responsibility for reformulating pupil assignments to address the problem of segregation in metropolitan area schools but how these officials were going to achieve this end. For all its opposition to the plaintiffs’ case, the state board offered the most comprehensive desegregation plan in the period following the court’s ruling. It proposed, in what became known as the Six-District Plan, to divide the Wilmington district and combine its parts with the neighboring suburban districts. Students in each new district would subsequently be bused across the city-suburb line. Under this plan, the board sought to distribute black students at the rate of 19 to 25 percent of the seats across metropolitan area schools.59 The Wilmington Board of Education, the ostensible victor in this case, now found itself in an awkward position. It had won its case against the state and secured a ruling that acknowledged the purposeful segregation of its district and created the basic legal structure for an interdistrict remedy. That the court essentially forwarded on open invitation to possible remedies raised important questions about its fate, the future of institutions that had historically served black students, and black influence in newly organized school systems. Political scientist Adolph Reed observed that the black urban regimes that came to power in the 1970s were “symbolically identified with the advancement of the interests of racial democracy” or, as Ronald Walters once claimed of black politicians in general, “fulfilling the legacy of black power.”60 A center of nascent black urban political power—a function, ironically, of white flight and black urban entrenchment—the Wilmington board now turned its attention to the preservation of black authority in newly formulated metropolitan governance structures. The Wilmington Board of Education offered three more modest plans, in response to the perceived suburban bias inherent in the Six-District Plan, designed to preserve the authority of the Wilmington board and equalize the burdens of reform across the metropolitan area. A majority of the board proposed a plan that would create seven school attendance zones. Under this arrangement, students from two or more black and white schools would be assigned to different racially mixed schools that served particular grade groupings to achieve desegregation. The board, as a body, also presented an intracity desegregation plan for the court’s consideration. Wilmington board member Wendell Howell introduced his own multiple option preference system. This plan, effectively a voucher plan, aimed to reorganize New Castle County schools into a series of educational regions, each containing a magnet school. Howell believed that racially segregated schools would be eliminated when parents had the opportunity to

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choose from a number of available schools. He argued that such a marketbased plan gave parents the ability to address the specific problem of poor education by withdrawing their children from underperforming schools. The threatened decline in attendance would thus force school officials to better attend to the needs of their students or face closure. This plan, in contrast to the Six-District Plan, also explicitly called for the preservation of the predominantly black Wilmington Board of Education.61 The court’s decision on liability and the state board’s six-district proposal prompted another—more pointed—round of suburban animus and the ideological dimensions of white suburban opposition became more apparent during a series of meetings sponsored by the Delaware Congress of Parents and Teachers between May 20 and June 2. Tenth grader Stuart Spinner captured the spirit of the meetings quite well in his June 2 testimony at Brandywine High School: “I see in the schools, among supposedly intelligent children of supposedly intelligent parents, a rampant anti-black feeling. It’s not outright ‘I don’t like niggers’ sort of thing. It’s subtler, it’s quiet, it’s a fear that spreads out of ignorance.”62 That the young man explained the attitudes in his community in such a way is understandable. Nevertheless, suburban opponents embraced a quite sophisticated politics of suburban populism that increasingly informed whites’ responses to civil rights advances in the 1970s. They deployed a purportedly color-blind attack against a future interdistrict remedy premised on a willed amnesia of the record—spelled out clearly in court documents—of institutionalized discrimination in the metropolitan area. In the process, suburbanites refigured civil rights advances as affronts to their rights as homeowners, parents, and citizens. To this end, they advocated the severing of connections between city and suburban schools maintained in the previous decade to enable Wilmington whites in increasingly black schools to take advantage of suburban educational opportunities.63 In an elaboration of the opposition voiced in earlier DCSD meetings, suburban opponents of the Six-District Plan cast neighborhood schools in their communities as sacrosanct institutions.64 They repeatedly spoke of these safe and nurturing places, within walking distance of their homes, where the teachers were particularly attentive to the needs of their children and where parents could be involved in their children’s education.65 In contrast, witnesses spoke of Wilmington, city schools, and black students in starkly converse terms and in the process grasped variations of culture of poverty arguments advanced by anthropologist Oscar Lewis, sociologist and

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policymaker Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and others who located the source of poverty and urban decline in the behaviors of the poor themselves.66 “I am convinced,” local resident Kenneth Smith asserted, “that I voice the fears and the mental anguish of many frightened and concerned parents across the length and the breadth of this land. The court decision to force busing of untold number of children far from their homes to schools of uncertain safety in slums and ghettos where even the armed police must walk in pairs has brought agonizing reappraisal to those of us who have long admired our system of jurisdiction.”67 Newark resident Rebecca Gregory held a similarly poor opinion of Wilmingtonians: “the people that live in the city, as far as I am concerned, live off welfare. They don’t want anything better for their children, so why bother them in that situation?... I’ve moved from Wilmington to Newark to give my children a better education, and now they’re going to turn around and bus my children to the city with a lower educational background?”68 And in a not-so-veiled allusion to white flight—a popular response to, among other things, school desegregation—John McClelland suggested: “The quickest way to empty the public schools of the Wilmington area would be to allow the values of the ghetto to become dominant in either the classrooms or the corridors of the schools.”69 In distinguishing their communities from those of the Jim Crow South, suburbanites argued that their schools were open to all races and did express some sympathy for the parents who initiated the lawsuit. “We share our community and its schools with other races, colors, and creeds,” Charlene Clark asserted in a manner that made indirect reference to the suburban school districts’ post-Brown open enrollment plans. “Therefore, our schools have been desegregated in a natural manner. I am sorry that the five families were denied the right to attend the school of their choice.”70 Her sympathy for her neighbors had its limits, however, and here she picked up the theme of white victimization at the hand of courts that sought to further expand Brown’s mandate. “At the same time,” she asked, “what have we done that was illegal, unconstitutional, or discriminatory? Why must our children be forced away from their neighborhood schools and why will we have to pay a financial penalty?”71 If suburban schools had relied on buses to transport children between their neighborhoods and area schools, witnesses now complained that busing was unsafe and a costly solution to the problem of segregation.72 Robert Agreen advanced Clark’s argument, making a more specific reference to the supposed constitutional infraction and the undemocratic nature of the courts’ decisions. He argued that busing violated the allegedly color-blind principles of the Civil Rights Act. In

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demanding such remedies, the court thus violated the Fourteenth Amendment rights of suburban children to attend their neighborhood schools.73 In apparent ignorance of the Green v. County School Board of New Kent County decision, Judy Hrivnak argued that busing was an affront to suburbanites’ “right to freedom of choice.”74 James Venema, president of Positive Action Committee—the major anti-busing organization at the time—was unequivocal: “The Courts have run afoul of our Constitution, a Constitution which guarantees ‘equal protection’ to ALL citizens. In its ill-founded, seemingly contrived opinion, the Court has essentially ruled in favor of ‘equal non-protection.’ ”75 To Venema, busing was part of a larger problem associated with what he viewed as the arbitrary exercise of federal power, to which he drew analogies between “Hitler’s Germany” and “Stalin’s Russia.”76 Others also resorted to hyperbole. Busing was frequently tagged with the modifier “forced” to imply coercion against the white populace.77 Others went further, equating it with “legalized kidnapping” and “child abuse.”78 Attempting to breathe new life into Red Scare reactions to civil rights advances, Charles Houghton stated, “there is sort of a Communistic conspiracy in the country to lower the standard of education here.”79 While they had not been cited in the original complaint, suburban school administrators had anticipated their involvement in this school desegregation suit well before the trial. A number of officials lamented the potential negative impact of a regional desegregation plan on their districts and the increased costs associated with leveling staff pay scales and equalizing tax rates between city and suburban districts. School officials—hardly reconciled with the court’s ruling on liability—thus took the court’s invitation to participate in the remedy formulation process as an opportunity to shape new pupil placement policies and modified governance structures in light of their own suburban interests. They shared the Wilmington board’s commitment to preserving their own institutional authority but went further to see that no white suburban students would be bused to city schools. They construed reform in the realm of pupil assignments as a restricted, one-way avenue from the city to the surrounding communities. And one by one they lined up against the state board’s Six-District Plan. The Alfred I. du Pont School Board opposed the plan, believing it would encourage white flight to the neighboring states of Maryland and Pennsylvania. Board vice president Augustus W. Graham also expressed concerns about accountability, costs, and violence if the state insisted on transferring suburban students to city schools. The Claymont Board of Education was particularly opposed to any mandatory transfers, otherwise deemed “forced busing.”

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Suburban administrators offered a number of plans that varied in their exact details, but as a whole the proposals largely relied on voluntary means of desegregation that were very limited in scope. If school officials had historically employed buses to transport students safely and cost-effectively to school, school desegregation opponents now evoked “forced busing” as a code phrase to highlight what they believed was the strained, distorted, and coercive use of an otherwise mundane aspect of educational policy. Here they essentially adopted the position that the transportation of white students outside their communities involved violence against the white populace at the hands of antidemocratic courts and executive authorities. The Conrad Area School District submitted a one-way voluntary transfer program that allowed black city students to transfer to the adjacent suburban district on a space-available basis or until the black enrollment in the district reached 18.8 percent. The Alexis I. du Pont Board of Education submitted an optional transfer plan in which the Wilmington School District was divided into four parts and combined with suburban districts to form voluntary transfer sections. Black and white students were permitted voluntary transfers between the city and suburban schools within each zone. The parents and students were responsible for arranging transportation if they desired transfers, however. The Stanton board announced that it was “unalterably opposed” to the state board’s plan and, along with the Alfred I. du Pont Board of Education, proposed a center schools plan that offered select desegregated programs for students. Under this arrangement, elementary and middle school students would attend school in programs organized around humanities and cultural arts or natural and social science themes one day per week at racially mixed centers located near the city-suburban line. The Stanton board also proposed a plan that involved the integration of Wilmington and suburban districts bordering the city—the Stanton district, interestingly enough, did not border Wilmington and thus was effectively excluded from any reform measures.80 After reviewing each of the plans and taking into account public feedback, the state board forwarded three plans to the district court for review. The first, a Wilmington-only plan, proposed modification of attendance zones in the city so that the racial demographics of each school reflected, within a tolerable deviation, the demographics of the city at large. To this end, the plan sought to achieve a racial distribution of 75.7–93.9 percent blacks in elementary schools, 84.9–92.3 percent in middle schools, and 84.9–91.1 percent in high schools. The second, a zone transfer plan, would require no changes to district borders and preserved the governing authority of all the school

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boards. The districts were to be combined into attendance zones. Within each attendance zone, district administrators would design special programs in sciences, mathematics, or humanities or adopt different educational models, such as the British open classroom approach, to encourage voluntarily pupil transfer. The third plan was a modified version of the Six-District Plan called the Five-District Reorganization Plan. In this plan, the existing suburban districts were to be consolidated into five districts and merged with parts of the Wilmington School District, which would be dismantled. With this reorganization plan, black students would occupy 18.2–27.5 percent of the seats in each new district. Based on the wide range of testimony on the merits of each plan, the state board recommended the zone transfer plan as the best way to desegregate metropolitan area schools.81 On May 19, 1976, the district court passed its first judgment on the state board’s three plans and narrowed the parameters of any possible reform. The court rejected outright the intracity plan because it failed, as Taeuber had earlier predicted, to significantly affect the racial makeup of the city’s predominantly black schools. The court also dismissed the plans with voluntary components because such approaches had proven ineffective in other communities and been rendered illegitimate by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Green. The court expressed interest in the Wilmington board’s cluster plan because it offered the greatest assurance that desegregation would actually take place and provided safeguards to minority rights. In what must have been a disappointment to Wilmington officials, though, it rejected this approach because of concerns about the judges becoming too involved in the day-to-day operation of area schools, and the court was hesitant to assign students to schools outside their home districts where school authorities were not directly accountable to their parents. The court’s reticence here was most likely a function of its assessments of the challenges that District Court judge W. Arthur Garrity faced after he demanded a wide-ranging redistricting and busing remedy in Boston.82 The court also rebuffed the center plan, which involved the part-time reassignment of elementary students for one day per week in desegregated facilities, as inadequate. In the end, it endorsed the state board’s Five-District Plan as the most appropriate remedy but declined to endorse any particular arrangement. It did determine, however, that desegregated middle and high schools should achieve 10 to 35 percent black students by September 1977. Elementary schools were to achieve the same ratio by September 1978. The exact details of the plan, the court concluded, were to be devised by a five-member interim board, which the court ordered sworn in by June 1976.

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The Wilmington board, attempting to balance the competing interests of desegregation and community control, was left wanting for more precise guidance. “The board does not feel triumphant,” Howell told an audience at Warner Middle School. “There are too many questions that have to be resolved.”83 The court’s endorsement of the state board’s plan left the future of the Wilmington board in doubt. And, as Howell noted, the court had yet to prescribe a more precise timetable for the interim board’s tasks, address the matter of the desegregation of faculty, and attend to growing concerns from bilingual education advocates about the possible reduction of services to bilingual students—the latter concerns having been only recently introduced during the remedy stage of Evans. Further fueling the concerns of black Wilmingtonians and school desegregation proponents, suburban interests—composed of groups determined to minimize changes to majority white suburban districts, to tax increases, and to the busing of white students—quickly emerged as the predominant force in the policy planning process as the interim board set to fulfill the court’s mandate. The power of these interests was boosted after the General Assembly passed legislation that expanded the interim board’s membership to thirteen, which ensured a suburban supermajority in decisions pertaining to the interdistrict remedy. Wilmington representatives held only two seats on the board. Senator Holloway was especially critical of this development. He represented the second senate district, a heavily black district in Wilmington.84 Holloway contended that such an arrangement was “deliberately designed to punish and retaliate against those people whom the Wilmington board represents, and in particular, black people for having successfully challenged the previously unconstitutional action by [the General Assembly].”85 After further deliberation, a majority of the board later voted to preserve the structure and authority of the eleven districts and adopt, in essence, a modified center plan in which all city and suburban students would attend the fifth and ninth grades in city schools and spend the remaining ten years in the suburban districts. Howell was particularly opposed to this approach because it was “consciously discriminatory against black children” and “punitive.”86 Wilmington teachers, he stressed, were particularly susceptible to job loss if they were not qualified to teach fifth or ninth grade. He also implored the board to leave some middle and high schools in the city. As a compromise, Howell, who also served as Wilmington representative on the interim board, offered his own version of a feeder plan in which students from certain black and white schools would attend one high school and two middle schools,

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which would be located in the city and racially mixed. Suburban representatives opposed this measure because suburban students would be bused for different amounts of time. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third District affirmed the plaintiffs’ metropolitan strategy and the district court’s decision on liability on May 18. Guided by the Supreme Court’s decision in Swann, Judge Ruggero J. Aldisert ordered that “The school system and its students are to be returned, as nearly as possible, to the position they would have been in but for the constitutional violations that have been found.”87 A certain vagueness inherent in Aldisert’s “but for” calculation then prompted a number of end runs around a two-way busing plan. The state board interpreted the court’s decision as grounds to forward a proposal that, given the record of housing discrimination, merely required the transfer of all students from Wilmington public housing, plus an additional 3,645 black students, to suburban schools. Under this arrangement, the state board had no expectation that any suburban students would be transferred to any city school. Madden touted the plan for its cost-effectiveness and the fact that it required less busing.88 Mitchell was particularly critical of Kenneth Hilton, the sole African American member of the board, and his support for this scheme. He criticized Hilton for being out of touch with the black community and not cultivating relationships with concerned black organizations. “Your positive vote to transport the black children of Wilmington to suburbs in a one-way transportation plan was not only degrading but indicative of your stupidity,” Mitchell charged in a manner that implied Hilton’s racialized obligation to support more progressive means of reforms. “We can accept the ‘Uncle Tom’ behavior of blacks that used it as a survival technique. What is your excuse for using it?”89 Howell, now president of the Wilmington board, and Lucas both objected to the proposal. Lucas asserted that the one-way transfer plan amounted to “contempt of court” in its pandering to antidesegregation interests. Delaware State Education Association president Walter A. Young, Jr., considered the plan a clear and obvious attempt to evade the law, discriminatory, and unworkable. The Special Legislative Committee on Desegregation, established by the General Assembly in 1975 and organized to minimize the impact of District Court rulings on suburban districts, also took advantage of the appellate court’s ambiguous ruling to propose what it called a “reverse volunteerism” plan. Under this arrangement, most of the city student population would be transferred to suburban schools unless their parents requested an exemption.90 The voluntary nature

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of the plan, committee members asserted in a contemptuous play on the complaints of school desegregation proponents, was intended to eliminate the punitive aspects of mandatory plans that had been alleged by African American state representative Al O. Plant. “Clearly it is less of a burden on the black student population,” committee attorney James Conaway, Jr., argued cynically, “to bus only those students who desire to attend school in the suburbs.”91

* * * District court judge Murray Schwartz, who assumed jurisdiction over the case, intervened to negate this subversion of the court’s demand for a twoway interdistrict desegregation plan. Appointed to the bench by President Nixon, the Pennsylvania native had served as a clerk for Judge Caleb Wright when Redding first filed suit in 1956. On August 5, 1977, he rejected the state board’s one-way busing plan.92 On the weaknesses of the reverse volunteerism plan, he stressed: The most obvious and significant flaw is that the proposal places the entire burden of the remedy on those whose rights have been violated. . . . One would find it difficult to create a more graphic paradigm of an inequitable remedy than one which assigns to those who have been wronged the responsibility of correcting those wrongs . . .  [N]o white student, suburban or city, would be assigned to a different school district, but every black student in Wilmington would be reassigned.93 Schwartz did allow for a voluntary transfer plan that had been proposed by the General Assembly as a temporary measure and ordered a one-year stay in the implementation of any comprehensive plan. He further instructed the state board to establish the New Castle County Planning Board of Education, known as the New Board, to replace the interim board, which had been unable to agree on a viable plan. The New Board was charged with the responsibility of devising pupil and faculty desegregation plans in accordance with this decision effective in the fall of 1978.94 Despite Schwartz’s best intentions, the New Board was plagued by the same suburban majoritarian biases that had beset the interim board. In policy terms, the New Board’s suburban partiality was most manifest in the

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majority’s endorsement of a variation of the interim board’s modified center plan, which also proposed to assign metropolitan area students to suburban schools for ten years and to city schools for two. This plan—a feigned attempt at equity—proposed to assign students to city schools for two consecutive years. Mary DiVirgilio, who represented the Marshallton-McKean School District and supported busing, and Howell were particularly distressed by the inequities of such a plan, which demanded the closure of all high schools in Wilmington and the predominantly black De La Warr School District, located south of the city. The suburban majority of the New Board also submitted to the court a proposal for a four-area attendance zone—again over Howell and DiVirgilio’s objections—that would divide up the Wilmington School District and recombine its parts with neighboring suburban districts. Stanton Board of Education superintendent George E. Glynn, the architect of the plan, offered no recommendations that required the closure of any suburban school and conceded that his plan was forwarded without any on-site inspections of any of the city schools that the board proposed to close. Newark superintendent Kirk defended the plan as one that would eliminate racially identifiable schools. Howell and DiVirgilio countered that Glynn’s plan was tantamount to eliminating predominantly black schools.95 To counter the suburban partiality of the New Board, Howell submitted an alternative plan, deemed Plan W, to the district court for consideration as part of an effort to advance desegregation and preserve black institutions and leadership that had been so central in black communities. He proposed to transfer suburban students outside their home districts for two to six years; Wilmington students would be bused for eight to ten years. Like the New Board, Howell recognized the need for some school closures. Under his plan, however, schools in the city and in the suburbs would be shut down. Most important, city high schools would remain open as city high schools and not converted to middle school centers, as proposed in the New Board’s plan. In Howell’s assessment, this plan represented a far more equitable approach to desegregation and spread the burdens of reform more evenly between suburban and city residents. Howell stressed that he and others in the black community understood that any desegregation plan would involve some inequalities in the number of schools closed and the years that students were required to be bused across municipal boundaries. The racial demographics of the metropolitan area and the number and location of school facilities demanded that concession. “The question,” Howell asked of Schwartz, “is what price do minority children have to pay for seeking their constitutional rights?”96

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After almost six years of deliberation, an interminable impasse between proponents and opponents of school desegregation, and the continued delay in the implementation of any plan, Schwartz attempted to broker a compromise. He called a secret meeting in late July 1977 to attempt to break the political deadlock. His goal: a desegregation plan that was more comprehensive than what became known as the New Board’s 10–2 plan but less extensive than a single-district option that would require wide-ranging changes in metropolitan area pupil assignments and transportation plans. Murray was concerned about implementing a scheme that assigned too many students to city schools, primarily out of concern about school seating capacity in the Wilmington district. A settlement would avoid more litigation, he contended, and allow everyone to redirect their attention to the matter of education. Counsel for the Wilmington School Board Paul Dimond suggested that the court appoint two officials—one black and one white—to draw up a mutually acceptable plan. To this end, he recommended Kirk and the next Wilmington superintendent, Joseph E. Johnson. The two agreed, and Schwartz put them to work devising a compromise plan that included elements of both suburban and the Wilmington board’s plans. On the way to a compromise, Kirk and Johnson presented Schwartz with their 9–3 Plan three weeks later.97 Schwartz issued his formal opinion affirming the 9–3 Plan early the next year, on January 10, 1978, leaving the finer details to the New Board.98 To suburbanites who had opposed the implementation of any plan and faced the reality that suburban children would be bused into Wilmington, he offered a special message of conciliation: the Court is not totally insensitive  to the dismay and anger experienced by some white citizens who must assume responsibility for violations arising out of discriminatory laws enacted in the past over which they exercised little or no control. However sincere and strongly held, such beliefs fail to recognize that widespread discrimination, sanctioned by law, was practiced in Delaware in contravention of the United States Constitution and that today the effects of that condition persist in the form of separate but equal school systems in the desegregation area in violation of Brown I.99 It was a powerful statement of affirmation for the principle of equity in struggles over civil rights, especially in light of the rising tide of backlash that increasingly equated the advance of reforms with the violation of the legal,

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political, economic, and social rights of whites. In translating Schwartz’s legal ruling into public policies, the state board later adopted a plan that dissolved the Wilmington School Board, divided its district into four parts, and merged those portions with the neighboring suburban districts. The relatively remote Newark School District was connected to a division of Wilmington via the I-95 corridor. All city and suburban teachers were to be reassigned within the newly constituted districts.100 In all, the remedy was a most expansive expression of Brown, beyond the sectional imaginary of de jure segregation, to allegedly de facto forms of school segregation outside the context of Jim Crow. Under pressure from the suburban districts, counsel for the State Board of Education had petitioned the Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third District affirmed the District Court decision on liability. In its appeal, the state board argued that the remedy was administratively and financially onerous. It also cited the Court’s recent decision in Dayton Board of Education v. Brinkman in which the Court invalidated a Dayton desegregation plan on the grounds that the demonstration of racially homogeneous schools did not, on its face, violate the Fourteenth Amendment rights of black students absent a showing of intent to discriminate on the part of school officials. As the first day of the 1978–79 school year approached, Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., in his capacity as circuit justice, issued his decision on whether to grant the State Board of Education a stay of execution for the two-way busing desegregation plan set to begin on September 11. Brennan denied the state board’s application for a stay, arguing that the facts of the Dayton case were “fundamentally different” from the Wilmington case. Echoing the findings of the lower court, he observed that in Delaware— unlike Ohio—segregation was mandated in 1954 and that school segregation was a cooperative exercise involving the city and suburbs.101 He agreed with the lower courts that had concluded that the dual school system had never been eliminated. “Unlike the situation in Dayton, therefore, the record before the Court of Appeals in the instant case was replete with findings justifying,” he asserted, “if not requiring, the extensive inter-district remedy ordered by the District Court.” Here, at once, Brennan both challenged and affirmed the distinctions between the sectional imaginaries of de jure and de facto segregation. In acknowledging the combined records of school and housing discrimination, he cut against the grain of prevailing popular and jurisprudential opinion that attempted to de-link the histories of school and housing discrimination in assessing the legitimacy of segregated school systems that preserved the metropolitan plan. It was indeed possible that the full Court,

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given its growing animosity toward busing, would have overturned the lower courts’ decisions. Still, that Brennan viewed the record of discrimination in Delaware as “different” from cases outside the context of Jim Crow substantiated the ideas of sectional distinctiveness that differentiated the history of school desegregation in the South and border states and the North and West. This logic served to limit the application of a potential Wilmington-style metropolitan remedy in communities that also harbored segregated schools.

* * * In assessing the changing landscape of school segregation in the 1970s, school desegregation proponents adapted their tactics and cited the intersecting networks of discriminatory action in state education and housing policy in their challenge to school segregation in the Wilmington metropolitan area. In their campaign for an interdistrict, metropolitan remedy, school desegregation proponents had secured one of the most comprehensive desegregation plans in the nation’s history. This outcome was, in sum, a most dramatic expansion of the goals of the direct action campaign imagined four decades earlier by the NAACP and the dictates of Brown and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 beyond the geographic and temporal bounds of Jim Crow. In earlier decades, school desegregation proponents’ efforts—which focused on discriminatory pupil assignment policies—helped popularize the sectional imaginary of de jure segregation. Now, they claimed that forms of segregation widely considered de facto—and allegedly rooted in housing factors, personal choice, and impersonal socioeconomic factors—also fell under the rubric of constitutionally suspect institutional arrangements. That the federal courts proved sympathetic and bundled sets of constitutional violations rooted in school and housing policy essentially called into question the distinctions between “southern” and “northern” styles of segregation. Still, reformers were thwarted in their efforts to secure greater equity in the implementation of desegregation policies, especially in the face of a set of organized and powerful suburban interests that were committed to moderating the impact of reform on suburban students and the administrative structures that had governed suburban school districts. Locally, suburban opponents of reform were able to blunt the liberal edge of reform in ways that left school desegregation proponents again wanting for a more equitable outcome to this legal and political process. Even as the New Board finalized its plans in April 1978, Howell continued to oppose the 9–3 Plan in a manner that reflected broad

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concerns within black communities about the impact of white dominance on the remedy formulation process. “[The plan] does as little as necessary to meet the court order,” he complained in a manner that typified black public opinion, as it “places a disproportionate impact on my people.”102 The imbalances, in terms of the burdens shouldered by white and black communities, were significant. Black students were required to spend far more years on buses and travel farther distances than their white peers. This particular metropolitan remedy also led to the erosion of black political power that was made possible—ironically—by increasing levels of segregation in the metropolitan area in the first place. The Wilmington Board of Education, which had been serving city residents since 1834 and had recently become a center of black political power and promised African Americans greater influence over the institutions that served their communities, was dismantled on June 19. Furthermore, Wilmington representatives were rendered minority interests on the newly constituted metropolitan school boards.103 After years of legal and political maneuvering, African Americans had mixed opinions as to the relative merits of these reforms.104 For all the innovation of civil rights attorneys, researcher Jeffrey Raffel found that nearly half of Wilmington blacks opposed (42 percent) or strongly opposed (43 percent) busing in 1977 and 1978. A majority of blacks also believed that desegregation would lead to increases in disciplinary problems, expose students to undue risk on buses, make it difficult for parents to attend to children if they were sick or injured at school, and have a negative effect on after-school activities. Herein lay a fundamental tension in the history of school desegregation wherein African Americans won equality before the law through the artful manipulation of the tropes defining legitimate and illegitimate institutional arrangements but were denied equity in the implementation of remedying public policies. But for the effective litigation campaign and the liberal interventions by the courts, black Wilmingtonians would have been restricted to schools increasingly marked by race and class segregation. In victory, however, African Americans were still rendered minority interests in the new school governing structure and subject to political winds that they understood were, at worst, antithetical to their interests or, at best, unsympathetic.

Chapter 6

“For and Against School Busing”

On March 20, 1972, twenty-nine-year-old attorney and New Castle County councilman Joseph Biden formally announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate. Before an enthusiastic and overflowing crowd in the du Barry Room of the Hotel DuPont in Wilmington, he introduced his family and outlined his political platform. “The [1972] presidential election unfolded,” historian Rick Perlstein has argued, “as a referendum on the meaning of the 1960s”— cynicism versus idealism, insincerity versus authenticity, old versus young, and unethical versus principled. So too did the Senate election in Delaware (although with considerably less animus between the candidates for office). Biden presented himself as an alternative to the status quo, which he argued was personified by Republican incumbent J. Caleb Boggs.1 Careful not to impugn the character of his much-respected opponent, Biden stressed that Boggs was out of touch with voters and lacked the legislative initiative to adequately represent their interests in Congress. Political commentators portrayed Biden as a political long shot in the early months of the campaign, and most considered his opponent’s reelection a certainty. By the end of October, however, a polling firm reported that Biden was running neck and neck with Boggs.2 Political commentator and columnist Bill Frank, who had doubted the merits of Biden’s campaign in March, recognized the changing dynamic of the campaign. “The truth is,” he wrote in June, “the only man who’s going to ruin Biden’s campaign will be Biden himself.”3 School desegregation—and specifically busing—was a particularly important subject of debate during the campaign. Boggs expressed his support for a March 1972 request by Nixon that Congress pass legislation halting all busing orders until July 1, 1973, while the administration worked out the details of a national strategy that would provide substantive alternatives to busing and focus more resources on improving educational opportunities for poor students.4 “I agree with the President,” Boggs said in response to

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questions from a Wilmington paper, “that our most important objective is to improve the quality of education and that it is something we all seek.”5 Biden had a more nuanced position on the matter, designed to challenge a conservative political dogma that was anathema to most civil rights initiatives and liberal doctrine that, he asserted, missed the mark in addressing problems of racial segregation and inequality. In framing his commitment to the ideals of the civil rights movement, he recalled in the early 1990s, “The reason I got into politics was to fight the Strom Thurmonds.”6 To this end, he questioned the motives of busing opponents and charged Republicans with raising the issue as a red herring to gain white votes. He argued that busing programs should be employed to transfer kids from underperforming schools to good schools. Biden opposed, however, efforts to bus children in the interest of racial balance. In this way, the Wilmington Morning News reported, Biden was “for and against school busing.”7 Far from a principled strike at the roots of school segregation, especially as it related to the problem of residential segregation, Biden concluded that busing was a “phony issue that allows the white liberal to sit in suburbia, confident that they are not going to have to live next to a black.”8 If, as Biden also recalled, he had distanced himself from the left wing of the party and those who supported George McGovern in his opposition to busing, his antagonism had its limits.9 In a debate before the Brack-Ex-Rosell Civic Association, Biden joined Boggs in opposition to a constitutional amendment banning busing, as advanced in the U.S. House of Representatives. Indeed, Biden professed his support for the Supreme Court’s decision in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, which supported busing remedies where the courts had found evidence of de jure segregation.10 On his way to an electoral victory, Biden had begun his negotiation of a vexing dilemma that faced many Democrats in the 1970s: how to support a central goal of the Civil Rights Movement—school desegregation—and take into account a rising tide of popular opposition to busing, an increasingly important means of addressing forms of school segregation that marked communities outside the temporal and geographic scope of the Jim Crow South. Sociologist Nathan Glazer captured Biden’s—and liberal Democrats’—dilemma with great precision: “To stand with the courts in their latest decisions is, for liberal Congressmen, political suicide . . . . But if to stand with the further extension to all the Northern cities and suburbs of transportation for desegregation is suicide, how can the liberal Congressmen join with the South and with what they view as Northern bigotry in opposing busing? Is

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there a third position, something which responds to the wave of frustration at court orders, and which does not mean the abandonment of hope for an integrated society?”11 Senator Biden sought to resolve the liberals’ dilemma by embracing the ideal of desegregation and the purportedly colorblind dictates of Brown v. Board of Education. He opposed, however, busing remedies that would broaden the mandates of Brown and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to remedy forms of purportedly de facto school segregation that were products of residential segregation outside the geographic and temporal context of the Jim Crow South. As grassroots opposition to the Wilmington metropolitan remedy mounted, Biden introduced a number of pieces of anti-busing legislation designed to limit the ability of the executive branch and courts to mandate affirmative action policies that advanced reform in communities that maintained segregated schools. Among his numerous arguments, he charged federal authorities with meddling in state and local matters. Biden thus extended a line of arguments that had animated white reaction to race reforms writ large: that civil rights advances—especially in the form of busing—undermined the competing rights of white citizens, especially in matters of education and property. In rationalizing his legislative efforts, Biden also stressed the dichotomous qualities of the sectional imaginaries of de jure and de facto segregation in order to insulate his white suburban constituents from busing programs. He thus cast white Americans as an aggrieved minority and argued that busing remedies deprived them of their rights as defined in—ironically—Brown and the U.S. Constitution. In Biden’s congressional work, we can discern the ways in which local reactions shaped national trends. Earlier chapters explored the advance of school desegregation and contests over the meaning of seminal court rulings and federal legislation in the context of historian Thomas Sugrue’s observation that “the politics of liberalism was ineluctably a politics of place. States and localities became battlegrounds over the meaning and implementation of federal policies.”12 This chapter explores this process as it operated in reverse: how the local struggles over school desegregation found expression in the formulation of national policy. In sum, Biden’s legislative efforts marked a convergence of interests, nominally considered liberal and conservative in modern American political culture, and highlighted the extent to which liberals and Democrats increasingly figured in opposition to the advancement of civil rights reforms in the post-movement era. This was especially so as reformers looked beyond desegregation measures to race

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conscious, affirmative action policies that promised to produce racially mixed classrooms outside the context of Jim Crow.

* * * In 1973 Biden joined a Congress that had developed a considerable record on civil rights in the previous decade. In the years following World War II, the body was nearly immune to the rising tide of reform wrought by the democratic impulses of the war. Southern Democrats, steeped in commitments to white supremacy, and northern Republicans, with their devotion to limited government, exploited the seniority system and the filibuster to turn back anti-lynching legislation and other civil rights measures. The House did pass a poll tax bill in 1949, and, sensing the growing importance of the black vote, a select number of southern Democrats like Senator Lyndon Johnson softened to the idea of legislation—this time in the form of the Civil Rights Act of 1957—that provided for a Civil Rights Commission in the Department of Justice and granted the federal government nominal power to seek injunctions against states perpetuating civil rights violations. The years 1964 to 1968 marked the high point of congressional support for civil rights. Direct action protests in Birmingham, Selma, and dozens of other cities and urban uprisings in northern and western cities prompted Congress to pass legislation that, among other things, banned segregation in public accommodations, forbade discrimination in programs receiving federal money, suspended racially discriminatory literacy tests and other qualifications for voting, and outlawed discrimination in the sale and rental of housing. All this despite recurrent opposition from southern Democrats and a slow retreat, amid a rising chorus of resentment from their white constituents, by northern Democrats and Republicans from the ideals of racial justice.13 If these legislative efforts marked an extension of the spirit of civil rights liberalism and struck profound blows against Jim Crow, Congress still chafed at the Supreme Court’s continued forays into school desegregation matters. This reaction was part of a broader response to the Warren Court’s aggressive defense of individual rights in constitutional and criminal matters and violations of the political-question doctrine, in which the justices weighed in on issues of national security and congressional districting and state legislative apportionment, issues believed to be beyond the purview of the courts. The courts’ demands for color-conscious (as opposed to color-blind) remedies and assertion of the states’ affirmative duties to address racial discrimina-

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Figure 12. Newly elected freshman Senator Joseph Biden, December 12, 1972. Associated Press Photo/Henry Griffin.

tion (as opposed to pledges of nondiscrimination) prompted a particularly pointed reaction from Congress over the judicial branch’s increasing commitment to the defense and expansion of the rights of individuals. The Supreme Court’s decisions in Green v. New Kent County School Board (1968), where it rejected as inadequate freedom of choice plans, Swann v. CharlotteMecklenburg Board of Education (1972), which validated the use of busing to address segregation in public schools, and the Burger Court’s support for racially conscious remedies proved particularly irksome for many members of Congress. Further fueling the fires of congressional reaction, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) appeared poised, after it rejected freedom of choice plans as legitimate means of furthering desegregation, to begin developing increasingly aggressive guidelines that demanded actual results.14 Biden spent his first year in the Senate familiarizing himself with its rules and norms. By 1974, however, the matter of busing came to the fore and he was presented with his first opportunity to establish himself on the topic. The Supreme Court, in Keyes v. School District No. 1 (1973), had for the first time ruled on the problem of segregation in a northern community, and the

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decision raised the possibility of more judicial scrutiny of segregated schools in communities outside the South. Southern racial conservatives continued their push to limit the application of remedies to communities that maintained segregated schools. In this evolving legal context, their efforts gained increasing sympathy from their northern colleagues, especially as Congress set to reauthorizing the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). The House passed its version of the education bill on March 27 that contained a number of amendments limiting the application of busing programs in public school systems.15 The Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee reported its version of the bill soon thereafter with language that also barred the use of busing when “the time or distance involved was so great as to risk the health of the children or to impinge significantly on the education process.”16 During five days of debate on the bill in the Senate, the body voted on and adopted a number of amendments designed to restrict the use of busing in pupil assignment policies. With a few exceptions, Biden voted in support of every anti-busing amendment. He did oppose, however, a reopener provision introduced by Edward J. Gurney (R-Fl.). Southern congressmen prized this rider because it would have permitted communities that had maintained Jim Crow schools as a matter of law and were under court-ordered desegregation orders to return to court and have their busing mandates possibly vacated if such plans did not conform with the time and distance prescriptions of this new legislation. A measure tabling the Gurney amendment passed by one vote. Biden supported a compromise amendment, offered by majority leader Mike Mansfield (D-Mont.) and minority leader Hugh Scott (R-Pa.). Both Mansfield and Scott had assumed leadership positions in the passage of the civil rights bill. Mansfield had been largely responsible for shepherding the bill through the Senate, and Scott had played an instrumental role in ensuring bipartisan support for the measure and refuting southern Democratic misrepresentations of the legislation. In defense of their hard-fought legislative achievement, their amendment asserted the right of students to attend the schools nearest their homes while affirming the primacy of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. The final version of the education bill, as passed by the full Congress and signed by President Gerald Ford, contained a mishmash of often contradictory provisions. It declared as federal policy that all children were entitled to equal educational opportunities and affirmed the authority of the courts and the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. The bill also contained, among other things, provisions limiting the use of federal

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funds for busing to overcome racial imbalances and prohibiting the courts from ordering busing until all other remedies had been exhausted. That Congress included language acknowledging the court’s ultimate authority in cases where the rights of minority students were infringed upon limited the legislation’s effect on the courts. The most dramatic impact of the legislation concerned HEW’s ability to enforce desegregation mandates, even if the agency had rarely invoked its power to cut off funds to school districts that violated the 1964 Civil Rights Act.17

* * * After the public lambasting at the Krebs School meeting described in the introduction to this book, Biden returned to the Senate a chastened man, determined to make a forceful intervention into the busing debates. His freshman Republican colleague from North Carolina, Jesse Helms, launched the first broadside against busing in the form of a limitation rider to the 1976 HEW appropriations bill on September 17, 1975, and this set the context within which Biden was to subsequently attempt to forward his own anti-busing measures. Since the 1960s, Helms had established himself as a staunch opponent of an evolving civil rights agenda. Helms had roundly opposed any federal effort to further school desegregation in his home state of North Carolina and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.18 In carefully eschewing baser arguments about black difference and inequality, he railed against forced integration, an artful rhetorical device that linked him to an evolving national coalition of foes of racial reforms and suggested a certain coercive power inherent in civil rights reforms that undermined whites’ rights.19 Helms was unabashed in his assertion that the purpose of his amendment was “to put an end to the current blight on American education that is generally referred to as ‘forced busing.’ ” In detailing the rationale for his anti-busing measure, Helms contended that this rider was designed as a broader check on the power of a centralized, federal bureaucracy and a means of returning the control of schools to local units of government. And given the social disruptions, necessity of National Guard intervention, and popular outcry he alleged were prompted by busing in communities across the nation, he proposed his own final solution: “stop forced busing and stop it now.”20 To further bolster his case, Helms tapped into a growing disaffection with school desegregation within the black community, as expressed by black columnist William Raspberry, a frequent critic of busing. In a Washington

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Post column, which Helms asked be entered into the Congressional Record, Raspberry lamented the erosion of public order related to the busing programs in Boston and Louisville and wondered aloud whether the NAACP’s continued efforts to eliminate racially identifiable schools were desirable in the post-Jim Crow context if such schools were functions of allegedly innocuous racial neighborhood patterns.21 Helms’s primary target was Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the provision that gave the federal government the authority to extend or withhold funds to local municipalities to promote desegregation in their school districts. In order to thwart further efforts to advance desegregation, the Helms amendment contained language designed to prohibit the executive branch from leveraging its power to disperse federal education funding to require any school or school system to adopt measures to advance desegregation. Helms’s animosity for Title VI was such that the senator even proposed, as a means of hobbling the federal government, to forbid classification of teachers and students by race or maintaining records of the racial makeup of school systems.22 With no empirical proof of segregation or discrimination, the government would be effectively precluded from formulating any remedy. Liberal supporters of busing roundly criticized the Helms amendment on the grounds that its restriction of the means of enforcing civil rights laws amounted to a wholesale assault on desegregation itself. Massachusetts Republican senator Edward Brooke, one of the most outspoken supporters of school desegregation, emerged as his primary critic. In his 1960 run for the office of secretary of state, Brooke had expressed regret that so much attention was being paid to the passage of federal civil rights legislation when the nation could look to the U.S. Constitution, which already affirmed the principles of liberty and freedom.23 A decade and a half later, he took a very different position on the importance of federal civil rights legislation. Brooke argued that the Helms amendment would not only thwart busing, a means of advancing school desegregation, but undermine the monitoring and enforcement functions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He reminded the Senate of the constitutional grounds of HEW’s investigative processes and enforcement authority under Title VI: “The standards set forth in these guidelines particularly as they relate to school districts’ ‘affirmative duty’ to desegregate, track closely controlling constitutional principles as enunciated by the Supreme Court in school desegregation cases. Moreover, a later amendment to the 1964 act suggests that standards for compliance with Title VI are substantially coextensive with constitutional requirements under the 14th amendment.”24

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Brooke was particularly critical of Helms’s proposed prohibition on maintaining racial and ethnic data on schools: “how does one prove the existence of discrimination,” he asked rhetorically, “if there is no requirement that records be kept?” Busing, Brooke also reminded his colleagues, was only one of many constitutional tools that school districts had at their disposal, and for all the anti-busing fervor it was a remedy of a particularly low order. The ESEA, he noted, mandated that school districts pursue other means first. If the Helms amendment passed, in sum, it would undermine the government’s ability to address a broad range of discriminatory acts. Brooke concluded, “this is not a wolf in sheep’s clothing; this is a wolf in wolves’ clothing.”25 Brooke subsequently offered a motion to table the Helms amendment, which was agreed to by a 48–43 vote.26 His effort was certainly a setback for antibusing forces. The narrow margin of defeat, as compared to previous votes on similar limitation riders, however, suggested waning support for busing in the Senate. Biden took the narrow defeat of the Helms amendment as an opportunity to introduce a more moderate anti-busing amendment that he believed would be more attractive to racial moderates, many of whom were also under growing pressure from grassroots anti-busing interests in their own districts and who were looking for an opportunity to express their opposition to busing without contravening the Fourteenth Amendment or scrapping the Civil Rights Act of 1964 altogether. To this end, Biden introduced himself as a principled supporter of the Helms amendment and conceded, “I am sure it comes as a surprise to some of my colleagues . . . that a Senator with a voting record such as mine stands up and supports, at least in principle, an amendment on the question of busing offered by a Senator with the voting record such as that of the Senator from North Carolina.” Helms quipped with playful senatorial grace, “The Senator from North Carolina welcomes the Senator from Delaware to the ranks of the enlightened.”27 Then Biden explained his change of heart. He presented himself as an opponent of a number of anti-busing amendments and expressed his discomfort with the means—via increasing numbers of limitation riders, which proscribed expenditures for regulatory activities or for enforcement of particular rules— by which anti-busing provisions were forwarded.28 Biden complained that the matter of busing should have been subjected to more substantive debate and an up or down vote, as would take place in the consideration of any public bill. He continued, “I have become convinced that busing is a bankrupt concept that, in fact, does not bear any of the fruit for which it was

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designed.” In his first extended elaboration on the matter of busing on the Senate floor, Biden presented it as a red herring, arguing that it served only to distract the Senate from the essential goal of equal opportunity in education for all Americans. The junior senator admonished his colleagues to reject busing and direct their attention instead to far more important issues of opportunity and access in the realms of housing, employment, credit, and voting rights that, he contended, had been the main focus of racial liberals. Theses “real issues” should be the Senate’s focus, not busing, which, he concluded, had the paradoxical effect of intensifying racial tensions instead of encouraging reconciliation.29 If Biden had expressed his principal agreement with Helms, he still offered a narrower busing prohibition that he believed would be attractive to those who opposed the Helms amendment. Like the Helms amendment, Biden’s amendment proposed to prohibit the use of federal funds to assign teachers or students to schools, classes, or courses based on race. His intent, however, was to more acutely focus on busing. In contrast to Helms, Biden sought to preserve the federal government’s recordkeeping authority and use of racial classifications. He also stressed that his amendment would not preclude court-ordered busing—an interesting admission of a certain incongruity between his legislative efforts and the concerns of his white constituents who were concerned about an impending court-ordered busing mandate. Still, Biden shared Helms’s concerns and those of a growing chorus of consternation about what they perceived as the increasingly arbitrary power of federal bureaucrats to interfere in the affairs of local communities that had been enabled by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. His amendment would prevent HEW from demanding busing, he contended in a swipe at federal bureaucrats, “according to some HEW formula which is somehow supposed to provide for a better educational opportunity for young people.”30 Under questioning from his Senate colleagues seeking clarification on his intent, he conceded that his amendment would repeal Title VI. That Biden and other school desegregation opponents targeted Title VI was ironic. During deliberation on the civil rights bill in 1963, Congress was particularly focused on the extent to which the bill would address the problem of racial imbalances outside the bounds of Jim Crow. The broader implications of Title VI went largely unexplored, especially by non-southerners. Furthermore, HEW had rarely exercised its authority under Title VI in the years following passage of the historic legislation, especially in cities. It was only after civil rights groups sued HEW that the agency began leveraging its power of the purse in the

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early 1970s. And even then, HEW primarily focused on higher education desegregation. While he agreed with his questioners that his amendment did not prohibit court-ordered busing, Biden did admit, in a subtle allusion to the growing depths of his opposition to any busing remedy, that he had not figured out a way to prevent such outcomes.31 As he had with the Helms amendment, Brooke targeted the Biden amendment on the grounds it would do exactly what Biden intended: nullify Title VI. Brooke called the Biden amendment deceptive in that it went beyond the problem of forced busing that many believed was so contemptible. He contended that Biden’s amendment was dangerous because it demanded proscriptions beyond limitations on busing and effectively removed all the means available to HEW to enforce Title VI and advance school desegregation under the Civil Rights Act. It removed all remedies involving school assignments. Brooke also questioned the soundness and sincerity of this legislative effort, particularly as Biden attempted to privilege equal opportunity over school desegregation. Foregrounding another line of criticism of Biden, he contended that his colleague’s purported concerns about equal education could only be addressed via different legislative means in that it required Congress’s appropriation of actual funds, not demanding limitations on executive authority. In a final comment, Brooke alluded to the growing rift between the civil rights establishment and its evolving agenda and the liberal members of the civil rights coalition who were increasingly opposed to race conscious remedies to segregation. Brooke expressed faint sympathy for Helms given his long-standing antipathy toward civil rights advances. He reserved particular disapproval for Biden, however, who sought to undermine the means of enforcing civil rights legislation under the professed guise of supporting civil rights and equal educational opportunities. Playing on Biden’s latent liberalism, Brooke concluded, “I do not think the Senator intends to do what his amendment would accomplish.”32 In his opposition to busing, Biden also attempted to redirect the debate toward what he believed was a constitutional problem inherent in the busing controversy: the federal government had exceeded its authority under Brown, adopted a more affirmative definition of desegregation, and elided the distinction between legally suspect and innocuous forms of segregation.33 Biden had thus begun the process of resuscitating a variation of southern conservative doctrine that had been developed in the previous decade and a half in order to delineate the limits of reform. After the South Carolina case Briggs v. Elliott had been remanded to the district court in 1955,

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conservative judge John J. Parker issued his decision that according to historian Richard Kluger “set a standard for evasiveness by school districts across the South.” Writing on behalf of the court, Parker acknowledged that Brown was the new law of the land and conceded the point that states were denied the right to segregate students according to race. In defining the state’s future responsibilities in this new jurisprudential context, however, Parker also set new limits on the meaning of Brown, advancing the complementary idea that neither Brown nor the Constitution demanded the active desegregation of schools. The law merely forbade the government from discriminating on the basis of race in pupil assignment policies and enforcing segregation. In delineating the parameters of the state’s negative and affirmative responsibilities under the law, Parker had made a legal distinction between desegregation (defined in the negative sense as prohibiting states from maintaining segregated schools) and integration (which demanded the state take positive steps to ensure mixed-race classrooms). The Parker doctrine subsequently served as the legal grounds for freedom of choice plans that states deployed to maintain all but token levels of desegregation in the decade following Brown.34 In highlighting what be believed was the constitutional distinction between desegregation and integration, Biden also endeavored to reinvigorate distinct notions of the sectional imaginaries of de jure and de facto segregation, infused into recent civil rights legislation by northern congressmen who had sought to exempt their constituents from the reforms demanded by the civil rights bill as it advanced through the House of Representatives in 1963. There, Representative William McCulloch (R-Oh.) offered an amendment deleting references to racial imbalance—and by implication the discrepancies between the racial makeup of schools and the demographics of surrounding communities outside the Jim Crow South—from Title III of the bill. The federal government subsequently targeted southern school districts that had maintained de jure segregated schools with considerable effect. This measure effectively restricted the Office of Education to offering technical and financial assistance to address school desegregation in the Jim Crow South. Northern and western communities that maintained allegedly de facto segregated schools thus earned a collective exemption from federal intervention after President Johnson signed the bill into law on July 2, 1964.35 If Biden stressed the need for greater educational opportunities for black and disadvantaged students as an alternative to busing, his critics continued to raise the kinds of questions Brooke had asked about Congress’s commitment to compensatory education as an alternative to desegregation and al-

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luded to the body’s shallow commitment to devoting the requisite resources to address the institutionalized inequalities between school systems that served white and black students. William Hathaway (D-Me.) questioned the wisdom of Biden’s amendment that, he observed, lacked provisions that would ensure equal educational opportunities for students in disadvantaged school districts. Hinting at possible support for a different path, he noted, “90 percent of those of us who are supporting busing are open to any suggestions that would better accomplish the purpose that we all seek of getting equal educational opportunities. But unless somebody comes up with something other than just abandoning busing, I do not think it will be met very sympathetically.” In the face of such questions, Biden conceded that concrete alternatives could not be included in the amendment. Indeed, appropriationbased legislation empowered senators only to propose prohibitions on expenditures for specified regulatory activity. Senate rules precluded senators from attaching legislation to appropriations bills that would have demanded the ends alluded to by Hathaway. “It seems to me the alternative is to say when we eliminate busing as a proposal,” Biden countered, “what we do to see that there is equal opportunity is we increase spending for education; we increase the enforcement muscle of EEOC; we increase housing opportunities.”36 Senator Lowell Weicker (R-Conn.) offered a more historically specific critique of Biden’s rhetorical position on compensatory educational funding when the Senate resumed its debate on the education appropriations bill the next morning. He reminded his colleagues that he had proposed an amendment the previous year that would have appropriated $2.3 billion to be used to enrich the building and staffing of disadvantaged school districts to avoid the problem of separate and unequal schools. Weicker also noted that for all the enthusiastic cosponsors of his measure, there was little tangible support for provisions that would have funded this initiative. “As I have said many times,” he complained, “what [busing opponents] cannot have is your prejudices and your wallets intact. Something has to give. Nobody wants to suggest a price—only yelling and screaming at the courts or at HEW.” Notwithstanding Biden’s passionate defense of his civil rights record and concerns about disparities between schools, Weicker emphatically asserted that the junior senator’s amendment “does not build one new school, does not create one new program, does not hire one additional teacher. It does none of these things, which are what has to be done if we wanted to find a solution other than busing. All it does, as everything else that is being said in the

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country today, is say no—we do not like the courts, or in effect, we do not like the Constitution, we do not like the law of the land.”37

* * * If Biden’s efforts reflected the concerns of his white constituents and a certain sympathy toward a rising chorus of opposition to the advance of school desegregation, they also marked his growing rift with the mainstream civil rights community that was committed to broadening the mandate of Brown and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Continuing the line of arguments introduced by Brooke, civil rights advocates—both within and outside the government— lamented Biden’s efforts to strip the federal government of its ability to enforce civil rights laws under the authority of Title VI. Arthur S. Flemming, chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, charged in a statement requested by minority leader Hugh Scott (R-Pa.) that “The Biden Amendment is unquestionably the most sweeping attack on a civil rights act passed by the Senate in recent years.” He questioned the constitutionality of the amendment, claiming that it would strip HEW of its authority to enforce federal law, and charged that the amendment would invalidate an essential administrative procedure that was designed in part to lessen the burden on an already overburdened judiciary.38 Roy Wilkins, chairman of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), admonished the Senate to reject this legislation. Notwithstanding that HEW had rarely moved to withhold federal funds from school districts to promote desegregation, LCCR counsel Joseph Rauh, Jr., asserted that preservation of HEW authority in these matters was essential. Civil rights organizations, he noted, had brought suit against HEW to compel local districts to desegregate schools, and such suits produced orders that had broad application across the South. Another suit was working its way through the court that Rauh predicted could affect thirty-three northern states. If not for HEW’s ability to affect wideranging reforms, he asserted, school desegregation proponents would have to initiate individual suits in each offending district. Peter Holmes, director of the HEW Office of Civil Rights, charged that as a practical matter the Biden amendment would hamstring an ongoing effort in Ferndale, Michigan, where the department currently withheld federal funds from a local district that maintained attendance zones that had perpetuated fifty years of racial segregation in its elementary schools. He noted that Biden’s reference to pupil assignments—as opposed to busing—would preclude HEW from acting here, even though HEW’s desegregation order in Ferndale involved no buses.39

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That a majority in the Senate affirmed Biden’s amendment by a vote of 50–43 further testified to a rising tide of anti-busing sentiment. Helms, in particular, recognized this trend when he suggested that the passage of Biden’s amendment “shows that even some ‘liberal’ senators are getting the word from back home about forced busing.”40 The Senate vote to attach Biden’s amendment to its Labor-HEW appropriations bill further marked a new consensus among the three branches of the federal government that busing was an illegitimate means of advancing school desegregation in the mid-1970s. The Supreme Court had issued its first decision in contravention to Brown in Milliken v. Bradley in 1974. President Nixon had long established his anti-busing bona fides. In Congress, majorities in the House had regularly passed anti-busing limitation riders in previous years, only to have them blocked by Senate liberals.41 With the passage of the Biden amendment, the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal noted, “That protective Senate majority has vanished.”42 Senate liberals, in particular, recognized this. In the debates over the 1963 civil rights bill, Hubert Humphrey (D-Minn.) had defended the necessity of Title VI. Still, the longtime civil rights advocate noted that “The message is that the Senate, the last bastion of civil rights support, has now joined the President and the House in opposing desegregation of towns and cities across the North and West.”43 Biden was not assured that his amendment would get out of committee, and he came under more criticism from busing supporters. When the appropriations committee resumed business the next day, Scott and Humphrey offered an amendment that would have effectively nullified Biden’s anti-busing amendment. Like Brooke had the previous day, Scott expressed his criticism of Biden’s amendment on the grounds it promised to enfeeble HEW’s authority under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to enforce federal desegregation laws. And he was particularly concerned about the means with which this was done and the attack on busing through the biannual appropriations process. Scott and Humphrey offered, instead, an amendment with a decidedly pro-busing tone that demanded HEW allocate or withhold federal funds in a manner consistent with the principles enshrined in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments and Title VI.44 Under growing criticism from busing supporters, Biden did offer to remove the phrase “or other educational institution” to avoid any unintentional impact on colleges or universities. He also offered to remove “teachers or” and “classes or courses” to avoid the chance his amendment might sanction segregation within schools. This act of conciliation,

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however, only provoked conservatives such as Helms who insisted on a much stronger anti-busing amendment.45 Emboldened by his legislative achievement—but still on the defensive— Biden continued to stress his commitment to desegregation and quality education for all students after the Senate adjourned for the weekend. In an interview with Raspberry, he continued to argue that busing was not the solution to the problem of school segregation and stressed the constitutional distinction between desegregation and integration. He also cited increasing frustration within black communities with the protracted pace of school desegregation. In this way, Biden attempted to link his opposition to school desegregation outside the context of Jim Crow with growing black support for community control over public institutions that primarily served their communities and dissatisfaction with public policies that demeaned black authority and the historically black institutions that had been central to the education of black children. In an awkward reference to the body of social science literature produced by James Coleman and his contemporaries, Biden asserted, “What they [supporters of reform] are saying is that your black, curly-haired son has to be in the class with my white, straight-haired one before he can get a decent education.”46 Building on the inroads made by Biden, Senator Robert Byrd intervened the next week and offered an even more pointed anti-busing rider to the HEW appropriations bill. The West Virginia Democrat had once been a member of the Ku Klux Klan and personally held the floor for fourteen hours during the 83-day filibuster against the civil rights bill. He had since begun to distance himself from that past and supported the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968. Through a crafty legislative maneuver that was reminiscent of his efforts to thwart the Civil Rights Act, however, Byrd offered a perfecting amendment to the Biden amendment and held the floor through September 23 until the Senate yielded to an up or down vote on his amendment.47 As entered into the Congressional Record, Byrd’s amendment read: “None of the funds appropriated by this act shall be expended to require, directly or indirectly, the transportation of any student to a school other than the school which is nearest the student’s home, and which offers the courses of study pursued by such student, in order to comply with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”48 In contrast to the Biden amendment, which focused on student assignments, the Byrd amendment focused on conveying students from their home to their school. Byrd found the impetus for this legislative intervention in the social disruptions wrought by busing. The violence surround-

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ing busing controversies in Boston and Louisville stood, for him, as prime examples of massive busing gone wrong. He also cited a recent Gallup Poll that concluded that while a majority of Americans believed in integration, few believed that busing was the appropriate means of achieving this end. Like Biden, Byrd attempted to redirect the Senate’s attention to what he believed was the root of this public policy dilemma: American children of all races—and disadvantaged children in particular—were not getting a quality education. In another purported projection of Brown, Byrd latched onto the part of Chief Justice Earl Warren’s decision that emphasized the importance of education in contemporary America. Byrd recited some of Warren’s words: “it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity . . . is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.”49 The crux of that problem, as he saw it, lay in the configuration of school financing, which perpetuated inequalities between wealthy and disadvantaged districts; busing was not the solution to this. Byrd’s most forceful critique of busing, however, lay in an artful embrace of the sectional imaginaries of de jure and de facto segregation and the color-blind principles he ascribed to Brown. The Court had condemned discrimination in 1954 but failed to forthrightly address the constitutionality of racial classifications. In this legal void, Brown was for many, as legal scholar Andrew Kull has noted, a “blank slate on which the Court and its commentators might thereafter write a changing constitutional law, supplying the missing rationale in consequence of what later cases [and federal legislation] appeared to require.”50 Thus the West Virginian attempted to rework the ever-contested meaning of Brown as a decision that legitimized desegregation as a remedy to segregation born of the Jim Crow but prohibited race-conscious busing programs designed to promote racial balance outside the context of Jim Crow. Byrd acknowledged that the separate but equal doctrine was inherently unequal and worthy of indictment. Brown, in the senator’s assessment, thus rendered race a constitutionally impermissible standard by which students could be assigned to schools. Busing, Byrd stressed, was an affront to this principle. In the Green, Keyes, and Swann decisions, he contended, the Supreme Court had resurrected race as a factor in pupil assignment plans and thus overreached Brown’s mandate and set the nation on the wrong track. The courts, he contended, no longer demanded evidence of purposeful discrimination or the denial of equal protection of the law; they required only cursory evidence of segregated schools to make a determination of constitutional violation and thus turned the original

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meaning of the historic decision on its head. In another indication of the rising tide of reaction against school desegregation, the Senate voted 51-45 in favor of the Byrd amendment.51 Doggedly determined, as William Raspberry wryly noted, to “establish a ‘good guy’ position against busing,” Biden then offered another anti-busing rider to the HEW appropriations bill. Seeming to take into account many of his critics’ points, this amendment narrowly targeted the means of transportation—busing—rather than roundly forbidding all desegregation remedies. It also took care to affirm the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments and Title VI. Biden also made sure that his measure made allowances for HEW to withhold federal funds if so ordered by the federal courts.52 Conservatives took exception to what they considered was now a weaker amendment than that originally proposed. Helms criticized Biden’s focus on transportation as functionally irrelevant: “The provisio in the amendment is meaningless, because courts and HEW do not order the transportation of students to schools by race. They order the assignment of students to schools by race.” Recognizing a giant loophole in Biden’s second amendment, Helms noted sarcastically, “It would suit the bureaucrats if the children had to walk across town just so the bureaucrats have their way.”53 Conservative senator James Allen (DAla.) moved to table Biden’s amendment, but his motion was rejected by nine votes, and the Senate subsequently approved this third amendment to the HEW appropriations bill by an even wider margin in a 44–34 vote.54 Over continued objections of busing advocates Brooke and Weicker, the Senate approved the omnibus education bill—along with Biden and Byrd’s anti-busing limitation riders—on September 26, 1975, by an overwhelming 60–18 vote. Biden must have been disappointed when his two amendments were dropped from the final bill after the House-Senate Conference met to work out the differences between their different versions of legislation. The Byrd amendment survived subsequent House and Senate actions and a presidential veto, however, to become law on January 27, 1976.55 Still, Biden took great pride in his anti-busing advocacy and the sum of his remarks spoke to the growing rift between the civil rights establishment and white liberals. In an interview with Eric Wentworth of the Washington Post, Biden stressed that he was convinced that there was even greater opposition to busing within the Senate, given that many liberals had been locked into a pro-busing position despite private concerns about the merits of this remedy. He did express faint sympathy for the concerns of the civil rights community about the broader consequences of his anti-busing position.

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Given the government’s weak support of civil rights protections in areas such as housing, he conceded in a stunning admission, “The black community justifiably is jittery.” Still, he asserted, “I think what I’ve done inadvertently . . . is, I’ve made it—if not respectable—I’ve made it reasonable for longstanding liberals to begin to raise the questions I’ve been the first to raise in the liberal community here on the floor.” He went further to predict that more liberals would see the light. Biden conceded that his simultaneous support for civil rights and opposition to busing had led to “repeated misunderstandings.” Still, he asserted that he opposed assignment policies that undermined the neighborhood school and rejected the notion, as articulated in Milliken, that suburban schools should have to shoulder the burden of actively desegregating the nation’s schools, especially if the courts had not found them guilty of maintaining segregated schools through discriminatory pupil assignment policies. Biden reiterated his support for court-ordered busing if necessary. However, he also expressed the desire to pursue further legislation that would bar busing where segregation resulted from housing discrimination. His support of the limitation rider to the HEW appropriations bill, he concluded, was but a means to that end.56

* * * In 1977 Biden was faced with two impending challenges. First, the freshman senator had to prepare for his first reelection campaign. The Republican nominee and downstate farmer James H. Baxter charged that Biden, as correspondent Jules Witcover observed, “was too liberal for Delaware.” Biden anticipated such criticism and continued to advance his previous arguments: that he was a strong supporter of civil rights but unyieldingly opposed busing and that desegregation was justified while busing programs to advance racial balance were unwarranted. Second, despite repeated appeals in the remedial phase of the Wilmington metropolitan school segregation case, it was increasingly evident that Wilmington would be subject to a court-ordered metropolitan desegregation plan. Biden thus broadened his anti-busing agenda along two fronts. He continued the first line of attack on busing through the annual appropriations process, this time in collaboration with Senator Thomas Eagleton (D-Mo.) who was also a longtime supporter of civil rights but a busing opponent.57 His constituents in the Kansas City School District were under the threat of an HEW-ordered busing program

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that was designed to address the increasing racial isolation of the city’s black students. The House had approved a measure by a 75–vote margin that included the language contained in the original Byrd amendment restricting the use of federal funds to compel local districts to transport students beyond the school closest to their home. The measure also contained language that prohibited the use of federal funds for non-transportation-related measures that promoted racial balance in schools. The Senate Appropriations Committee reported its version of the bill on June 21, and Biden and Eagleton cosponsored a rider with language that likewise targeted non-transportationrelated remedies for segregated schools. Now tacking to the right of Byrd in his previous legislative effort, Biden and Eagleton set their sights on legislation that promised to significantly narrow the parameters of pupil assignment schemes that could be forced upon local communities by federal authorities and proposed to close what they perceived as a major loophole in the West Virginia senator’s amendment. Byrd’s amendment, they recognized, forbade the transportation of students to schools beyond those nearest their homes. Biden and Eagleton’s amendment thus intended to prohibit the use of other desegregation techniques that did not necessarily require buses and that they believed enabled end runs around busing prohibitions, like clustering and pairing. Under these arrangements, school officials could affect integration in schools between contiguous or noncontiguous zones through reassignment of all students to certain facilities that accommodated, for example, grades K–3 and 4–6.58 During two days of contentious floor debates, the cosponsors of the anti-busing legislation spelled out their rationale. Eagleton made it clear that their amendment was designed to prohibit HEW intervention of the kind that promoted desegregation in local communities. In hyperbolic language suggestive of biblical curses, he warned that such measures threatened to spread like a plague and promised great damage in communities where implemented. And in delineating the constitutional grounds for his anti-busing position, he cited the Court’s decision in Milliken, which exempted suburban communities outside the context of Jim Crow from the kinds of desegregation plans that HEW had planned for Kansas City. Eagleton went on to predict that such policies would lead to less integration, not more, and thus should be abandoned.59 Biden, for his part, continued to rail against what he perceived as the excesses of the federal bureaucracy in support of this amendment. To the opponents of this legislation, he noted, “That you think, absent a court order, a bureaucrat downtown or out in the district can make a judgment that there is a con-

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stitutional violation that exists. I say to you that the only person who should be able to make that decision is a duly constituted Federal court.” Biden also evoked the sectional imaginary of divergent forms of segregation that were constitutionally suspect and beyond the purview of the federal government to remedy, stressing the distinctions between the kinds of de jure segregation that marked southern communities during the Jim Crow era and the current situation of allegedly de facto segregation in many northern communities. “They are completely different living patterns,” he concluded.60 Biden then warned, in a manner that seemed to bow to white opposition while almost ignoring altogether the constitutional stakes at issue, of the often intense and increasing backlash against busing: “People are beginning to get fed up and when, in fact, you lose the basic support of that so-called great unwashed middle class—of which I am a part—you are not going to get any social policy in this Nation to continue to move.”61 Once again, over the objections of busing supporters like Brooke who now found himself in the awkward position of supporting the more moderate language of the Byrd amendment as a progressive alternative to the Eagleton-Biden amendment, a majority in the Senate voted in support of the measure that broadened proscriptions against HEW and prohibited the use of public funds in support of clustering and pairing measures that would further school desegregation. The bill was then ready to be delivered to President Jimmy Carter for his signature. During his presidential campaign, Carter had expressed support for integrated education and considered HEW’s enforcement authority under the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a great means of advancing progress in the South. He also opposed the ratification of any anti-busing constitutional amendment. A New South governor, Carter had won the presidency with an overwhelming majority of the black vote. Carter had also appointed Joseph Califano, a firm supporter of integration, as HEW secretary and he set the agency, at least initially, on a path of firm enforcement in school desegregation matters. As to the president’s record on civil rights, Carter won from Congress the authority to implement a government reorganization plan that centralized the enforcement of civil rights polices, supported minority hiring practices of the kind that originated in the Philadelphia Plan, and extended minority set-asides in government procurement. Still, the administration voiced no opposition to the anti-busing provisions that were contained in the appropriations bill, and Carter indicated on June 16, 1977, that he would sign the bill. In the face of a rising tide of white reaction, the administration had assumed the

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position that school desegregation was essentially a matter to be decided by the federal courts and affirmed Congress’s intention to further limit HEW’s ability to demand the desegregation of metropolitan area schools.62

* * * On a second front, Biden struck out at the federal courts in a manner that more directly addressed the impending court-ordered busing plan in Wilmington and that addressed an incongruity between his congressional legislative work that targeted executive action and the court-driven school desegregation controversies in the Wilmington metropolitan area. Now he tailored his efforts to reverse—or at least delay—the court-ordered, interdistrict metropolitan busing remedy in Wilmington that was set to begin in September 1977. Biden and the senior Republican senator from Delaware, William Roth, cosponsored bill S.1651 on May 18 and the measure was subsequently referred to the Committee on the Judiciary. As framed in the bill’s title, the measure was ostensibly designed “to insure equal protection of the laws as guaranteed by the fifth or fourteenth amendments to the Constitution of the United States.” For all its egalitarian premise, the measure was a color-blind assault on school desegregation and reflected Biden’s commitment to reifying the sectional imaginaries of de jure and de facto segregation in order to limit the authority of the federal courts to order busing remedies beyond the bounds of Jim Crow, particularly in cases where predominantly white suburban communities—in Wilmington and elsewhere—were threatened with court-ordered interdistrict busing programs. Roth and Biden sought this end by establishing a number of new evidentiary standards and procedural rules that would make it more difficult for the courts to find evidence of constitutional violation in districts accused of maintaining segregated schools. As detailed in five sections, the bill raised the bar in school desegregation cases and precluded the courts from directly or indirectly ordering the transportation of students unless it determined that districts had expressly intended to discriminate against black students in the formulation of assignment policies. Biden and Roth proposed an additional step in the remediation process, in effect requiring a three-judge panel review of all transportation orders to ensure greater uniformity in the school desegregation process. S.1651 also proposed, in the spirit of Milliken, to restrict transportation schemes to the particular schools in which the constitutional violation was found and forbade more

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extensive relief that would include districts not determined to have violated the law. It also demanded that any court order be stayed until all appeals in connection with the order had been exhausted.63 Biden and Roth’s efforts were by no means the first time Congress had attempted to limit the authority of the courts in school desegregation matters. Congress had enacted two measures under the Education Amendments of 1972 and the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974 that targeted the authority of the courts. The first measure postponed busing orders until the litigants had exhausted all appeals. The second established remedial priorities in desegregation cases and set busing at the bottom of that list. The courts determined later, however, that neither legislative restriction applied to judicial decisions involving cases of de jure segregation. Judging the inadequacy of these previous measures, Roth and Biden sought to correct the perceived imbalance of power between the branches of the federal government and Congress’s alleged passivity in the previous decade and reassert upper house authority in federal interpretations of the equal protection clause, especially with regard to education. In the first round of hearings in mid-June, Biden emerged as the more active and engaged cosponsor of this legislation. Alluding to the balancing act he was again engaged in, he stressed, “I see the trend among my fellow citizens of viewing Federal court decisions as irrational, capricious, and incomprehensible as a threat to the very fabric of our society, and more directly, as the most serious threat to the continuation of the civil rights movement in America.”64 The court’s expanded definition of segregation—in a manner that undermined the sectional imaginaries to include those beyond official acts of segregation—and its focus on areas outside the Jim Crow South best personified these threats. To this end, Biden repeatedly noted that S.1651 was intended to address the excesses of recent desegregation jurisprudence, not reverse the tide of reform altogether.65 Roth and Biden presented their bill as a conservative measure—a means of merely reinforcing prevailing school desegregation jurisprudence that acknowledged the de jure–de facto distinction—and reinvigorated these sectional imaginaries as distinct legal concepts. To this end, they argued that S.1651 fit squarely within the liberal tradition of activists who initiated challenges to segregated schools and affirmed the core tenets of Brown. Roth acknowledged that Brown was established law and the principles contained therein enjoyed wide public support. The historic decision, he stressed in a manner that denoted both the decision’s range and its limitations, marked the repudiation of state-sponsored Jim Crow segregation in the nation’s

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public schools. Building on Roth’s arguments, Biden stressed the new context—twenty years after Brown—in which claims of school segregation should be evaluated and remedied. Biden acknowledged the fact that the nation needed to exercise continued diligence in addressing the problems of racial inequality and discrimination that still afflicted blacks. He restated his concern, however, that busing was a counterproductive means to that end. If public education, as Warren had asserted, enjoyed a new status in mid-century America and therefore it was necessary to reevaluate segregation in that light, Biden stressed a new emerging consensus around the issue of school desegregation and busing that privileged popular opinion and local sovereignty over judicial review. Building on the rising tide of more conservative recent school desegregation rulings, Biden suggested that the courts more forthrightly acknowledge the distinction between de jure and de facto segregation, determine that discrimination was intentional and the motivating factor in cases where segregation was discovered, and craft remedies to fit the scope of any constitutional violation so as not to unfairly implicate allegedly innocent whites in any desegregation order. The logic for the demand for an automatic stay lay in less legal logic. In a subtle inversion of the social scientific evidence of damage to black children that had been presented in the 1950s, these opponents of reform now argued that the stay was necessary to protect local districts from the stress and uncertainty that might result from the implementation and subsequent dismantling of interdistrict remedies as cases were appealed through the court system.66 In June and July 1977, Biden and Roth called a hearing on S.1651 to consider its merits. They invited a bevy of legal and social science experts whose work fortified the legal and social scientific foundations of the backlash against school desegregation and busing. University of Texas legal scholar and busing critic Lino A. Graglia stressed that the measure was an essential corrective to a spate of recent court decisions that had strayed from the central tenets of Brown. He marked the beginnings of this troublesome trend in the Green decision, where, he contended, the court began to conflate the concepts “segregation” and “separation,” and “desegregation” and “integration,” and essentially violated the sanctity of the sectional imaginaries of de jure and de facto segregation. To this end, Graglia emphasized the limits of Brown and the Civil Rights Act, the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate institutional arrangements, and the terms of state action. In the spirit of the “Briggs dictum,” he asserted that the Constitution did not require integration, racial balance, or racial mixing in classrooms. Graglia thus found

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nothing constitutionally suspect with neighborhood schools that had racially imbalanced pupil populations. He noted that the Supreme Court had approved busing programs designed to remedy official acts of discrimination in Swann. He stressed, however, that the Court limited its ruling to those acts in school policy and did not concern itself with behavior of non-school-related activities. Graglia believed the Court, as evidenced in the recent decision in Milliken, was righting itself and taking a stand against integration.67 If the movement for school desegregation enjoyed near unanimous support in the social science community in roughly the two decades following Brown, there now came a rising tide of dissension among social scientists who began to challenge many of the underlying assumptions of desegregation. Sociologist Nathan Glazer was central to this movement, and his testimony was intended to provide the social scientific authority to the anxieties felt by Biden and Roth and their white constituents in support of S.1651. His remarks reflected his earlier work on cultural pluralism in which he argued that ethnic groups maintained their distinctiveness even as they underwent a process of assimilation into the mainstream culture. This ethnic distinctiveness, in turn, explained the social mobility (or lack thereof) and political behavior of different groups.68 It also served as the social bedrock upon which the segregation of communities—and by extension schools—was to be judged. Glazer concurred with Graglia that the courts had gone too far in recent decisions and had extended their authority to forms of segregation that were not a result of official attempts at segregation. He contended that the courts had exceeded their authority in attempting to remedy more purportedly natural forms of what he termed “racial-ethnic concentration.” Glazier’s arguments here relied on a kind of willed amnesia regarding the role of the state in the evolution of residential segregation in twentieth-century American political development and a de-linking of state action in different realms of the political economy. In an act of outright denial, Glazier dismissed the idea that state-sponsored residential segregation was relevant to the problem of segregated schools. Thus he concluded, “Regardless of which element of State action one examines—let us say earlier segregation of public housing projects, the placement of public housing projects, the effects in the past of FHA regulations, or zoning orders—the fact is that none of this could have had much effect on the present racial distribution of blacks and whites in cities.” He explained the fact of continuing segregation in residential patterns—and by extension schools—in terms of socioeconomic and cultural factors. Blacks as a whole, he noted, earned less than whites. Ethnic groups

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tended to cluster for reasons of convenience, mutual affirmation, and access to the cultural institutions that served to anchor their communities. Making implicit reference to purported links between wealth, income, and behavior, Glazer argued that upwardly mobile individuals tended to move away from neighbors they perceived as exhibiting unattractive cultural traits. As to the possibility of the state’s productive intervention in these natural processes and the danger of undermining Americans’ historical right to move as they please, Glazer was unequivocal: “one cannot prevent these other groups in a free society from moving away.”69 He did not deny that these demographic trends reflected, in part, an element of racial discrimination. Glazer stressed, however, that such outcomes were largely explained by individual acts and to a much lesser degree by official government policies, which in later remarks he quantified as “trivial.”70 Biden’s attempts to curb busing, this time through proscriptions on the courts, once again aroused fierce opposition from the civil rights community, who saw this as an attempt to eliminate an important avenue of civil rights advances. In a broad critique of this measure, Senator Brooke objected to the intent, content, and potential consequences of S.1651. Alluding to Congress’s struggle with the judiciary branch, Brooke argued that the legislation, as crafted, threatened to undermine the courts’ ability to address cases of illegal segregation. As such, S.1651 was an affront to principles enshrined in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. “Let us not deceive ourselves,” he admonished. “A right [to desegregated education] without a remedy is like a bell without a clapper—hollow and empty.”71 Director of the Washington Bureau of the NAACP Clarence Mitchell, who had been a central figure in the lobbying efforts to gain passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, argued that the bill’s demand for proof of discriminatory purpose was unnecessary, as the courts’ previous findings of a constitutional violation carried within them the determinants of discriminatory purpose under prevailing constitutional law. More dangerous, Mitchell warned, the bill created a nearly impossible standard by which to prove constitutional violation. William Taylor, the director of the Center for National Policy Review, expressed similar reservations about S.1651. Highlighting the inextricable links between school and housing policy that undergirded school segregation in the Wilmington metropolitan area, he warned that the measure would purposely exclude evidence of state-sponsored discrimination in housing policy that undergirded school segregation in many communities. The automatic stay requirement, Mitchell also contended, violated the “all deliberate speed” dictum under Brown II

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and subsequent Court demands, as in Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education (1969), that school districts recognize blacks’ “personal and immediate” right to attend desegregated public schools.72 Detractors of S.1651 also openly questioned the intentions of its supporters and the dangerous subtext of the legislation. The senators’ responses ultimately spoke to the growing—possibly intractable—rift between the civil rights establishment and whites—both liberal and conservative—over race conscious remedies. In his criticism of the senators’ effort to thwart race conscious remedies, Mitchell charged that this legislative effort was intended to quash the hopes of those working to advance civil rights protections. To this end, he charged that Biden and Roth’s bill only served to deny justice to those whose rights had been long denied. Getting at what he believed was the crux of the problem, he asserted, “racism has impelled you gentlemen to the point where you are now.”73 Roth took exception to this charge and countered that their measure furthered the goal of a color-blind society and was in the interest of the community as a whole. Mitchell held fast, criticizing the bill for singling out busing as one of the numerous remedial tools that the courts and school districts had at their disposal. “But busing is the atom bomb of discrimination,” Biden complained. “It may be needed on occasion but it should not be used unless it is an absolute last resort.”74 As his testimony closed, Mitchell countered by highlighting a certain hypocrisy about Biden’s protest: transportation was a central component of the education mission for all students. It was only a matter of contention when applied to remedy segregation. He hoped, the told the committee in a last statement, that the Constitution would prevail in this matter.75

* * * Biden and Roth’s effort to channel local expressions of opposition to busing remedies that promised to address allegedly de facto segregation through the limitations on the authority of the courts ultimately fell short. If the Senate had been moved to enact congressional restrictions on the executive branch, the body was more reticent about infringing on the authority of the judiciary and violating the separation of powers. The Committee on the Judiciary did vote to bring the measure to the floor by a vote of 11–6 on August 1. If the future of the bill was far from assured, the vote did mark a historical shift in the body’s voting record. S.1651 was, as the Congressional Quarterly reported, the first bill ever reported by a congressional committee that would have restricted the

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courts’ ability to prescribe busing remedies in desegregation cases. The Senate took no further action on the measure during this session, however. Biden and Roth attempted to resurrect the bill during the 1978 term, but the bill failed to withstand a tabling motion. Always the optimist when figuring the possibilities of passing federal legislation to restrict busing, Biden stressed that the “closeness of the vote signaled the ‘death knell’ for the pro-busing position in the Senate.”76 For the time being, the Senate’s restraint in restricting the power of the judiciary still marked the limits of congressional opposition to busing in the late 1970s. Still, the senator’s observations testified to the shifting center of American political culture on this issue. That all three branches of the federal government were now aligned against busing testified to a national consensus around the idea that equal protections of the laws drew the line at affirmative action measures that promised to subvert more ingrained and persistent structures of racial segregation in modern American culture and further fortified the assumed distinction, rooted in notions of geography and time, between de jure and de facto segregation.

Epilogue

The fiftieth anniversary of Brown—and the lower court cases that served as its evidentiary foundation—prompted a celebration of sorts in Delaware. In the period surrounding the anniversary, various groups sponsored a number of commemorative events intended—as part of the creation of a public memory—to recognize an abiding liberalism in the state’s political culture and the considerable strides made by its citizens in the larger project of racial reconciliation. The Delaware Bar Association organized a program honoring the anniversary and the work of Delaware civil rights attorney Louis Redding and jurists Collins J. Seitz and Murray M. Schwartz, whose rulings were instrumental in undermining segregation in public education. The Metropolitan Wilmington Urban League and a coalition of community activists from the Delaware Heritage Commission and Claymont Community Center also organized programs recognizing the work of local activists. The latter group’s symposium honored the “Claymont 12,” the first group of black students to be admitted to the newly desegregated Claymont High School in 1952. Historian Ed Kee hosted a Unity Picnic honoring eleven black students who were admitted—but later expelled—from Milford High School in the fall following the Brown decision in what was later recalled as the Milford incident. The Delaware Public Archives also erected a number of historical markers in honor of these events, thereby inscribing onto the landscape this state heritage. In roughly the decade surrounding the semicentennial, Redding in particular was elevated to the status of veritable hero. U.S representative Michael Castle had praised the civil rights stalwart on the floor of the House soon after his death in 1996. The Delaware Bar Association named a fellowship after him, and the city of Wilmington erected a statue in his honor and named the main city county building after him. The University of Delaware endowed a professorship in his name, renamed the President’s Diversity Award the Louis Lorenzo Redding Award, and honored him with a civil rights symposium. In addition, Howard University, as part of its fiftieth anniversary commemorative program, posthumously awarded Redding the Pioneer of Justice medal.

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In Wilmington, Howard High School of Technology inducted him into their Wall of Fame.1 The News Journal, the newspaper of record for Wilmington and the surrounding suburbs in New Castle County, also ran a number of hagiographic features exploring the history and legacy of efforts to further desegregation in the state public school system. Redding was most remembered for spearheading the efforts, and his legacy was closely bound to that of Seitz, who, after carefully assessing the relative merits of the black and white schools in question, made a number of rulings that state-sponsored segregation in education violated the constitutional rights of black citizens. “Without the courage, humanity and foresight of Collins J. Seitz,” columnist Harry F. Thermal recalled, “there is no guarantee Brown v. Board of Education would have been decided the way it was in Washington on May 17, 1954.”2 Remembering the bravery of the plaintiffs, historian Bradley Skelcher recalled that Sarah Bulah’s efforts to secure fair treatment for her daughter—while not initially intended to challenge the institution of segregation—“presented a ‘pure’ question of equality to the courts.” Furthermore, he wrote, Bulah and her daughter Shirley were “ideal standard bearers for the fight. They had no animosity toward white people. They were not fighting this for ulterior motives. They were fighting because it was the right thing to do.”3 These recognitions testified to the power of the work of Redding and other activists, as well as the possibilities of the NAACP direct campaign against segregated schools and of civil rights liberalism more broadly.4 As the history of school desegregation in Delaware reveals, there was a vitality about African American resistance to the structures of racial segregation and their attendant inequalities that were endemic to American political development and—by design and implication—diminished black political, economic, and social standing. Redding and other civil rights liberals had no monopoly on insights into the inequalities and inequities inherent in systems of segregation. Still their efforts shone a particularly bright public light on the injustices inherent in Jim Crow schools in their formulation of a direct attack strategy against segregation. In leveling an adaptive challenge against shifting structures of racial segregation, local activists in Delaware, in concert with campaigns against racial injustice in other states that were ultimately overseen by the NAACP national office in New York, won a succession of historic court decisions that—while not a panacea for the nation’s ills—gave legitimacy and publicity to a record of complaints about racial segregation in America, secured for blacks expansive recognition of their rights and responsibilities as

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citizens, and gained for black students greater access to public resources and higher-quality education that had been largely beyond the ability of other movements to secure. School desegregation proponents also proved instrumental in creating a discursive framework that shaped the trajectory of civil rights activism and racial reform throughout the second half of the twentieth century. What most Americans came to know as the structure, sectional character, and normative value of constitutionally suspect de jure segregation was a direct function of the NAACP’s southern and border state strategy. And it was within this discursive context, bolstered by the passage of federal civil rights legislation, that civil rights activists secured the demise of Jim Crow schools. Recognizing the limitations of this approach to persistent school segregation outside the context of Jim Crow, school desegregation proponents embraced a more expansive notion of de jure segregation—one that acknowledged the intersecting networks of state-sponsored discrimination in school and housing policy. This approach challenged the distinctions—enshrined in the jurisprudential and popular imagination of the nation—between de jure and de facto and northern and southern forms of racial discrimination. This innovation, and the court’s sympathy to this line of argument, proved requisite in extending the mandates of Brown and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 beyond the temporal and geographic boundaries of the Jim Crow South and border states. In this sense, the Delaware story stands as a shining example of that long litigation campaign as originally imagined by Charles Hamilton Houston. Lest we overstate the power of the movement to reshape American race relations, it is important to recall the necessity of acknowledging the persistence of white resistance to civil rights activists’ efforts to eradicate segregation. Challenges to segregation in Delaware prompted an almost reflexive oppositional response from a broad array of actors—including small-town and rural conservatives, white suburbanites, and Democratic senators. The power of this backlash lay not in segregationists’ embrace of baser racist ideologies. Instead, segregationists couched their resistance to school desegregation in the idiom of whites’ rights and expressed purportedly color-blind pronouncements of entitlement to be free from federal and other outside sources of interference. That the courts often privileged the rights of white residents to social stability and the rights of white students to quality education over the constitutional rights of black students ensured that reform would be slow and modest in the decade following Brown. In the face of still

Figure 13. 1987–88 Delaware School District demographics maps. Horacio D. Lewis, ed., Ten Years of Desegregation: Then and Now (Dover: Delaware State Department of Public Instruction, 1988). Courtesy Delaware Department of Education.

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more legal challenges and as the constitutional and moral foundations of Jim Crow were further eroded, school desegregation opponents embraced the principles of equal opportunity and equality before the law as enshrined in Brown and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Here they argued that the state’s advocacy of color conscious, affirmative action programs—especially in the form of busing remedies—undermined the social, constitutional, and property rights of white suburbanites. This last assertion provided the ideological bridge for the development of a broad-based politics premised on the notion that forms of segregation most reminiscent of the Jim Crow South and border states were “bad.” In buying into the concept and normative valuation of the sectional imaginary of de jure segregation as constitutionally and morally suspect, they drew the line at reforms that promised to elide the color line outside the geographic and temporal bounds of Jim Crow. Although opponents of reform were unable to stem the tide of a court-ordered metropolitan remedy, they still managed to exert a powerful influence on the pace and scope of reform, especially as primary control over the remedial process passed out of the courtroom and into the offices of state executive and legislative officials. If school desegregation was never a panacea for the multiple sources of racial discrimination and inequality, it is in this opposition to reform that we can discern the source of black discontent with the often inequitable manner in which reforms were implemented. The public memories of Redding and other activists, the historic decisions, and the advance of racial inequality in the state certainly made room for more sober assessments of the legacy of Brown and the desegregation of public schools. Reminding their readers of the work that still needed to be done, the editors of the News Journal asserted: “For all [Brown’s] historic impact, the ruling still has not solved all the problems of minorities and public education. This is no time for resting on laurels.”5 This was especially true in light of a revived backlash that had gained significant momentum at the turn of the century. At the intersection of white opposition (as it developed beyond the 1970s) and these fond remembrances lies a profound tension in both Delaware and U.S. political development: there evolved a general consensus that the reforms embodied in the seminal victories of the classical stage of the Civil Rights Movement—and especially Brown and the Civil Rights Act of 1964—had expunged many of the cruelties inherent in Jim Crow and advanced the cause of freedom and racial equality in the postwar period. Still, many white Americans were more sanguine about reforms that attempted to address subsequent forms of segregation and inequality that persisted outside

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the geographic and temporal bounds of Jim Crow. Thus Delawareans lauded the efforts of activists who advanced school desegregation and equal opportunity for all citizens at the same time that the courts and state legislatures took actions that promised to reverse the tide of reform and resegregate public schools now as a matter of practice, if not by law.

* * * This chapter of backlash was spurred in the early 1990s by the Rehnquist Court, which set about reevaluating the ongoing responsibilities of school officials to continue desegregation policies in communities that had previously maintained constitutionally suspect de jure segregated school systems. In three desegregation rulings, this High Court effectively gave districts—which were under court orders to eradicate de jure segregation—the opportunity to gain exemptions from those orders if they could demonstrate that they had engaged in “good faith” efforts to eliminate the vestiges of the dual school systems and establish a unitary system. In assessing the relevance of shifting demographic patterns (construed in this context as the sum total of individuals’ private residential choices or vague and unknowable social processes) to the problem of school segregation, the Court also concluded that racial balance in schools was not justified for its own sake absent a clear constitutional violation measured narrowly in consciously discriminatory pupil assignment policies.6 In arriving at these conclusions, the Court refigured desegregation remedies as temporary impositions on communities and articulated new frameworks for evaluating the state’s obligation against the evidential standards defined in Green, Swann, and—most important—Milliken.7 In foregrounding these rulings as governing decisions, the Court assessed the duties of state officials and discriminatory policies against the backdrop of segregation born within the geographic and temporal boundaries of the Jim Crow South and border states where de jure segregation had been rendered unconstitutional. In giving districts an out, it reified the sectional imaginary of de jure segregation that framed the advance of reform in the wake of Brown. In emphasizing Milliken, the courts built a legal firewall between the dynamics informing demographic trends in schools and residential areas. The Court thus effectively de-linked the ways in which school and housing patterns as social phenomena were bound and, by extension, redefined the history of segregation in housing patterns as a function of “private decision making and economics,” thereby rendering moot any evidence of discriminatory housing

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policies.8 The Rehnquist Court had, in the end, invigorated the distinctions between South and the North, past and present, and the sectional imaginaries of de jure and de facto segregation that both provided an escape valve for districts that had maintained de jure segregation and extended Milliken’s exemption for allegedly de facto forms of segregation where suburban communities were threatened with interdistrict remedies. The U.S. District Court of Delaware gave further substance to these rulings and the sectional imaginaries of de jure and de facto segregation at the local level after state and suburban Wilmington boards asked Judge Sue Robinson to assess whether they had lived up to their obligations under recent Supreme Court rulings. Robinson found in Coalition to Save Our Children v. State Board of Education (1995) that the Brandywine, Christina, Colonial, and Red Clay districts had achieved, according to the findings of education scholar Christine Rossell, “close to perfect racial balance” in metropolitan area schools. Indeed, New Castle County schools, the witness stressed, were “significantly less racially imbalanced than the national court ordered sample.”9 Robinson also cited findings indicating levels of racial balance in faculty and staff assignments.10 With reference to the Rehnquist Court’s school desegregation rulings, the district court concluded that school officials had acted in good faith to eliminate the vestiges of past discriminatory practices “to the extent practicable,” fulfilled their responsibilities under the law, and were thus released from federal supervision.11 Figuring Delaware against the backdrop of its Jim Crow past, Robinson concluded, “the doors of the public school system have been opened to all children, regardless of their color.” She was correct in the most narrow sense that the state had dismantled the structures of the dual school system, especially against the standards of Brown, Brown II, Green, and Swann—decisions that provided the basic legal structure for eradicating de jure segregation. That the judge declined to explore the significance of continued residential segregation in the Wilmington metropolitan area and its possible effect in resegregating schools after removal of the order suppressed the district court’s expansive definition of constitutionally suspect segregation in the 1974 and 1975 Evans decisions and rendered the legacy of housing policies that informed the segregation of schools in the Wilmington metropolitan area moot. Robinson thus revived the sectional imaginary of southern-style, de jure segregation, which she concluded the state had remedied. The school districts were freed to dismantle the very mechanism that enabled the high levels of racial balance in the metropolitan area in the first place.

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The General Assembly also struck a blow against school desegregation and in the process affirmed the distinction between the sectional imaginaries of de jure and de facto segregation that, on the whole, undermined the foundation of the metropolitan remedy. In 1995, after almost a century of maintaining provisions demanding racial segregation in education on the books, the General Assembly removed the language in Article 2 of the state constitution requiring segregated schools that, at least symbolically, portrayed the state’s refusal to live up to its obligations under the Fourteenth Amendment as demanded by Brown.12 Five years later, however, the Assembly passed the Neighborhood Schools Act, which provided the legislative gateway to resegregated schools on the basis of race and class. The motive behind this measure, as articulated in the legislation’s preamble, lay in the ostensibly color-blind goals of enabling children to attend schools in their communities, minimizing transportation times, reducing the stress on students associated with long commutes, and facilitating greater parental input in school operations.13 The act required the Brandywine, Colonial, Christina, and Red Clay school districts to develop neighborhood school plans, which assigned all students to elementary, junior high, or high school “without regard to any consideration other than geographic distance and the natural boundaries of neighborhoods.” The measure made exceptions in cases where “substantial hardship to a school or school district, student, or a student’s family exists; provided, that, no student shall be assigned to any school on the basis of race and school assignments shall be made without regard to the racial composition of the schools.”14 The fundamental concern for school desegregation proponents was that this ostensibly color-blind school reform was laid over significant residential segregation. Ninety percent of the city’s public school students were African American or Latino by the end of the twentieth century, legal scholar Leland Ware noted, three-quarters of them eligible for the free lunch program. This isolation of these students thus set the precondition for the resegregation of metropolitan area schools by race and class.15 And once again government authorities had reinforced notions that the sectional imaginary of de facto segregation was an innocuous social formation—and by extension distinct from de jure segregation—and thus beyond the power of the state to remedy.

* * * The contest over school desegregation ultimately played out against the creation of the sectional imaginary of de jure segregation—a social construction

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whose origins date back to the NAACP’s evolving direct attack strategy and subsequent victories in Brown. “Southern-style” de jure segregation thus came to denote constitutionally and increasingly morally suspect institutional arrangements that public officials had the responsibility to dismantle. In contrast, de facto segregation became enshrined in the legal and popular imagination of the nation as innocent or innocuous forms of racial separatism and therefore beyond the responsibilities of officials to remedy. The true irony in the evolution of the constructed dichotomy of de jure and de facto segregation born of the innovations of the NAACP is that they served—at once—as a vehicle to advance and thwart change in modern American political culture. Thus celebrants could genuinely laud the efforts of Redding and other activists and the basic framework that advanced racial equality in the postwar period and—at the same time—set the legal and legislative framework requisite for the resegregation of schools, especially in metropolitan areas, in a way that was not entirely inconsistent. Herein lies the national consensus as enshrined in law and the popular imagination around the limits of racial liberalism as refracted through the lens of geographic sectionalism Frederick Jackson Turner defined a century ago.

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Abbreviations

Manuscript Collections AG Attorney General Papers, Delaware Public Archives, Dover ARP Amy Rextrew Papers, University Archives, University of Delaware, Newark BFC Bill Frank Collection, Historical Society of Delaware, Wilmington BH Board Highlights, Morris Library, University of Delaware, Newark CNPR Records of the Center for National Policy Review, Library of Congress DDP Delaware Desegregation Papers, Special Collections, Morris Library, University of Delaware, Newark DOHC Delaware Oral History Collection, Special Collections, Morris Library, University of Delaware, Newark DPI Department of Public Instruction Papers, Delaware Public Archives, Dover Evans Evans v. Buchanan Collection, Amistad Research Center, New Orleans EVB Evans v. Buchanan Collection, Historical Society of Delaware, Wilmington FBI Records of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, File on the National Association for the Advancement of White People as obtained through a FOI request, FBI, Washington, D.C. GP Governor’s Papers, Delaware Public Archives, Dover KBC Kenneth Bancroft Clark Papers, Library of Congress LMP Littleton Mitchell Papers, Special Collections, Morris Library, University of Delaware, Newark MBOE Milford School Board Minutes, Delaware Public Archives, Dover MSDAR Milford School Desegregation Audio Recordings, Delaware Public Archives, Dover NAACP Collection Papers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Library of Congress PYP Pauline A. Young Papers, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center, Atlanta SBOE Minutes of the Board, State Board of Education, Delaware Public Archives, Dover TMC Time Magazine Correspondences, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. WBOE Minutes of the Board, Wilmington Board of Education, Delaware Public Archives, Dover WH Walter Hullihen Papers, University Archives, University of Delaware, Dover WLF City of Wilmington Litigation Files, Delaware Public Archives, Dover WOS Wilber Owen Sypherd Papers, University Archives, University of Delaware, Dover

252 WSC Newspapers BAA DSN EJ JEE LSR MC NJ NYT NJG PI SSN WP WMN WSJ WSS

Abbreviations William Samuel Carlson Papers, University Archives, University of Delaware, Dover Baltimore Afro-American Delaware State News Evening Journal Journal-Every Evening Laurel State Register Milford Chronicle News Journal New York Times Norfolk Journal and Guide Philadelphia Inquirer Southern School News Washington Post Wilmington Morning News Wall Street Journal Wilmington Sunday Star

Notes

Introduction 1. Paul R. Dimond, Beyond Busing: Inside the Challenge to Urban Segregation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985), 303. 2. “Biden Sets Busing Facedown,” EJ, June 29, 1974. 3. Congressional Quarterly, Almanac, 93rd Cong., 2nd Sess., 30 (1974): 461–62; Joseph R. Biden, Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics (New York: Random House, 2007), 124–25. 4. Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (New York: Knopf, 1976); Peter H. Irons, Jim Crow’s Children: The Broken Promise of the Brown Decision (New York: Viking, 2002); James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); J. Harvie Wilkinson, III, From Brown to Bakke: The Supreme Court and School Integration, 1954–1978 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Robert J. Cottrol, Raymond T. Diamond, and Leland Ware, Brown v. Board of Education: Caste, Culture, and the Constitution (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003); Mark V. Tushnet, The NAACP’s Legal Strategy Against Segregated Education, 1925–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); Tushnet, Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936–1961 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Manfred Berg, The Ticket to Freedom: The NAACP and the Struggle for Black Political Integration (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005); Patricia Sullivan, Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: New Press, 2009); Charles J. Ogletree, All Deliberate Speed: Reflections on the First Half Century of Brown v. Board of Education (New York: Norton, 2004); Genna Rae McNeil, Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983). 5. G. Calvin Mackenzie and Robert Weisbrot, The Liberal Hour: Washington and the Politics of Change in the 1960s (New York: Penguin, 2008), 158–66, 175–83. 6. “Biden Defends Vote and Angers Antibusing Crowd,” EJ, July 10, 1974; “Busing Clash Wins Biden Few Friends,” MN, July 10, 1974; Gary Orfield, Must We Bus? Segregated Schools and National Policy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1978), 272–73. 7. James D. Anderson and Dara N. Byrne, The Unfinished Agenda of Brown v.

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Board of Education (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2004);  Vivian Gunn Morris, The Price They Paid: Desegregation in an African American Community (New York: Teachers College Press, 2002);  David S. Cecelski, Along Freedom Road: Hyde County, North Carolina and the Fate of Black Schools in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 344–42; Klarman, “How Brown Changed Race Relations: The Backlash Thesis,” Journal of American History 81, 1 (June 1994): 81–118; Gerald N. Rosenberg, The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 39–172; Stephen C. Halpern, On the Limits of the Law: The Ironic Legacy of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Risa L. Goluboff, The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007); Berg, Ticket to Freedom, 116–39; Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), 148; Raymond Wolters, The Burden of Brown: Thirty Years of School Desegregation (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984); Wolters, Race and Education, 1954–2007 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008); David J. Armor, Forced Justice: School Desegregation and the Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). For a thoughtful review of the sum of this literature, see James C. Cobb, The Brown Decision, Jim Crow, and Southern Identity (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 31–55. 8. Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930– 1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 39–59. 9. Dean E. Robinson, Black Nationalism in American Politics and Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 2. 10. Heather Ann Thompson, “All Across the Nation: Urban Black Activism, North and South, 1965–1975,” in African American Urban History Since World War II, ed. Kenneth L. Kusmer and Joe W. Trotter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 182; Derrick A. Bell, Jr., “Serving Two Masters: Integration Ideals and Client Interests in School Desegregation Litigation,” Yale Law Journal 85, 4 (1975–76): 470. 11. Herbert A. Eastman, “Speaking Truth to Power: The Language of Civil Rights Litigators,” Yale Law Journal 104, 4 (1994): 763. 12. Tushnet, The NAACP’s Legal Strategy. 13. On the power and possibilities of public interest law, see Thomas Hilbink, “The Profession, the Grassroots and the Elite,” in Cause Lawyers and Social Movements, ed. Austin Sarat and Stuart Scheingold (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Law and Politics, 2006), 64–69. 14. Thomas Ross, “The Richmond Narratives,” Texas Law Review 68, 2 (December 1989): 381. 15. Taylor Branch, Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963–65 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 1–169; Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), 226; Charles

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Earl Jones, The Black Panther Party (Reconsidered) (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998), 83. 16. Bell, “Serving Two Masters,” 470. On the dynamism inherent in black lawyering circles, see Kenneth W. Mack, “Rethinking Civil Rights Lawyering and Politics in the Era Before Brown,” Yale Law Journal 115, 2 (2005–6): 256–354; Mack, “Law and Mass Politics in the Making of the Civil Rights Lawyer, 1931–1941,” Journal of American History 93, 1 (2006): 37–62. 17. Steven Hahn demands just such an approach in his consideration of the interconnections between liberal integration and grassroots emigrationism and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and NAACP in the rural South in the 1920s. Steven Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 145–57. On challenging the typologies that frame traditional approaches to history, see also Wallace Best, “ ‘The Right Achieved and the Wrong Way Conquered’: J. H. Jackson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Conflict over Civil Rights,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 16, 2 (June 1, 2006): 196. 18. Berg, Ticket to Freedom, 26. 19. James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008); Davison M. Douglas, Jim Crow Moves North: The Battle over Northern School Segregation, 1865–1954 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard, eds., Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940–1980 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 20. Kluger, Simple Justice, 432; Annette Woolard, “Parker v. The University of Delaware: The Desegregation of Higher Education in Delaware,” Delaware History 22, 2 (Fall–Winter 1986): 111–23. 21. Kluger, Simple Justice, 449. 22. Ed Kee, “The Brown Decision and Milford, Delaware, 1954–1965,” Delaware History 27, 4 (Fall–Winter 1997–98): 205–43. 23. Jeffrey A Raffel, “After the Court Order: The Changing Faces of School Desegregation in the Wilmington Metropolitan Area,” Widener Law Symposium Journal 9, 1 (2002–3): 81. 24. Gary Orfield and Chungmei Lee, Brown at 50: King’s Dream or Plessy’s Nightmare? (Cambridge, Mass.: Civil Rights Project, Harvard University, January 2004), 29. 25. William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion, vol. 2, Secessionists at Bay, 1776– 1854 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 2–3; Luther Adams, Way Up North in Louisville: African American Migration in the Urban South, 1930–1970 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 3; Tracy E. K’Meyer, Civil Rights in the Gateway to the South: Louisville, Kentucky, 1945–1980 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009), 5; Clarence Lang, Grassroots at the Gateway: Class Politics and Black Freedom Struggle in St. Louis, 1936–75 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 9, 12; Howell S. Baum, Brown in Baltimore: School Desegregation and the Limits of Liberal-

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ism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2010), 132; Peter B. Levy, Civil War on Race Street: The Civil Rights Movement in Cambridge, Maryland (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 7; C. Smith, Here Lies Jim Crow: Civil Rights in Maryland (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 3; George C. Wright, Life Behind a Veil: Blacks in Louisville, Kentucky, 1865–1930 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), 4; Joe William Trotter, Coal, Class, and Color: Blacks in Southern West Virginia, 1915– 32 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 3; Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland During the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), xii, 90. 26. Collins J. Seitz, “Segregation: What Is Past Is Prologue,” Delaware History 24, 4 (Fall–Winter 1991–92), 220. 27. Carol E. Hoffecker, Corporate Capital: Wilmington in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), 1. 28. Harold Livesay, “The Reconstruction Era,” in Readings in Delaware History, ed. Carol E. Hoffecker (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1973), 122; Hoffecker, Corporate Capital, 3; Carole Marks, ed., A History of African Americans of Delaware and Maryland’s Eastern Shore, http://www.udel.edu/BlackHistory. 29. Robert L. Hayman, Jr., “A History of Race in Delaware, 1639–1950,” in Choosing Equality: Essays and Narratives on the Desegregation Experience, ed. Hayman and Leland Ware (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), 29–30. 30. Ibid., 42–58; John A. Munroe, History of Delaware, 5th ed. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006), 144–50; Kluger, Simple Justice, 426; Jane Elizabeth Dailey, The Age of Jim Crow: A Norton Casebook in History (New York: Norton, 2009), xiv. The Delaware Constitution of 1897, Art. X, Sec. 2 stated, “In addition to the income of the investments of the Public School Fund, the General Assembly shall make provision for the annual payment of not less than one hundred thousand dollars for the benefit of the free public schools which, with the income of the investments of the Public School Fund, shall be equitably apportioned, among the school districts of the State as the General Assembly shall provide; and the money so apportioned shall be used exclusively for the payment of the teachers’ salaries and for furnishing free text books; provided, however, that in such apportionments, no distinction shall be made on account of race or color, and separate schools for white and colored children shall be maintained.” School Laws for Free Public Schools of the State of Delaware, 1898 (Dover: Press of the Delawarean, 1899). The Delaware Revised Code, Ch. 71, Art.1, 2631 stated, “Separate schools for white and colored children—Separate schools for Moors and Indians.—The State Board of Education is authorized, empowered, directed and required to maintain a uniform, equal and effective system of public schools throughout the State.  . . . The schools provided shall be of two kinds; those for white children and those for colored children.  . . . The State Board of Education shall establish schools for children of people called Moors and Indians.  . . . white or colored child shall be permitted to attend such a school without the permission of the State Board of Education.  . . . [‘36 Del. Laws, chs. 211, 222].” Pauli Murray, ed., States’ Laws on Race and Color (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1950, 1997), 71.

Notes to Pages 10–15

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31. Kluger, Simple Justice, 427. 32. Frederick Jackson Turner, “Geographic Sectionalism in American History,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 16, 2 (June 1926): 85; Turner, Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” and Other Essays (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), 205. 33. Numan V. Bartley, “The South and Sectionalism in American Politics,” Journal of Politics 38, 3 (August 1976): 241–42. 34. Ulrich B. Phillips, “The Central Theme of Southern History,” American Historical Review 34, 1 (October 1928): 31. 35. Jennifer Rae Greeson, Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 11. 36. For surveys of the literature evoke the trope of “southernization,” see Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), 6; Matthew D. Lassiter and Joseph Crespino, “Introduction: The End of Southern History,” in The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism, ed. Lassiter and Crespino (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 17n6; Joe William Trotter, The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 134; Darlene Clark Hine, Hine Sight: Black Women and the Re-Construction of American History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 95. 37. Lassiter and Crespino, “Introduction,” 9. See also the essays in this fine anthology. A number of historians also note that many defining characteristics of southern race relations, especially racial segregation, had their origins in the North. Cottrol, Diamond, and Ware, Brown v. Board of Education, 11–33. Davison Douglas does well to highlight the central problem inherent in the problem of school segregation in northern states—a certain dissonance between legal prohibitions against school segregation and the actual practice of school segregation in many communities—without assuming a dichotomy between de jure and de facto segregation. Douglas, Jim Crow Moves North, 8. 38. Allen Tullos, Alabama Getaway: The Political Imaginary and the Heart of Dixie (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 5. 39. I would like to thank Nathan Connolly for his critical insights here on considerations of African American historical agency. 40. McAdam, Political Process, 41–42. 41. Gary Orfield, “The 1964 Civil Rights Act and American Education,” in Legacies of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, ed. Bernard Grofman (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 89. 42. Charles W. Whalen and Barbara Whalen, The Longest Debate: A Legislative History of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (Cabin John, Md.: Seven Locks Press, 1985), 33. 43. Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 128. 44. For a most thoughtful survey of white backlash in modern American history, see Crespino, In Search of Another Country; Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the

258

Notes to Pages 15–24

Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005);  Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006). 45. Joel Williamson, A Rage for Order: Black/White Relations in the American South Since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 98–150. 46. Steven F. Lawson and Charles Payne, Debating the Civil Rights Movement, 1945– 1968 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998). 47. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, vol. 1 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1996), lxxxiii. 48. Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), 315–16. 49. For one of the best examples of works that bridge this divide, see Self, American Babylon. 50. Robert J. Taggart, Private Philanthropy and Public Education: Pierre S. du Pont and the Delaware Schools, 1890–1940 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988); Roger C. Mowrey, Delaware School District Organization and Boundaries (Dover: Delaware State Department of Public Instruction, 1974), 5. 51. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 3. 52. Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 308–10; Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Macmillan, 2007), 129; Self, American Babylon, 235; Komozi Woodard, A Nation Within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 40; Mackenzie and Weisbrot, The Liberal Hour, 337. 53. For a thoughtful consideration of the alignment between Black Power interests and liberalism, see Devin Fergus, Liberalism, Black Power, and the Making of American Politics, 1965–1980 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009); and Karen Anderson, “Organizing the Ghetto: The Ford Foundation, CORE, and White Power in the Black Power Era, 1967–1969,” Journal of Urban History 34, 1 (November 2007): 67–100. 54. Derrick A. Bell, Jr., “Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma,” Harvard Law Review 93, 3 (1979): 523–24. Chapter 1. “There Is a Movement on Foot” 1. Walther Hullihen to Ira S. Edwards, January 18, 1939, HP, 311. 2. See introduction for fuller discussion. 3. Hullihen to Edwards, January 18, 1939. 4. “Student Seeks U. of D. Course,” Journal Every Evening, April 19, 1939. 5. University of Maryland v. Murray, 169 Md. 478 (1937); Mark V. Tushnet, Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936–1961 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 11–15; Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (New York: Knopf, 1976), 189–94.

Notes to Pages 24–30

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6. Mark V. Tushnet, The NAACP’s Legal Strategy Against Segregated Education, 1925–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 36. 7. Kenneth W. Mack, “Rethinking Civil Rights Lawyering and Politics in the Era Before Brown,” Yale Law Journal 115 (2005): 256–354; Jerome H. Holland, Reclaiming a College: A Report on Delaware State College, 1953–1960 (Dover, Del., 1960). 8. Hullihen to Joseph J. Rhoads, February 27, 1941, HP, 465; Hullihen to John D. Adkins, Jr., n.d., HP; W. Owen Sypherd to Felice Neirenberg, August 22, 1945, WOS; Earle Saunders to W. Earl Armstrong, June 1, 1947, WSC. 9. Hullihen to Ralph W. Robinson, March 13, 1940, HP. 10. William S. Carlson to Judge Hugh M. Morris, October 8, 1946, WSC. 11. Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 161; Tushnet, The NAACP’s Legal Strategy, 56–58; Pearson v. Murray, 182 A. 590 (Md. 1936); State of Missouri ex. rel. Gaines v. Canada, 305 U.S. 337 (1938); Kevin M. Kruse, “Personal Rights, Public Wrongs: The Gaines Case and the Beginning of the End of Segregation,” Journal of Supreme Court History 22, 2 (1997): 113–30. 12. Carlson to Morris, October 8, 1946. 13. W. Earl Armstrong to William S. Carlson, June 6, 1947, WSC; Carlson to Judge Hugh M. Morris, January 7, 1947, WSC. 14. William S. Carlson to The Honorable Walter W. Bacon, February 13, 1947, WSC; SBOE Minutes, January 19, 1948, SBOE. 15. John A. Hodgson to William S. Carlson, May 26, 1947, WSC; John A. Munroe, History of Delaware (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006), 333–60. 16. Evelyn Brannen to Legal Department of the NAACP, June 24, 1947, NAACP Collection; Brannen to Robert L. Carter, July 24, 1947, NAACP Collection; Carter to Brannen, August 5, 1947, NAACP Collection. 17. Louis Redding to Roy Wilkins, September 2, 1933, NAACP Collection; W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Signet, 1969), 97–108. 18. Mack, “Rethinking Civil Rights Lawyering,” 292; Laura Kalman, The Strange Career of Legal Liberalism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 13–22. 19. Delaware was the second-to-last state to admit a black man to the bar, followed only by Utah, in states where that information had been recorded. No black lawyers were identified or located in Alaska, Idaho, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Dakota, or Vermont. J. Clay Smith, Jr., Emancipation: The Making of the Black Lawyer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 611–13, 129; Leonard L. Williams, “Louis L. Redding,” Delaware Lawyer 16, 2 (Summer 1998): 10. 20. Annette Woolard-Provine, Integrating Delaware: The Reddings of Wilmington, Cultural Studies of Delaware and the Eastern Shore (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003), 103. 21. Darlene Clark Hine, “Black Lawyers and the Twentieth-Century Struggle for Constitutional Change,” in African Americans and the Living Constitution, ed. John

260

Notes to Pages 30–33

Hope Franklin and Genna Rae McNeil (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 47; Smith, Emancipation. 22. Jack Greenberg, Crusaders in the Courts: How a Dedicated Band of Lawyers Fought for the Civil Rights Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 87. 23. Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008), 19. 24. David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 1919–1963: The Fight for Equality and the American Century (New York: Holt, 2001), 320. 25. Quoted in ibid., 322–23. 26. Mack, “Rethinking Civil Rights Lawyering,” 350. 27. Jonathan Scott Holloway, Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris, Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919–1941 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 149; Cary D. Wintz and Paul Finkelman, Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2004), 13; Raymond Wolters, Du Bois and His Rivals (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), 216. 28. Jessie Parkhurst Guzman, Negro Year Book: An Annual Encyclopedia of the Negro, 1931–1932: Work, Monroe Nathan: Free Download & Streaming: Internet Archive (Tuskegee, Ala.: Negro Year Book Publishing, n.d.), 109; Rayford W. Logan, What the Negro Wants (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944), 146; Louis L. Redding, “I Become a Party Man,” Journal of Negro Life (November 1929): 347–49; Emmett. E. Dorsey, “The Negro and Social Planning,” in Black Scholars on the Line: Race, Social Science, and American Thought in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jonathan Scott Holloway and Ben Keppel (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 325. 29. On the range of radical and liberal lawyer movements, see Kenneth W. Mack, “Law and Mass Politics in the Making of the Civil Rights Lawyer, 1931–1941,” Journal of American History 93, 1 (June 2006): 37–62; U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Civil Rights—Public Accommodations (Washington, D.C.: U.S. GPO, 1963), 1506; “Report on Guild Activities,” Lawyers Guild Review 16 (1956): 29; Gerald Horne, Black and Red: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944–1963 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986), 246; Redding to Wilkins, September 2, 1933. 30. Louis Redding, interview by Myron Blackman, March 30, 1971, University of Delaware Special Collections, DOHC, 1–2. 31. August Meier and Elliot Rudwick, “Attorneys Black and White: A Case Study of Race Relations Within the NAACP,” Journal of American History 62, 4 (March 1976): 937; Tushnet, The NAACP’s Legal Strategy, 31; Langston Hughes, Fight for Freedom: The Story of the NAACP (New York: Norton, 1962), 126. On the NAACP- LDF, split see Gilbert Ware, “The NAACP Inc. Fund Alliance: Its Strategy, Power, and Destruction,” JNE 63, 3 (Summer 1994): 323–35. 32. Jean Jamison to Thurgood Marshall, January 18, 1948, NAACP Collection; Edward R. Dudley to Jamison, January 22, 1948, NAACP Collection; John T. Hubell, “The Desegregation of the University of Oklahoma, 1946–1950,” Journal of Negro History 57, 4 (October 1972): 371.

Notes to Pages 33–38

261

33. Louis Redding to Thurgood Marshall, January 26, 1948, NAACP Collection; John Munroe, The University of Delaware: A History (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986), 362. 34. Redding to Marshall, January 26, 1948, NAACP Collection; “Writing in 1933,” Mark Tushnet noted, “[William] Hastie described the desirable plaintiff as a person who would be ‘of outstanding scholarship . . . neat, personable, and unmistakably a Negro.’ The plaintiff would be ‘a valuable object lesson which shows the whites in the community that there are negroes . . . who measure up in every respect to collegiate standards.’ ” Tushnet, The NAACP’s Legal Strategy, 37, italics original. 35. Sipuel v. Board of Regents of University of Oklahoma, 332 U.S. 631; Edward R. Dudley to Louis Redding, January 28, 1948, NAACP Collection. 36. Robt. H. Richards to Dr. William S. Carlson, January 29, 1948, WSC; Louis Redding to Edward R. Dudley, February 2, 1948, NAACP Collection; “U. of D. Opens Some Courses to Negroes,” JEE, January 31, 1948; Marion Thompson Wright, “Negro Higher and Professional Education in Delaware,” JNE 17, 3 (Summer 1948): 270. 37. William Carlson to Judge Richard S. Rodney, January 28, 1948, WSC. 38. University of Delaware News Release, January 31, 1948, University of Delaware Archives; “Conditions of Admission of Negroes as Students,” The By-Laws, Resolutions and Miscellaneous Rules and Regulations of the Board of Trustees of the University of Delaware (State College: Pennsylvania Valley Publishers, 1958), University of Delaware Archives. 39. Munroe, The University of Delaware, 362. 40. Dudley to Redding, February 4, 1948, NAACP Collection; Redding to Dudley, February 2, 1948, NAACP Collection; “2 Negroes in Test at U. of D. Aren’t Due to Enroll,” WMN, January 31, 1948; Munroe, History of Delaware, 362. 41. James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 274; Adam Fairclough, Teaching Equality: Black Schools in the Age of Jim Crow (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 24; Raymond Wolters, The New Negro on Campus: Black College Rebellions of the 1920s (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975). 42. “Students on Strike at State College,” DSN, February 17, 1949. 43. Open letter to the students of Delaware State College, n.d., GP; Petition addressed to Judge Elwood F. Melson, May 4, 1949, GP; “Branch News,” The Crisis 48, 1 (January 1941): 25; “Branch News,” The Crisis 51, 2 (February 1944): 54; Citizen’s Committee, Undated memo, GP. 44. Howard D. Gregg to Elbert N. Carvel, February 7, 1949, GP. 45. Carvel, Memo, February 16, 1949, GP. 46. Arthur R. James to Honorable Elbert N. Carvel, February 26, 1949, GP; Josiah F. Henry, Jr., to Governor of Delaware, March 20, 1949, GP. 47. “Students on Strike at State College”; “An Inquiry into Affairs at College Is Ordered,” DSN, March 3, 1949; “College Will Have Open Discussion on Monday,” DSN,

262

Notes to Pages 38–43

March 17, 1949; “Resolution,” July 13, 1949, GP; “Exhibit ‘A,’ ” attached to “Resolution,” July 31, 1949, 1–5, GP; “State College Investigation Is Underway,” DSN, March 24, 1949; “State College Investigation Is Resumed,” DSN, March 31, 1949; “Gregg Cleared of All Charges,” DSN, May 26, 1949. 48. “New Trustees for College,” DSN, June 23, 1949; “Court Halted Gregg Hearing,” DSN, July 21, 1949; “Deny Outside Pressure in Handling College Affairs,” DSN, August 25, 1949; “Dr. Gregg Levels Charges of Bias Against College Trustees,” DSN, September 1, 1949; “Cash Settlement for Gregg Ends the State College Case,” DSN, September 9, 1948; Middle States Association, “Report of the Inspection of Delaware State College for the Middle States Association,” October 27–28, 1949, GP; Madeline E. Buchanan, “Resolution,” September 2, 1949, GP. 49. “Report of Inspection of Delaware State College,” 14–15. 50. Ibid. 51. Gloster Current to Thurgood Marshall, January 6, 1950, NAACP Collection. 52. Student Council Committee to The Honorable Elbert N. Carvel, January 9, 1950, GP; (Miss) Rella Brown to Carvel, January 6, 1950, GP. 53. Reginald Stanton Tynes to The Honorable Elbert N. Carvel, January 6, 1950, GP. 54. Charles W. Bush, “Report on Applications of Negro Students for Admission to the University of Delaware,” February 8, 1950, WSC; “Exhibit 1,” Charles W. Bush to Lillian Coleman, January 16, 1950, WSC, 1949–50, vol. 20, 516, and annexed to complaint in Parker v. University of Delaware in Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware, March 1950, ARP. 55. C. J. Rees to M. E. Thomasson, January 9, 1950, WSC. 56. University of Delaware News Release, January 9, 1950, UDA. 57. Complaint, Parker v. University of Delaware, March 1950, ARP; copy of the form letter from Charles W. Bush in WSC; Louis Redding to Hugh M. Morris, January 20, 1950, NAACP Collection; Bush, “Report on Applications”; “Exhibit 2,” Bush to Homer W. Minus, January 7, 1950, attached to complaint in Parker v. University of Delaware in Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware, March 1950. 58. “U. of D. Board Bars Entrance of 9 Negroes,” JEE, February 18, 1950. 59. Current to Marshall, January 6, 1950. 60. Greenberg, Crusaders in the Courts, 87. 61. Tushnet, The NAACP’s Legal Strategy, 53–56; Jack Greenberg to Karl G. Miller, January 12, 1950, NAACP Collection. 62. Redding to Morris, January 20, 1950. 63. Redding to Morris, January 24, 1950, NAACP Collection and WSC; Morris to Redding, January 31, 1950, NAACP Collection; Resolution (Received by the Office of the Governor on) February 21, 1950, GP; Jack Greenberg to Redding, February 19, 1950, NAACP Collection. 64. “ ‘Separate But Equal’—Not Here,” JEE, February 23, 1950; “No Right to Destroy,” JEE, February 21, 1950.

Notes to Pages 43–49

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65. Dover Metropolitan Council of Negro Women to Elbert N. Carvel, January 17, 1949, GP; Ceci P. Henry to Carvel, January 21, 1950, GP; Alonzo H. Shockley and Cora Norwood Feely to Carvel, January 25, 1950, GP; Thomas Fraser to Carvel, January 10, 1950, GP. 66. Gilbert Nickel to Elbert N. Carvel, January 27, 1950, GP. 67. “NAACP Bids Delaware U.: Open Doors to Negroes,” March 10, 1950, NAACP Collection. 68. Jack Greenberg to Louis Redding, March 17, 1950, NAACP Collection; Greenberg, Crusaders in the Courts, 88. 69. Complaint, Parker v. University of Delaware, ARP Papers. 70. Jack Greenberg to Ewald B. Nyquist, May 22, 1950, NAACP Collection; Louis Redding to Greenberg, May 31, 1950, NAACP Collection. 71. Albert James to Gilbert Nickel, April 21, 1950, Department of Justice Papers; Hall Hammond to James, April 24, 1950, Department of Justice Papers; C. Fraser Smith, Here Lies Jim Crow: Civil Rights in Maryland (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 132–35. 72. Hugh Morris to William Bennethum, June 15, 1950, AG. 73. Testimony of Witnesses and Proceedings at Final Hearing, Parker v. University of Delaware, 3, NAACP Collection. 74. Ibid., 11–21. 75. Collins J. Seitz, “Segregation: What Is Past Is Prologue,” Delaware History 24, 4 (Fall–Winter 1991–92): 220–23; Greenberg, Crusaders in the Courts, 88; Kluger, Simple Justice, 430–31; Annette Woolard, “Parker v. The University of Delaware: The Desegregation of Higher Education in Delaware,” Delaware History 22, 2 (Fall–Winter 1986): 116. 76. Homer Minus, interview by the author, August 13, 2003; Helen Powell (née Handy), interview by the author, August 13, 2003. 77. Testimony of Witnesses and Proceedings at Final Hearing, Parker v. University of Delaware,21, 43, 79, 103, 116–18; “State College Witness Calls Staff Inadequate,” WMN, June 13, 1950; “Point Is Made in Negro Suit,” JEE, June 13, 1950. 78. Testimony, Parker v. University of Delaware, 291. 79. Ibid., 316. 80. Ibid., 319. 81. Ibid., 321–22. 82. “An Interview with the Honorable Collins Jacque Seitz by the Honorable A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. and David Stivison,” in Choosing Equality: Essays and Narratives on the Desegregation Experience, ed. Robert L. Hayman and Leland Ware (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), 85. 83. Fairclough, Teaching Equality, 39.   84. Testimony, Parker v. University of Delaware, 659; Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 270. 85. Testimony, Parker v. University of Delaware, 660. 86. Ibid., 662. 87. Ibid., 670.

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Notes to Pages 49–54

88. Ibid., 671; “Hearing Ends on Negro Suit,” JEE, June 15, 1950. 89. Western Union Cablegram, Greenberg to Redding, August 10, 1950, NAACP Collection; Woolard-Provine, Integrating Delaware, 118. 90. “Court Rules U. of D. Must Admit Negroes,” JEE, August 9, 1950; Parker v. University of Delaware, 75 A.2d. 225 (1950). See also “The University of Delaware Decision,” JNE 19, 4 (Autumn 1950): 519–29. 91. Parker v. University of Delaware, 75 A.2d., 230. 92. Ibid., 231; “The University of Delaware Decision,” 525; “Vice Chancellor Will Visit University, College in Suit,” WMN, June 16, 1950; “College Verdict Likely by Fall,” JEE, June 16, 1950. 93. Parker v. University of Delaware, 75 A.2d. at 231; “The University of Delaware Decision,” 525; Seitz, “Segregation: What Is Past Is Prologue,” 224. 94. “Admit Negro Undergrads, Court Orders Delaware U.,” August 10, 1950, NAACP Collection; Digest of NAACP News Releases (July 15–August 15, 1950), vol. 1, no. 12, NAACP Collection; Roger A Martin, A History of Delaware Through Its Governors, 1776–1984 (Wilmington, Del.: McClafferty, 1984), 462. 95. Official Statement, Office of Public Relations, University of Delaware News Release, August 18, 1950, UDA Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, 256; Richard W. Ervin to Albert W. James, August 14, 1950, Department of Justice Papers; James to Hugh M. Morris, August 23, 1950, AG; Board of Trustees Minutes, December 9, 1950, UDA. 96. Henry N. Drewry and Humphrey Doermann, Stand and Prosper: Private Black Colleges and Their Students (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), 103.   97. “Negro College Trustee Raps High Schools,” JEE, August 10, 1950. 98. Oscar J. Chapman, “Decision of the Chancery Court Will Have Little Effect upon the Enrollment of Delaware State College,” August 15, 1950, 1, GP; “Negro College Head Doubts U. of D. Gains,” JEE, August 15, 1950. 99. Chapman, “Decision of the Chancery Court Will Have Little Effect.” 100. Oscar J. Chapman, “Delaware State College Needs a Two Million Dollar Building Program: State Has Spent No Money for This Purpose Since 1931” (Received at the Office of the Governor) January 3, 1951, GP; “Opinions of Board Members Concerning the Future of Delaware State College (As Expressed at Meeting on February 15, 1951),” n.d., GP. 101. Committee to Study the Physical and Educational Needs at Delaware State College, “First and Final Report of the Committee to Study Delaware State College,” 3, GP; Elbert N. Carvel to Thomas C. Mulligan, September 18, 1950, GP. 102. “Schedule 2, Report of the Sub-Committee on Proposal 2,” attached to Committee, “First and Final Report,” 1–4. 103. Louis Redding, Cecie P. Henry, and John J. Kerrigan, “Report of a Minority of the Committee to Study Delaware State College,” March 19, 1951, GP. 104. Allan P. Colburn, Carl J. Rees, and Francis H. Squire, “Status of Delaware State College,” February 20, 1953, GP.

Notes to Pages 54–59

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105. “Governor Hears Pros, Cons on Future of State College,” WMN, April 23, 1953. 106. Gerrish Gassaway to J. Caleb Boggs, June 16, 1953, GP; Ebenezer P.T.A. to Boggs, February 20, 1953, GP; Ross Point P.T.A., March 4, 1953, GP; Muriel Symington to Boggs, April 2, 1953, GP. 107. Jerome Holland to J. Caleb Boggs, December 27, 1954, GP. 108. Holland to Boggs, May 2, 1957, GP. 109. G. James Fleming, “The Negro Publicly-Supported Colleges in Delaware and Maryland,” JNE 31, 3 (Summer 1962): 271. 110. Louis L. Redding, “Desegregation in Higher Education in Delaware,” JNE 27, 3 (Summer 1958): 258. 111. Open letter from Gloster B. Current, August 18, 1950, NAACP Collection. The NAACP was successful in gaining the commitments of a broad coalition of organizations. They included the Business and Professional Women’s Club, National Association of College Women, Council of Negro Women, Howard High Alumnae Association, Howard High P.T.A., American Social Workers, Monday Club, United Order of Odd Fellows, Delta Sigma Theta, Alpha Kappa Alpha, Phi Delta Kappa, Sigma Gamma Rho, Paul Lawrence Dunbar Lodge, Kappa Alpha Psi, Wilmington Ministerial Alliance, and Musicians’ Union. “NAACP Calls Conference to Implement Delaware Ruling,” August 24, 1950, NAACP Collection. 112. “Governor Hears Pros, Cons on Future of State College.” 113. Redding, “Desegregation in Higher Education in Delaware,” 258. 114. Legal scholar Derrick Bell has made this assertion. Derrick A. Bell, Jr., “Serving Two Masters: Integration Ideals and Client Interests in School Desegregation Litigation,” Yale Law Journal 85 (1976): 470. 115. Redding, “Desegregation in Higher Education in Delaware,” 256. 116. Littleton Mitchell, Meeting Minutes, Delaware State Conference of NAACP Branches, February 19, 1966, Pauline A. Young Papers; Littleton P. Mitchell to The Officers and the Board of Directors of the Delaware State Conference of NAACP Branches, “RE: Information on the Resolution Concerning the Delaware State College,” March 3, 1966, PYP; “NAACP Asks Del. State Closing as Segregated,” EJ, February 22, 1966; “Del. State College Abolition Sought,” MN, February 22, 1966; “Del. State Shuns Rap of NAACP,” EJ, March 10, 1966; “Sussex Alumni of Del. State Rap NAACP for Demanding Its Closure,” MN, March 14, 1966. Chapter 2. “He Wouldn’t Help Me Get a Jim Crow Bus” 1. Ronald L. Lewis, “Reverend T. G. Stewart and the Education of Blacks in Reconstruction Delaware,” Delaware History 19, 3 (Spring 1981): 156–78; Lewis, “Reverend T. G. Stewart and ‘Mixed’ Schools in Delaware, 1882,” Delaware History 19, 1 (Spring 1980): 53–58; Jacqueline J. Halstead, “The Delaware Association for the Moral Improvement and Education of the Colored People: Practical Christianity,” Delaware History 15, 1 (Spring 1972): 19–40; Judith Y. Gibson, “Mighty Oaks: Five Black Educators,” in A History of African Americans of Delaware and Maryland’s Eastern Shore, ed. Carole Marks

266

Notes to Pages 60–66

(Newark: University of Delaware, 1997), http://www.udel.edu/BlackHistory/mightyoaks.html; Bradley Skelcher, African American Education in Delaware: A History Through Photographs, 1865–1930 (Wilmington: Delaware Heritage Commission, 1999); Robert J. Taggart, Private Philanthropy and Public Education: Pierre S. Du Pont and the Delaware Schools, 1890–1940 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988). 2. “Negro School System Is Called ‘Deplorable,’ ” SS, March 19, 1939. 3. “Combined P.T.A. Unit Launches Broadside on Conditions at Public School No. 29,” JEE, April 24, 1946. 4. H. B. King to Trustees of Sampson Lodge No. 5, August 2, 1949, GP; Trustees of Sampson Lodge #5 to Governor Elbert Carvel, August 23, 1949, GP; Trustees, Frankford School 206c (John E. Andrews, Thomas J. Oliver, Ernest Ingrain) to Carvel, August 23, 1949, GP; George R. Miller, Jr., to Carvel, August 22, 1949, GP; Blackwater #207c Board of Trustees to Carvel, n.d., GP; Jack S. Lynch, Elva H. Turner, et al. to Carvel, May 12, 1950, GP; Charles L. Reynolds to Walter W. Bacon, May 4, 1948, GP; Preston G. Eisenbrey to Reynolds, May 19, 1948, GP. 5. Robert L. Carter, “The Warren Court and Desegregation,” Michigan Law Review 67, 2 (1968): 237–38. 6. Franklin H. Williams to Louis Redding, September 1, 1948, NAACP Collection. 7. For a survey of the racial inequalities in the state’s system of public primary and secondary education, see “Segregation in Delaware Public Schools: A Report to the Delaware Fellowship Commission—1950,” n.d., Pauline A. Young Papers. 8. Mark V. Tushnet, The NAACP’s Legal Strategy Against Segregated Education, 1925–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 115; Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (New York: Knopf, 1976), 293–94. 9. Mr. and Mrs. Fred Bulah to Governor Elbert Carver, October 3, 1950, GP; Preston G. Eisenbrey to Mr. Fred Bulah, October 10, 1950, Exhibit 1 annexed to Complaint, Bulah v. Gebhart, NAACP Collection; Department of Public Instruction, “Transportation of Pupils,” December 15, 1949, GP; Kluger, Simple Justice, 435; William Peters, “The Schools That Broke the Color Line,” reprinted from October 1954 Redbook: The Magazine for Young Adults, NAACP Collection; George I. Sylvester, Jr., to Mr. Fred Bulah, October 9, 1950, GP. On the Bulahs’ commonsense solution, see Bulah to Carvel, October 12, 1950, GP. 10. SBOE Minutes, December 15, 1950, GP; George R. Miller, Jr., to Fred Bulah, December 18, 1950, Exhibit 3 Amended to Complaint, Belton v. Gebhart, NAACP Collection; Eisenbrey to Bulah, December 11, 1950, GP. 11. Carl T. Rowan, “Delaware Wants Its Schools to Be ‘Separate, Equal,’ ” reprinted in “Jim Crow Schools on Trial: The Persons, the Places, the Issues,” Minneapolis Morning Tribune, December 1953, KBC; Kluger, Simple Justice, 435. Redding’s recollections confirm those of Bulah. “I told her I would not get involved in such a limited matter,” he recalled. “But if she wanted her daughter to go to the white school, that I would do. She readily agreed.” See Laurie Hays, “Louis Redding’s Fight for Dignity and Decency,”

Notes to Pages 66–69

267

Brown Alumni Monthly 86, 38 (February 1986): 38–43, 60. Fred Bulah and Sarah Bulah to Louis Redding, January 19, 1951, photocopy of document held by Phillip Stamps. 12. Mrs. Fred Bulah to State Board of Education, February 20, 1951, DPI; Mrs. Fred Bulah to Gordon Biehn, February 13, 1951, DPI. 13. Kluger, Simple Justice, 434; Raymond Wolters, The Burden of Brown: Thirty Years of School Desegregation (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), 177; Peter Irons, Jim Crow’s Children: The Broken Promise of the Brown Decision (New York: Penguin, 2002), 105–7; James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 30; Ethel Belton et al. to State Board of Education, February 15, 1951, DPI; Edward H. McNair to State Board of Education, February 17, 1951, DPI; Mrs. Arthur Johnson et al. to State Board of Education, February 21, 1951, DPI; Helen Turner to State Board of Education, March 6, 1951, DPI; George R. Miller, Jr., to Ethel Belton, February 26, 1951, DPI; Miller to McNair, February 26, 1951, DPI; Miller to Mrs. Fred Bulah, February 26, 1951, DPI. 14. George R. Miller, Jr., to Max Terry, February 27, 1951, DPI. 15. SBOE minutes, March 16, 1951, GP. This generic letter was included in the Minutes of the State Board of Education, SBOE, March 16, 1951; [President of Claymont Board of Education] to Emma Fountain, January 30, 1951, Exhibit 1 annexed to Complaint, Belton v. Gebhart, NAACP Collection; Miller to Ethel Belton, February 26, 1951; Miller to McNair, February 26, 1951; Miller to Emma Fountain, March 19, 1951, Exhibit 2 annexed to Complaint, Belton v. Gebhart, NAACP Collection; “Negroes Apply to State Board,” JEE, February 28, 1951. 16. National Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., “Report of the Staff to the Board of Directors of N.A.A.C.P.,” April 1951, 6, NAACP Collection; Tushnet, The NAACP’s Legal Strategy, 50–51. 17. “Legal Department Monthly Report,” June 1951, 2, NAACP Collection; Jack Walter Peltason, Fifty-Eight Lonely Men: Southern Federal Judges and School Desegregation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 5–6; “Allegations of the Complaint,” Robert Wilson, et al. plaintiffs v. James Beebe et al defendants, James Johnson, an infant by his guardian ad Litem, Susanne Johnson et al. plaintiffs v. James Beebe et al. defendants, Civil Action No. 1376–1377, EVB, 1. 18. Wilson v. Beebe, 99 F.Supp. 421, 419–20; “Legal Department Monthly Report,” January 1952, NAACP Collection; Jack Greenberg, Crusaders in the Courts: How a Dedicated Band of Lawyers Fought for the Civil Rights Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 136; “U.S. State Courts Asked to End Jim Crow Schools,” BAA, July 28, 1951. 19. Jack Greenberg, Crusaders in the Courts, 135. 20. Kluger, Simple Justice, 436. 21. Elbert N. Carvel to the Senate of the State of Delaware, June 5, 1951, Governor’s Papers; Kluger, Simple Justice, 433; “An Interview with the Honorable Collins Jacques Seitz Conducted by the Honorable A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. and by David V. Stivison,” in Choosing Equality: Essays and Narratives on the Desegregation Experience, ed. Rob-

268

Notes to Page 69

ert L. Hayman and Leland Ware (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), 81–82. 22. Kluger, Simple Justice, 433. 23. Students who were parties to Belton v. Gebhart: Ethel Louise Belton, Elbert James Crumpler, Richard Leon Davis, Spencer V. Robinson, Styron Lucille Sanford, Alemena A. Short, and Myrtha Delores Trotter; Complaint, Belton v. Gebhart, NAACP Collection. 24. Answer, Belton v. Gebhart, 3, 4, NAACP Collection. 25. Kluger, Simple Justice, 406. 26. Testimony of Witnesses, Belton v. Gebhart and Bulah v. Gebhart, 18–22. 27. Ibid., 36–37. 28. Ibid., 37–38. 29. Ibid., 55–108, 139, 186–202, 215–79. 30. John P. Jackson, Social Scientists for Social Justice: Making the Case Against Segregation (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 20–23. 31. Testimony of Witnesses, Belton v. Gebhart and Bulah v. Gebhart, 282, 290, 374, 395. 32. Daryl Michael Scott, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880–1996 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), xiii; Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 33. Walter A. Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism, 1938–1987 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 293; Jackson, Social Scientists for Social Justice, 126; Herbert Hill and Jack Greenberg, Citizen’s Guide to De-Segregation: A Story of Social and Legal Change in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 88; Kluger, Simple Justice, 282–84; David W. Levy, “Before Brown: The Racial Integration of American Higher Education,” Journal of Supreme Court History 24, 3 (1999): 298–313. 34. Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage, 1972), 301; James E. Reibman, “Ralph Ellison, Frederic Wertham, M.D., and the Lafargue Clinic: Civil Rights and Psychiatric Services in Harlem,” Oklahoma City University Law Review 26 (Fall 2001): 1041–43; Shelly Eversley, “The Lunatic’s Fancy and the Work of Art,” American Literary History 13, 3 (Fall 2001): 445–47. 35. Greenberg, Crusaders for Justice, 136; Jack Greenberg, “Trial Memorandum, Wilmington School Case,” October 11, 19511, NAACP Collection; Kluger, Simple Justice, 442–43. Frederic Wertham summarized the findings of his work with these students in “Psychological Effects of School Segregation,” American Journal of Psychotherapy 6, 1 (January 1952): 94–103, and “Nine Men Speak to You: Jim Crow in the North,” The Nation (June 12, 1954): 497–99. 36. Testimony of Witnesses, Belton v. Gebhart and Bulah v. Gebhart, 124; Greenberg, Crusaders in the Courts, 136; Kluger, Simple Justice, 443–45; “Educators Hit Segregation,” JEE, October 23, 1951; “Public Segregation Held Health Drag,” NYT, October 23, 1951.

Notes to Pages 69–81

269

37. Testimony of Witnesses, Belton v. Gebhart and Bulah v. Gebhart, 129. 38. Ibid., 131. 39. Ibid., 139, 143. 40. Jackson, Social Scientists for Social Justice, 136. 41. Kenneth B. Clark, Prejudice and Your Child (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1963), 23–24; Herman, The Romance of American Psychology, 195. 42. Clark, Prejudice and Your Child, 86–87. 43. Ibid., xx; Kluger, Simple Justice, 316–17. 44. Greenberg, Crusaders in the Courts, 124; Kluger, Simple Justice, 321; Mark V. Tushnet, Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936–1961 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 157. 45. Testimony of Witnesses, Belton v. Gebhart and Bulah v. Gebhart, 588–89; Kenneth Clark, “Preliminary Report: Tests of Racial Preferences of Adolescent Negro Subjects in Wilmington, Delaware,” KBC. 46. Ibid., 591. 47. Ibid., 12. 48. Ibid., 13–15. 49. Ibid., 838–39, 816–23; George R. Miller, “Adolescent Negro Education in Delaware: A Study of the Negro Secondary School and Community (Exclusive of Wilmington)” (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1943); George R. Miller, Jr., to Walter White, August 26, 1941, NAACP Collection. 50. On the relative difficulties that attorneys faced in defending desegregation suits and recruiting expert witnesses, see Mark A. Chesler, Joseph Sanders, and Debra S. Kalmuss, Social Science in Court: Mobilizing Experts in the School Desegregation Cases (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 67–74. After the Supreme Court decision in Brown, social scientists and legal scholars noted a number of inconsistencies between Clark’s original research findings in his projective and coloring tests and his conclusions based on interviews with the student plaintiffs in the Briggs and Belton cases. As the historian of American social science John P. Jackson has noted, there were serious flaws in Clark’s calculation that segregated schools caused damage to the psychological development of black students that were beyond Young’s ability to identify and engage during the trial. Clark’s original 1947 study interpreted the children’s preference for the white doll as a “concomitant negative attitude toward the Brown doll.” Clark was unable to reproduce his findings in his examination of more than a few dozen black Delaware children, including thirteen of the plaintiffs’ children, in preparation for the Belton case. In this case, only a small minority—twelve of forty-one—of the test subjects who expressed a preference chose the white doll as the one they liked best. Most of the children refused to identify either doll as the one they believed would “act bad.” If, as in his original study and his examination of the black children in the South Carolina case, Clark interpreted the black children’s choice of the brown doll as an identification of psychological damage, he now considered the children’s failure to identify the brown doll as the one that acted bad as a demonstra-

270

Notes to Pages 81–85

tion of damage. Notwithstanding certain inconsistencies in the body of Clark’s work, the evidence of damage capped one of the most concerted challenges to the constitutionality of school segregation to date. A number of commentators have highlighted significant weaknesses and inconsistencies in the social science literature on damage and, more specifically, in Clark’s findings. See “Grade School Segregation: The Latest Attack on Racial Discrimination,” Yale Law Journal 61, 5 (1952): 735–38; Edmond Cahn, “Jurisprudence,” New York University Law Review 30, 1 (1955): 153–54; Jackson, Social Scientists for Social Justice, 135–45, 153–55, 175–81. 51. Belton v. Gebhart, 87 2A.2d. 862, 871 (1952); “Claymont Negroes Win School Suit,” JEE, April 1, 1952; “Chancellor Plans to Visit Schools Involved in Suit,” WMN, October 26, 1951; Segregation Hearings End,” JEE, October 26, 1951; “Del. Judge Inspects Schools, Trial Closes,” BAA, November 10, 1951. 52. Belton v. Gebhart, 87 A.2d. at 864–66. 53. Ibid., 870. Also quoted in Kluger, Simple Justice, 449. 54. Order, Belton v. Gebhart, 87 A.2d., April 15, 1952. 55. Fred E. Gebhart to Elbert M. Carvel, April 11, 1952, Governor’s Papers. 56. Minutes of the State Board of Education, April 22, May 2, 1952, Governor’s Papers. 57. For a broader consideration of black ambivalence regarding desegregation, see Adam Fairclough, “ ‘Being in the Field of Education and Also Being a Negro . . . Seems . . . Tragic’: Black Teachers in the Jim Crow South,” Journal of American History 87, 1 (June 2000): 84–87. 58. Carl T. Rowan, “Some Negro Teachers Favor School Segregation,” reprinted in “Jim Crow Schools on Trial: The Persons, the Places, the Issues,” Minneapolis Morning Tribune, reprinted from December 1953, KBC. 59. Ibid.; Kluger, Simple Justice, 435. There is a vast literature on the black church as a facilitator of both political mobilization and accommodation. See Barbara Dianne Savage, Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008); Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 99–100; Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: Free Press, 1984), 91–93; Adolph L. Reed, Jr., The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon: The Crisis of Purpose in Afro-American Politics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986), 46. 60. Minutes of the State Board of Education, June 5, July 18, 1952, Governor’s Papers. 61. This language was contained in a memo from the State Board of Education to the governor and presented by Louis Redding in his cross-examination of Miller during Belton v. Gebhart and Bulah v. Gebhart. Testimony of Witnesses, Belton v. Gebhart and Bulah v. Gebhart, 830. 62. Robert C. Stewart, “Attendance Unit Summary of the Negro High School for the Central Part of the State” (Dover: Department of Public Instruction, December 14, 1948); John Shilling, “Alternative Proposals for Attendance at the William W. M. Henry

Notes to Pages 85–91

271

Comprehensive High School” (Dover: Department of Public Instruction, November 1951), 1; Robert C. Stewart, “Preliminary Study of Negro Attendance Units in Sussex County” (Dover: Department of Public Instruction, April 18, 1951), 1–2. 63. John Shilling and Harley F. Taylor, “A New Educational Center Is Born to Strengthen Our Democratic Way of Life: William W. M. Henry Comprehensive High School, Dover, Delaware, Program of Studies, 1952–1953,” Bulletin no. 1–52, May 19, 1952, 8 (italics in original). 64. Ibid., 11–22; Roger C. Mowrey, Delaware School District Organization and Boundaries (Dover: Department of Public Instruction, 1974), 6, http://facilitynet.doe. k12.de.us/schooldata/reports/DelSchDistOrg-Boundaries.pdf. 65. “School Decision Is Upheld,” JEE, August 28, 1952; “Negro Pupils Ruling Upheld by High Court,” WMN, August 28, 1952. 66. Notice of Appeal, Belton v. Gebhart, 2, 4, 9. 67. Belton v. Gebhart, 91 A.2d. at 137, 142. 68. Ibid., 149. 69. Ibid., 152. 70. Ibid., 141–42. 71. Peters, “The Schools That Broke the Color Line.” 72. Harvey E. Stahl, interview by John H. Gauger, Retired Superintendent, Claymont Special School District, July 20, 1966, DOHC. 73. Brigitte L. Brown, interview by the author, February 2004. 74. Peters, “The Schools That Broke the Color Line.” On the broader view in U.S. culture on the degrading effects of miscegenation, see George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817– 1914 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 49. 75. Peters, “The Schools That Broke the Color Line.” 76. “Court to Hear Delaware Segregation Case, Dec. 8,” JEE, November 24, 1952; “Young Readies State School Segregation Case for U.S. Court,” WMN, November 25, 1952; Kluger, Simple Justice, 539–40. 77. Leon Friedman, ed., Argument: The Oral Argument Before the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 1952–55 (New York: Chelsea House, 1969), 13; Kluger, Simple Justice, 280, 564–67; Brief for Appellants, Brown v. Board of Education, in Landmark Briefs and Arguments of the Supreme Court of the United States: Constitutional Law, ed. Philip B. Kurland and Gerhard Casper (Washington, D.C.: University Publications of America, 1975), 27–39; “Appendix to Appellants’ Briefs (The Effects of Segregation and the Consequences of Desegregation: A Social Science Statement),” Brown v. Board of Education, in Kurland and Casper, Landmark Briefs, 43–59. 78. Paul E. Wilson, A Time to Lose: Representing Kansas in Brown v. Board of Education (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), 144. 79. Friedman, Argument, 161–65. 80. Kurland and Casper, Landmark Briefs, 471–72. 81. Kluger, Simple Justice, 557.

272

Notes to Pages 91–101

82. Friedman, Argument, 172. 83. Tushnet, Making Civil Rights Law, 194. 84. SBOE Minutes, November 11, 1952; George R. Miller, Jr., to H. Albert Young, July 22, 1953, AG; Miller to Board of School Trustees, Hockessin School District #107, August 14, 1953, AG. 85. George R. Miller, Jr., to H. Albert Young, October 5, 1953, AG; Miller to Board of School Trustees, Hockessin School District #29, September 9, 1953, AG; Young to Miller, October 2, 1953, Attorney General Papers; Miller to Young, October 19, 1953, AG. 86. Young to Miller, October 2, 1953, AG; Ward I. Miller to Louis J. Finger, August 28, 1953, AG. 87. Kurland and Casper, Landmark Briefs, 615–16, italics added. 88. Ibid., 625, 627. 89. Ibid., 629 90. Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 494 (1954). 91. Footnote 11 as included in the text of Brown v. Board of Education: “K. B. Clark, Effect of Prejudice and Discrimination on Personality Development (Midcentury White House Conference on Children and Youth, 1950); Witmer and Kotinsky, Personality in the Making (1952), c. VI; Deutscher and Chein, The Psychological Effects of Enforced Segregation: A Survey of Social Science Opinion, 26 J. Psychol. 259 (1948); Chein, What are the Psychological Effects of Segregation Under Conditions of Equal Facilities?, 3 Int. J. Opinion and Attitude Res. 229 (1949); Brameld, Educational Costs, in Discrimination and National Welfare (MacIver, ed., 1949), 44–48; Frazier, The Negro in the United States (1949), 674–681. And see generally Myrdal, An American Dilemma (1944).” See Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), 494. 92. Scott, Contempt and Pity, 136. 93. Adolph L. Reed, Jr., Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene (New York: New Press, 2000), 188–89. 94. Kluger, Simple Justice, 705. 95. Andrew Kull, The Color-Blind Constitution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 155. 96. Reed, Class Notes, 187; Kluger, Simple Justice, 707; Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education, 69. Chapter 3. “The Delaware Method of Solving Things” 1. “Along the NAACP Battlefront: Atlanta Declaration,” The Crisis 61, 6 (June–July 1954): 358. 2. Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008), 182. 3. “Along the NAACP Battlefront,” 359. 4. Daniel Judah Elazar, American Federalism: A View from the States, 2nd ed. (New York: Crowell, 1972), 180–93. 

Notes to Pages 101–106

273

5. Thomas J. Sugrue, “All Politics Is Local: The Persistence of Localism in TwentiethCentury America,” in The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History, ed. Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak, and Julian E. Zelizer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), 302. 6. As political scientist Paul Dolan has observed, “Where a state agency attempt[ed] to regulate the domestic affairs of a large number of citizens in each county, local prejudices generally require[d] that the state agency be well apprised of the local feelings.  . . . This fact is again part of the general picture which seems to prevail in Delaware, namely that if a board [was] charged with spending the large sums of money, it [was] likely to have representatives from each county upon it.” Paul Dolan, “The Organization of State Administration in Delaware,” Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science 68, 1 (1950): 41–47; Robert J. Taggart, Private Philanthropy and Public Education: Pierre S. du Pont and the Delaware Schools, 1890–1940 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988), 71–73. 7. Minutes of the Board, June 11, 1954 SBOE; “State Board of Education Policies Regarding Desegregation of the Schools of the State,” June 11, 1954, BFC; “Delaware,” SSN, September 3, 1954. 8. Minutes of the Board, August 19, 1954, SBOE; “Suggested Policies for Opening of School,” August 19, 1954, BFC; “Integration Guide Offered,” JEE, August 20, 1954; Minutes of the Board, “Some Items and Suggestions Relative to Desegregation Plans,” Minutes of the Board, August 26, 1954, SBOE; “Suggestion on Integration Wins State Board Approval,” JEE, August 28, 1954; “Delaware,” SSN, September 3, 1954, 3; “Supreme Court’s Decision Relative to Segregation,” May 17, 1954, WBOE; “Schools Ready for Integration,” WMN, May 27, 1954; “Integration of Summer Activities,” June 21, 1954, WBOE; “City Abandons Segregation in Summer School Program,” JEE, June 22, 1954. On the basic tenets of freedom of choice plans, see “Freedom of Choice,” in Jeffrey A. Raffel, Historical Dictionary of School Segregation and Desegregation. The American Experience (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998), 108–9; “Proposed Policies Regarding Attendance of White and Negro Pupils,” n.d., BFC. 9. “Plan to End Segregation in City This Fall Studied,” JEE, July 9, 1954. 10. “Delaware,” SSN, September 3, 1954. 11. William M. Gordon, “The Implementation of Desegregation Plans Since Brown,” JNE NE 63, 3 (Summer 1994): 311. See also Raffel, Historical Dictionary, 108–9. 12. Carol E. Hoffecker, Corporate Capital: Wilmington in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), 112; Charles Tilly, Wagner D. Jackson, and Barry Kay, Race and Residence in Wilmington, Delaware (New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1965), 50–63. 13. Board of Public Education in Wilmington, “Providing Equal Educational Opportunity in the Wilmington Public Schools,” August 2, 1954, BFC; June Shagaloff, “Desegregation of Public Schools in Delaware,” JNE 24, 3 (Summer 1955): 193; “Mixed Class Plan in City Runs Easily,” JEE, September 21, 1954; “Delaware,” SSN, May 4, 1955; “City to Start 7th Grade Integration,” JEE, June 3, 1955; “900 Negro Pupils to Enter Former

274

Notes to Pages 106–111

All-White Schools,” WMN, September 2, 1955; “Public School Segregation Ends This Fall,” JEE, February 14, 1956. 14. Minutes of the Board, August 19, 1954, SBOE; “Delaware,” SSN, September 3, 1954; Minutes of the Board, August 26, 1954, SBOE; “Statement Concerning Desegregation in Schools of the State of Delaware,” n.d., SBOE. 15. Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 203.  16. Jennifer Alice Delton, Racial Integration in Corporate America, 1940–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 257–61; Hoffecker, Corporate Capital, 129. 17. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 202–18; Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Norton, 2005), 112–41; Hoffecker, Corporate Capital, 123; Raymond Wolters, The Burden of Brown: Thirty Years of School Desegregation (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), 182. 18. W. Edwin Kee, Jr., “Tense Times: The Integration Crisis of 1954 in the Public Schools of Milford, Delaware” (M.A. thesis, University of Delaware, 1996), 23–24; Ed Kee and Orlando Camp, “Lost Opportunity: The Failure to Integrate Milford’s Public Schools in 1954,” in Choosing Equality: Essays and Narratives on the Desegregation Experience, ed. Robert L. Hayman and Leland Ware (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), 134–35; “Milford’s Schools Ready for Opening Day Wednesday,” DSN, September 3, 1954. On chartering the preconditions for the emergence and development of black insurgencies, see Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 36–59. The topic of desegregation had emerged on a number of occasions during meetings of the Milford Board of Education that summer. On August 9 the board agreed to organize a committee composed of civic and religious leaders who would advise the board on the integration of Milford schools. In a special session at the end of August, the Milford board agreed in principle that “Colored students residing in our district where no school facilities were provided would be admitted to the Lake Avenue School.” It is unclear, given Cobbs’s public statements, whether these decisions were made public. MBOE, August 9, 30, 1954, MBOE. 19. Kee and Camp, “Lost Opportunity,” 138. 20. “Delaware,” SSN, October 1, 1954; Ed Kee, “The Brown Decision and Milford, Delaware, 1954–1965,” Delaware History 27, 4 (Fall–Winter 1997–98): 211; Selwyn James, “The Town That Surrendered to Hate,” Redbook Magazine, April 1955, 70; Kenneth B. Clark, “Report on Observations in the Milford, Delaware Area,” September 22–24, 1954, KBC, 15. 21. John W. Flamer, “Summary of the Milford School Incident,” n.d., NAACP Collection; Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, vol. 1 (New Brunswick, N.J: Transaction Publishers, 1996), 58. See also Eliz-

Notes to Pages 111–115

275

abeth Jacoway, Turn Away Thy Son: Little Rock, the Crisis That Shocked the Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007). 22. Taggart, Private Philanthropy and Public Education, 130, 136; Bradley Skelcher, African American Education in Delaware: A History Through Photographs, 1865–1930 (Wilmington: Delaware Heritage Commission, 1999), 66, 73–99; Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (New York: Knopf, 1976), 427. 23. Robert Hagy, “Milford Deseg,” September 24, 1954, TMC; “Delaware,” SSN, October 1, 1954; Clark, “Report on Observations in the Milford, Delaware Area,” 4; James, “The Town That Surrendered to Hate,” 71. 24. “Demand End of Milford Integration,” DSN, September 20, 1954; Clark, “Report on Observations in the Milford, Delaware Area,” 4; “Police on Alert,” NYT, September 23, 1954. 25. Hagy, “Milford Deseg”; “Demand End of Milford Integration.” 26. MSDAR, Tape 9, September 20, 1954; “Demand End of Milford Integration”; “Segregation Session Ends in Confusion,” NYT, September 21, 1954; “1,002 Sign Petition Opposing Integration,” JEE, September 20, 1954. 27. Clark, “Report on Observations in the Milford, Delaware Area,” 6–7; James W. Flamer to Gloster B. Current, “Activity Report,” October 4, 1954, 1, NAACP Collection; “Integration Move Delayed by Fight,” NYT, September 21, 1954; MBOE, September 20, 1954; “Milford Schools Are Closed Again Today,” DSN, September 21, 1954; “Milford’s 2 Schools Will Remain Closed Until Further Notice,” JEE, September 21, 1954; “Racial Bias Keeps 2 Schools Closed,” NYT, September 22, 1954; “Delaware,” SSN, October 1, 1954. 28. Kee and Camp, “Lost Opportunity,” 143–44. 29. “Oral History Interview with H. Albert Young, Wilmington Lawyer,” transcr. R. Herman, May 15, 1976, Morris Library, Special Collections, University of Delaware. 30. Clark, “Report on Observations in the Milford, Delaware Area,” 3. 31. Ibid., 2; “State and Milford Boards Meet Tonight,” DSN, September 23, 1954. 32. Clark, “Report on Observations in the Milford, Delaware Area,” 18–24, 1–4; “Gov. Boggs Takes Stand in Milford Crisis,” DSN, September 24, 1954; “Board Statement on Milford Case,” DSN, September 24, 1954; “Delaware Board Acts in Bias Issue,” NYT, September 24, 1954; “Milford Strike Appraised,” NYT, October 8, 1954; “State and Milford Boards Meet Tonight”; “State Asked to Rule on Segregation at Milford,” JEE, September 23, 1954; “Ultimatum Given in Race Bias Case,” NYT, September 23, 1954. On the often contentious relationship between state and local agencies in Delaware, see Paul Dolan, The Organization of State Administration in Delaware, Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science 67, 1 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1950), 54, 137–41; Minutes of the Board, September 23, 1954, SBOE. 33. Robert Hagy, “Milford Research,” September 30, 1954, TMC. 34. Clive Webb, Rabble Rousers: The American Far Right in the Civil Rights Era (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 1–38.

276

Notes to Pages 116–119

35. Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 127. On the intersections of conservatism and populism, see Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), 165–93. Flamer to Current, “Activity Report,” 2, NAACP Collection; Will Lang, Jr., “Milford Research,” September 30, 1954, TMC. 36. MSDAR, Tape 1, September 30, 1954; MSDAR, Tape 2, October 10, 1954; MSDAR, Tape 5, September 26, 1954; Lang, “Milford Research.” 37. MSDAR, Tape 5. 38. MSDAR, Tape 2. Gunnar Myrdal observed that white southerners ranked the maintenance of etiquettes and discriminations that governed such personal contact as second in “the white man’s rank order of discrimination”—second only to concerns about intermarriage and sexual intercourse between black men and white women. Myrdal, An American Dilemma, 60. 39. MSDAR, Tape 5. 40. Danielle McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Knopf, 2010), 115. 41. MSDAR, Tape 3, October 10, 1954. 42. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street, 21. 43. “Attendance Increases at Milford School,” DSN, September 28, 1954. 44. On the difficulties that segregationists faced in employing biblical doctrine in support of racial segregation, see David L. Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 112–17. See also Jane Dailey, “The Theology of Massive Resistance: Sex, Segregation, and the Sacred After Brown,” in Massive Resistance: Southern Opposition to the Second Reconstruction, ed. Clive Webb (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 151–80; MSDAR, Tape 5. 45. “Racial Flare-Up,” Time, October 11, 1954; Will Lang, Jr., “Second Add, Milford Research,” September 30, 1954, TMC. Also quoted in Kee, “The Brown Decision and Milford, Delaware,” 226–27. 46. Lang, “Second Add, Milford Research”; “Milford School Reopens with Negroes,” DSN, September 27, 1954; James, “The Town That Surrendered to Hate,” 72. 47. MSDAR, Tape 3 and Tape 2. 48. My argument here takes inspiration from Gary Gerstle’s and Rogers Smith’s conceptions of racial nationalism and citizenship and the authors’ argument that membership in the polity has often been conceived in illiberal and narrow ethnoracial terms in which African Americans and other groups have been cast as inferiors and outsiders. Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001); Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999). 49. MSDAR, Tape 5. 50. MSDAR, Tape 2.

Notes to Pages 119–123

277

51. “Delaware,” SSN, September 3, 1954. 52. MSDAR, Tape 3, October 10, 1954. 53. “NAAWP: What Is It?—A Factual Report,” DSN, September 30, 1954; “ ‘White People’ Association Claims It Averted Violence,” JEE, September 29, 1954. 54. MSDAR, Tape 4, September 26, 1954. 55. MSDAR, Tape 2; Mark V. Tushnet, Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936–1961 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 188–91. 56. “Attendance Increases at Milford School.” 57. Eric L. Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 189; Gerstle, American Crucible, 251–52, 100–102, 246; MSDAR, Tape 2 and Tape 3; Kee and Camp, “Lost Opportunity,” 156; MSDAR, Tape 5. 58. Robert Hagy, “Milford Story,” October 1, 1954, TMC; Flamer to Current, “Activity Report,” 3; “Milford School Reopens with Negroes”; “Ten Negroes Back in Milford School,” NYT, September 28, 1954. The reason for the missing eleventh black student became apparent in one cautionary tale told by Georgetown resident Earl Hasting, who read a statement from Betty Jean Tingle, a white student from Milford High, at one of the NAAWP rallies. According to Hasting, Tingle reported that Leon Blue, one of the original eleven black students who had enrolled at Milford High, had “asked [her] to go to the movies” and later, along with a number of other boys, allegedly harassed her at her home. Blue’s parents, fearing retribution against their son for his alleged transgression, withdrew him from Milford High and enrolled him in the black comprehensive high school in Georgetown. Hagy, “Milford Story.” 59. Flamer to Current, “Activity Report,” 2–5; Hagy, “Milford Story”; “Attendance Increases at Milford School”; “Milford School Attendance Is Declining,” DSN, September 30, 1954; “1,500 Hear NAAWP Blasts at Meeting Here Wednesday,” State Register, October 1, 1954; “Revolt Widening over Integration,” NYT, September 29, 1954; “Student Absences Rise in Delaware,” NYT, September 30, 1954; Shagaloff, “Desegregation of Public Schools in Delaware,” 197. 60. Flamer to Current, “Activity Report,” 4. 61. “Statement Issued by the Milford Board of Education,” September 30, 1954, attached to Flamer to Current, “Activity Report,” italics added; “Board of Directors Meeting,” October 11, 1954, 4, NAACP Collection; Minutes of the Board, October 2, 1954, SBOE. 62. George R. Miller to [Parents of Black Children], October 2, 1954, NAACP Collection; “Seek Reorganization of Milford Board,” DSN, September 30, 1954; “Statement by the Milford Board of Education”; Edmund Steiner to Mr. and Mrs. Reese, September 30, 1954; Flamer to Current, “Activity Report”; Minutes of the Board, October 2, 1954, SBOE. 63. “Seek Reorganization of Milford Board”; “Boycott of Schools Appears Over,” JEE, October 1, 1954; “Move to Stop Spread of School Terror,” DSN, October 1, 1954;

278

Notes to Pages 123–126

“Maryland, Delaware School Segregation Issues Simmer,” Greenville Piedmont, October 2, 1954. 64. “Governor Blamed for Setback in DE,” October 9, 1954, NAACP Collection. 65. Flamer to Current, “Activity Report,” 6; “Negroes File Suit in Milford Dispute; FBI Probe Sought,” WMN, October 4, 1954; “Ten Ousted Negro Students File Lawsuit,” DSN, October 4, 1954; “Integration Problem Here Is Pending in Chancery,” MC, October 8, 1954. The ten students were Lillian Simmons, Madeline Staten, Annie Ruth Thompson, Edna Turner, Irene Pettyjohn, Charles Fleming, Jr., Kenneth Baynard, Orlando Camp, Eugene Harris, and Ronald Vann. Robert Hagy, “Bryant Bowles and Company,” October 13, 1954, TMC. 66. “Court Reserves Ruling in Milford School Case,” JEE, October 12, 1954; “No Decision in Milford Negro Case,” DSN, October 12, 1954. 67. “Oral History Interview with H. Albert Young, Wilmington Lawyer,” 16. 68. Hagy, “Bryant Bowles and Co.,” quoted in “Court Reserves Ruling in Milford School Case”; “No Decision in Milford Negro Case.” 69. Robert Hagy, “Add Bryant Bowles,” October 14, 1954, TMC; Danes to Boggs, October 13, 1954, GP; “Governor Refuses to Oust H. Albert Young,” DSN, October 14, 1954; “2 Senators Deny Bias Case Pledge,” NYT, October 14, 1954; Carol Hoffecker, Honest John Williams: U.S. Senator from Delaware (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 2000), 141–42, 150; “Integration Not a Political Issue—Williams,” DSN, October 7, 1954; “Delaware U.S. Senators Denounce Young,” DSN, October 13, 1954; John J. Williams, “An Explanation of the Supreme Court Decision as It Affects Integration,” October 14, 1954, Papers of Senator John J. Williams, University of Delaware, Newark; “An Explanation by Sen. John J. Williams,” MC, October 15, 1954;“Senator Williams Tells State Segregation Decision Is Final,” LSR, October 15, 1954. 70. Simmons v. Steiner, 108 A.2d. 173 (1954), 175. 71. Hagy, “Add Bryant Bowles.” 72. “Simmons et. al. v. Steiner et al.,” NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Monthly Report, October 1954, 5, NAACP Collection; Minutes of the Board, October 14, 1954, SBOE; Hagy, “Add Bryant Bowles”; “Order Admitting Negro Students Is Approved,” JEE, October 19, 1954; “Marvel Signs Injunction Returning Negro Pupils But Postpones Execution,” DSN, October 19, 1954; “Local Integration Problems Are Being Studied in Chancery,” MC, October 22, 1954; “Court to Decide Question of Integration in Delaware,” Greenville Piedmont, October 19, 1954; “May 17 Edict Wins Test in Delaware,” New York Age, October 23, 1954; “Delaware,” SSN, November 4, 1954, 7; William T. Quillen and Michael Hanrahan, A Short History of the Delaware Court of Chancery, 1993, http://courts.state.de.us/Courts/Court%20 of%20Chancery/?history.htm; Robert Hagy, “Wilmington Segregation Follow Up,” October 19, 1954, TMC; “Milford Students Enter Negro School in Sussex,” JEE, October 18, 1954. 73. “End Arguments in Negro Student Case,” DSN, October 22, 1954; “Supreme Court Grants Stay in Milford Case,” DSN, October 25, 1954; “Segregation Ruling Put Off

Notes to Pages 126–130

279

Seven Weeks,” JEE, October 23, 1954; “Supreme Court Grants Stay in Milford Integration,” MC, October 29, 1954; “Delaware,” SSN, November 6, 1954, 7. 74. On the purpose of the modern survey. see Sarah E. Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007); “Will Conduct Poll of Public Opinion at Laurel School,” State Register, October 8, 1954; “Public Opinion Poll Friday and Saturday at Central School,” State Register, October 15, 1954; Hagy, “Wilmington Segregation Follow Up”; “More Ballots Cast in Opinion Poll Than School Voting,” State Register, October 22, 1954; “Local Board of Education Adheres to Present Policies,” LSR, November 19, 1954; “Segregation Polls Are Due Saturday,” MC, November 19, 1954; “Harrington Poll,” November 20, 1954, GP; “Towns Favor Segregation,” DSN, November 22, 1954; Robert Hagy, “Poll on Integration and Note on Bryant Bowles,” November 23, 1954, TMC; “Five Communities Took Segregation Vote on Saturday,” MC, November 26, 1954; “More Public Opinion Polls Scheduled,” MC, November 26, 1954; Robert Hagy, “Trial of NAAWP’s Bryant Bowles,” November 30, 1954, TMC; Minutes of the Board, December 16, 1954, SBOE; “Delaware,” SSN, January 6, 1955; “Seaford Opinion Poll Against Integration,” LSR, February 18, 1955. 75. Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 351; Minutes of the Board, October 14, 1954, SBOE; “Delaware,” SSN, November 4, 1954. 76. “Integration Appeal Case Briefs Filed,” WMN, December 11, 1954; “Counter Briefs Filed in Milford Segregation Row,” MC, November 12, 1954. 77. Steiner v. Simmons, 111 A.2d. 574 (1955), 575; James Truitt, “Segregation—Report Card,” February 8, 1955, TMC. 78. Steiner v. Simmons, 579, italics original. 79. Ibid., 582. 80. Ibid., 584. 81. Truitt, “Segregation—Report Card”; Robert Hagy, “Milford School Case Decided,” February 8, 1955, TMC. 82. June Shagaloff to Thurgood Marshall, November 23, 1954, NAACP Collection. Racial moderates—as opposed to their more virulently racist cousins—have been increasingly recognized by historians for the ways they have shaped race relations and American political culture in the post-World War II era. See William H. Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina and the Black Struggle for Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Karen Anderson, “The Little Rock School Desegregation Crisis: Moderation and Social Conflict,” Journal of Southern History 70, 3 (August 2004): 603–36. 83. “The Call to Reason,” LSR, October 1, 1954, TMC. Will Lang, Jr., made a similar observation in “Milford School Integration,” September 30, 1954, TMC. 84. On the centrality of “law and order” to conservative politics, see David Farber, The Rise and Fall of Modern American Conservatism: A Short History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), 1; Gerstle, American Crucible, 309–10. Shagaloff, “Desegregation of Public Schools in Delaware,” 198; “Delaware,” SSN, November 4, 1954;

280

Notes to Pages 130–133

“Education in Conflict,” DSN, September 29, 1954; Robert W. Duke, letter to the editor, DSN, October 1, 1954. 85. Jack Beach, “Milling Around Milford,” DSN, September 29, 1954. 86. Harry C. McSherry, “Seen and Heard,” DSN, September 29, 1954. 87. Beach, “Milling Around Milford.” 88. L. Lee Layton, Jr., letter to the editor, DSN, September 29, 1954. 89. Gerstle, American Crucible, 239. See also  Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 11. 90. [Name blacked out] to Edgar Hoover, October 1, 1954, File on the National Association for the Advancement of White People, Federal Bureau of Investigation, italics original. 91. [Name redacted] to J. Edgar Hoover, December 1, 1954. 92. “Terribly Upset,” letter to the editor, DSN, October 1, 1954. 93. L. Lee Layton, Jr., letter to the editor, DSN, September 29, 1954. 94. On the NAACP’s anticommunism, see Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights, 29, 67; Manfred Berg, The Ticket to Freedom: The NAACP and the Struggle for Black Political Integration (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), 116–39. 95. Beach, “Milling Around Milford.” 96. Gunnar Myrdal’s comments on this subject are worthy of consideration: “The ignorance about the Negro is the more striking as the Southerner himself is convinced that he ‘knows the Negro,’ while the Yankee is supposedly ignorant on the subject. The insistence on the part of the Southern whites that they have reliable and intimate knowledge about the Negro problem is one of the most pathetic stereotypes in the South. In fact, the average Southerner ‘knows’ the Negro and the interracial problem as the patient ‘knows’ the toothache—in a sense that he feels a concern—not as the diagnosing dentist knows his own or his patient’s trouble. He further ‘knows’ the Negro in the sense that he is brought up to use a social technique in dealing with Negroes by which he is able to get them into submissive patterns of behavior.” Myrdal, An American Dilemma, 41. 97. Beach, “Milling Around Milford.” 98. James Truitt, “NAAWP,” September 30, 1954, TMC; “False-Pretense Record Found in Police Checkup on Bowles,” JEE, September 30, 1954; Robert Hagy, “Milford,” October 1, 1954, TMC; Hagy, “School Segregation,” October 6, 1954, TMC; “Founder of NAAWP Is Everywhere at Once; Police Records Show He Was Elsewhere, Too,” SS, October 7, 1954; James, “The Town That Surrendered to Hate,” 73. 99. “The National Association for the Advancement of White People,” November 3, 1954, File on the National Association for the Advancement of White People, FBI; Hagy, “School Segregation”; Hagy, “Bryant Bowles and Co.”; Hagy, “Add Bryant Bowles”; “Bowles’ Arrest Stirs Mass Meeting Crowd,” JEE, October 11, 1954; “Delaware Arrests Foe of Integration,” NYT, October 11, 1954; “NAAWP Fights to Keep Charter,” DSN, October 25, 1954.

Notes to Pages 133–137

281

100. Michal R. Belknap, Federal Law and Southern Order: Racial Violence and Constitutional Conflict in the Post-Brown South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 27; Arthur B. Caldwell to J. Caleb Boggs, September 29, 1954, GP; Memo re: Bryan William Bowles, Jr., n.d., GP. 101. Kenneth O’Reilly, Racial Matters: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960– 1972 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 198. 102. Mr. L. V. Boardman to Mr. A. H. Belmont, October 4, 1954, FBI; memo from Hoover, n.d., FBI File on NAAWP, Hoover to SAC Baltimore, October 4, 1954, FBI; Mr. Rosen to Mr. Price, October 7, 1954, FBI; “Bryant Bowles Attacks Jews,” Ocala Star-Banner, November 17, 1954, 7; Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, 275–77; FBI Baltimore Office to Hoover and Special Agent in Charge, October 10, 1954, FBI; Robert Hagy, “Trial of NAAWP’s Bryant Bowles,” November 30, 1954, TMC; “Bowles Spends Five Hours in Kent Jail,” DSN, November 4, 1954; “Bryant Bowles Held,” NYT, November 4, 1954; June Shagaloff to Thurgood Marshall, December 20, 1954, NAACP Collection; Hagy, “Bryant W. Bowles,” April 7, 1955, TMC; Hagy, “Bryant Bowles,” July 23, 1955, TMC; Hagy, “Bryant Bowles,” July 27, 1955, TMC; “School Bias Figure Fined in Delaware,” NYT, April 7, 1955; Hagy, “Bryant Bowles,” April 17, 1955, TMC; “Delaware,” SSN, May 4, 1955; “Bryant Bowles Wins,” NYT, July 26, 1955; Ted Clark, “Bryant Bowles,” July 26, 1955; TMC; Hagy, “Racial Integration,” August 23, 1955, TMC. 103. Hagy, “Add Bryant Bowles”; Hagy, “Bryant Bowles to NAAWP Presidency,” July 19, 1955, TMC; Hagy, “Bryant Bowles,” July 23, 1955; “Bowles Will Quit NAAWP; Says Third Party Is Alive,” JEE, July 18, 1955. Chapter 4. “If We Must and Are to Have Integration” 1. Mark V. Tushnet, Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936–1961 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 222. 2. For an overview on briefs and further re-arguments in Brown v. Board of Education, see Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (New York: Knopf, 1976), 657–77; and James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 57–65. For Young’s position on further argument, see “Brief for Petitioners on the Mandate,” Belton v. Gebhart and Bulah v. Gebhart, AG. 3. “Craven Will Take over Segregation Hearings,” MC, November 26, 1954; Peter H. Irons, Jim Crow’s Children: The Broken Promise of the Brown Decision (New York: Viking, 2002), 168–69; Philip B. Kurland and Gerhard Casper, eds., Landmark Briefs and Arguments of the Supreme Court of the United States: Constitutional Law, vol. 49A (Washington, D.C.: University Publications of America, 1975), 1092–99. 4. Tushnet, Making Civil Rights Law, 122. 5. Kluger, Simple Justice, 744. 6. Brown v. Board of Education, 394 U.S. 294 (1955) (Brown II), 300–301. 7. On the NAACP’s post-Brown strategy in Delaware, see “Principles Relevant to

282

Notes to Pages 137–143

the Effective Desegregation of the Public Schools in Kent and Sussex Counties of the State of Delaware,” n.d., KBC; Wagner D. Jackson, “Working with School Boards to Implement Desegregation,” The Crisis 62, 1 (January 1955): 5–9, 59–60; Louis L. Redding, “Evasions Barred,” The Nation, May 29, 1954, 455–56; “Along the N.A.A.C.P.: Atlanta Declaration,” The Crisis 61, 6 (June–July 1954): 358–59; SBOE, February 16, 1956; Letter regarding Milford Board of Education—Redding to State Board of Education, February 10, 1956; Letter regarding Laurel Board of Education—Redding to State Board of Education, February 10, 1956; Letter regarding Milton Board of Education, March 15, 1965, SBOE; “Largest Delaware Area to Complete Desegregation,” SSN, March 1956. 8. Robert Hagy, “Racial Integration,” August 23, 1955, TMC. 9. SBOE, March 15, 1956; “Plea for Immediate Integration in Eight Schools Is Rejected,” JEE, June 16, 1956; “4 Sussex Boards Call Integration Impossible,” JEE, June 23, 1956; Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, vol. 1 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1996), 31. 10. SBOE, July 14, 1955; “State School Board Defers Integration,” JEE, February 18, 1956. 11. George Miller to Louis Redding (draft dated March 16, 1956), March 15, 1956, SBOE; “Plea for Immediate Integration in Eight Schools Is Rejected.” 12. “Redding Scores School Desegregation,” WMN, February 5, 1957; Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 112.   13. Robert J. Taggart, Private Philanthropy and Public Education: Pierre S. Du Pont and the Delaware Schools, 1890–1940 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988), 77, 130–33.   14. SBOE, May 17, 1956; “14 Delaware Districts Will Continue Desegregation Policies During 1956–57,” SSN, September 1956; “4 Sussex Boards Call Integration Impossible”; “Fifth Sussex School Board Takes Segregation Stand,” JEE, June 27, 1956; “Cat and Mouse Game Charged in Racial Suits,” WMN, July 10, 1956. 15. Evans v. Members of the State Board of Education, 149 F.Supp. 376 (1957); “Majority of Eight Suits to Be Tried in Delaware,” SSN, December 1956; SBOE, March 21, 1957; “First U.S. Court Order in Delaware Calls for School Integration Plans,” SSN, April 1957; Evans v. Buchanan, 152 F.Supp. 886 (1957). 16. SBOE, May 2, 1957. 17. Briggs v. Elliott, 342 U.S. 350 (1952); Brown-Nagin, Courage to Dissent, 314; Raymond Wolters, The Burden of Brown: Thirty Years of School Desegregation (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), 139. 18. SBOE, July 18, 1957; “U.S. District Judge in Delaware Calls for First ‘All-State’ Desegregation,” SSN, August 1957. In 1955 Judge John J. Parker, in a clever—if cynical—interpretation of Brown, attempted to balance blacks’ constitutional right to desegregated schooling and whites’ freedom to attend the school of their choice: he concluded that “the Constitution . . . does not require integration. It merely forbids discrimination.” Briggs v. Elliott, 132 F.Supp. 777 (1955); “Briggs v. Elliott,” in Jeffrey A.

Notes to Pages 143–147

283

Raffel, Historical Dictionary of School Segregation and Desegregation: The American Experience (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998), 29–30; Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 358. 19. Minutes of the Board, July 26, 1957, SBOE; “U.S. District Judge in Delaware Calls for First ‘All-State’ Desegregation.” 20. SBOE, May 2, 1957; “Opposite Sides Say State Board Should Plan Deseg,” JEE, January 11, 1958; “Wilmington, Del. Superintendent Cites Experience,” SSN, March 1958. 21. Evans v. Buchanan, 256 F.2d. 688 (1958), 693–94. 22. “State Board Maps School Plan After Court Ruling,” SSN, June 1958. 23. “State Board May Take Appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court,” SSN, July 1958; “Tunnell Brief on Integration Puts Burden on State Board,” JEE, September 31, 1958; “State Asks High Court Decision,” SSN, September 1958; “Education Heads Defer Disclosure of Mixing Plans,” SSN, November 1958; “Time Given for Appeal to U.S. Supreme Court,” SSN, August 1958. 24. “State Board Given 105 Days to Submit Deseg Plan,” JEE, November 20, 1958; “Federal Court Orders Preparation of Statewide Desegregation Plan,” SSN, December 1958; “North-South Split Stalls General Integration Plan,” SSN, January 1959; “Plans Started on Integration,” WMN, January 9, 1959. 25. SBOE, “Proposed Plan of School Desegregation,” January 8, 1959, BFC; “Both Sides Dislike Deseg Plan; NAACP Proposes Own,” WMN, January 15, 1959. 26. “State to Present Court Its Stairstep Proposal,” SSN, February 1959; Delaware State Conference of Branches, NAACP, “Plan of Desegregation for Delaware Public Schools,” February 9, 1959, NAACP Collection; “NAACP Recommends ‘Total Immediate’ School Integration,” WMN, February 12, 1959; “Full Mixing Rejected; State Prepares Own Program,” SSN, March 1959. 27. George R. Miller, Jr., “State Board Statement on Plan of Desegregation Proposed by the NAACP,” February 11, 1959, SBOE, 120. 28. Ibid., 121; “State School Board Rejects Immediate Deseg Plan,” JEE, February 12, 1959; “Immediate Deseg Plan for Schools Rejected,” WMN, February 13, 1959. 29. Evans v. Buchanan, 172 F.Supp. 508 (1959); “State Proposes Stair-Step Plan; Court Action Anticipated Next Two Months,” SSN, April 1959; “12–Year Statewide Plan for Mixing Approved,” SSN, May 1959. For articles on testimony before the court, see “7 Districts Too Crowded to Integrate,” JEE, March 18, 1959; “NAACP Attacks Gradual Plan for Segregation,” WMN, March 19, 1959; “Separate But Unequal,” WMN, March 19, 1959; “Judge Pledges School Ruling Before May 17,” WMN, March 20, 1959. 30. Evans v. Buchanan, 172 F.Supp. 508 (1959), 511. 31. Quoted in Elizabeth Jacoway, Turn Away Thy Son: Little Rock, the Crisis That Shocked the Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007), 277; Irons, Jim Crow’s Children, 180–87; Cooper v. Aaron, 358 U.S. 1 (1958); Raffel, Historical Dictionary, 67–69. 32. Evans v. Buchanan, 172 F.Supp. 514 (1959). 33. “General Assembly, School Board at Odds on Building,” SSN, November 1959;

284

Notes to Pages 147–152

“25 Negroes in Classes Downstate,” JEE, September 10, 1954; “Five Additional Districts in State Enroll Negro Pupils,” SSN, November 1960; “Desegregated High School Regains Its Football Foes,” SSN, October 1961. 34. “Stairstep Program Under New Attack in U.S. Court,” SSN, December 1959; “Court Asked to Reverse Grade-Per-Year Order,” SSN, May 1960. 35. “Court Asked to Reverse Grade-Per-Year Order”; “Court to Hear Argument on Grade-a-Year Program,” SSN, January 1960. 36. Evans v. Buchanan, 281 F.2d. 385 (1960), 388; “Court Tells Delaware to Integrate Schools,” PI, July 20, 1960. 37. “Appeals Court Rejects Grade-a-Year Plan,” SSN, August 1960. 38. SBOE, August 25, 1960; “Deseg Upset Called Departure from Ct. Ruling,” WMN, August 3, 1960; “Plea to Stop Integration,” WMN, September 2, 1960; “Rehearing South on Grade-a-Year Decision,” SSN, September 1960; “Desegregation Plan to Be Given to State School Board,” SSN, October 1960; SBOE, December 15, 1960; “Decree Throwing Out Grade-a-Year Upheld,” SSN, February 1961. 39. Evans v. Buchanan, 195 F.Supp. 321–23 (1961); “Five-Year Sch. Battle to Pay Off in Delaware,” BAA, July 8, 1961. On Redding’s objections to the state’s plan, see SBOE, May 20, 1961. On the obstructive qualities of pupil assignment laws, see “Pupil Assignment Laws,” in Raffel, Historical Dictionary, 203; Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, 330, 358–59; Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), 150–51. 40. Evans v. Buchanan, 195 F.Supp. 321 (1961), 326. The court’s final comments seemed offered in response to comments by state superintendent George R. Miller, Jr., and president of the State Board of Education Vincent A. Theisen about the need for a new school code to legislatively address future developments regarding desegregation. 41. A Statistical Summary, State by State, of Segregation-Desegregation Activity Affecting Southern Schools from 1954 to Present (Nashville, Tenn.: Southern Education Reporting Service, November 1961), 3; 1962, 3; 1963–64, 2; 1964–65, 2; “Deseg Moving Smoothly, Educators Told,” WMN, September 14, 1961; “Millsboro Ordered to Admit 5,” JEE, September 4, 1962. For a broader review of desegregation trends, see “32 of 52 Former All-White Systems Now Teach Negroes,” WMN, January 1, 1963; “Del. School Racial Count,” November 5, 1963; and “Integration to Be Wide,” EJ, September 7, 1964. 42. “Effects of Desegregation on Negro Teachers Studied,” SSN, June 1963. For literature on differing levels of commitments to desegregation between the NAACP and members of black communities, see Derrick A. Bell, Jr., “Serving Two Masters: Integration Ideals and Client Interests in School Desegregation Litigation,” Yale Law Journal 85 (1976): 470–516; Tomiko Brown-Nagin, “Race as Identity Caricature: A Local Legal History Lesson in the Salience of Intraracial Conflict,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 151 (2003): 1913–76; David S. Cecelski, Along Freedom Road: Hyde County, North Carolina & the Fate of Black Schools in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Brown-Nagin, Courage to Dissent, 83–113, 307–8.

Notes to Pages 152–155

285

43. Vanessa Siddle Walker, Their Highest Potential: An African American School Community in the Segregated South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 3. 44. Judith Y. Gibson, “Mighty Oaks: Five Black Educators,” in A History of African Americans of Delaware and Maryland’s Eastern Shore, ed. Carole Marks (Newark: University of Delaware, 1997), http://www.udel.edu/BlackHistory/mightyoaks.html. 45. “Arguments Against Board Plan Set for May 22 in District Court,” SSN, May 1961; “Over Half of Negroes in Classes with Whites,” SSN, November 1961; “Court to Hear Argument on Grade-a-Year Program”; “Negro School Construction Approved by State Board,” SSN, April 1960; “Bill for Construction at 15 Negro Schools Is Passed by House of Representatives,” SSN, July 1960; “New School Plan Ends 5–Year Fight,” SSN, July 1961; “Law Approved Creating Human Relations Group,” SSN, January 1962. 46. Sarah E. Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 7, 10.   47. “Hearing on Bill Asked by NAACP,” WMN, February 6, 1960; “Negro Attorney Charges Bias in School Construction Bonds,” SSN, March 1963; “Larger Negro Ratio Expected,” SSN, September 1963. The state conference on the NAACP’s opposition to segregation even brought it into conflict with the administration of Delaware State College. For a broader consideration of the NAACP’s unwavering commitment to desegregation and the subsequent conflicts with black communities that resulted, see Bell, “Serving Two Masters”; “Negro Leader Questions Aim of School Poll,” EJ, February 7, 1961; “Negroes Okay Segregated School in Impromptu ‘Poll,’ ” EJ, February 8, 1961; Negroes Seen Wanting Separate But Equal Schools,” EJ, February 9, 1961. 48. “Some Negroes Resist ‘Guinea Pig’ Roles,” WMN, 2 January 1963. 49. Robert Mann, When Freedom Would Triumph: The Civil Rights Struggle in Congress, 1954–1968 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007), 203; Carol E. Hoffecker, Honest John Williams: U.S. Senator from Delaware (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000), 153. 50. Civil Rights Act of 1964 (P.L. 88-352, 78 Stat. 241, enacted July 2, 1964); Nick Kotz, Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Laws That Changed America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 152; 51. SBOE, “Resolution,” February 9, 1965, DPI; Department of Public Instruction, Annual Report for the Year Ending June 30, 1965 (Dover: State Board of Education, 1965), 20; “Statement of Compliance with the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare Regulations Under Title VI, Civil Rights Act of 1964,” January 22, 1965, DPI; “Negro Schools Phase-Out OK’d,” WMN, February 10, 1965; “Revolution Seen in State Race Reform,” DSN, February 21, 1965. 52. Wilmer E. Wise, “Enrollments by School Buildings: White and Colored, January 20, 1965,” March 10, 1965, DPI. 53. Raffel, Historical Dictionary, 108. 54. U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Office of Education, “General Statement of Policies Under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 Respecting

286

Notes to Pages 156–161

Desegregation of Elementary and Secondary Schools,” April 1965, GP; Stephen C. Halpern, On the Limits of the Law: The Ironic Legacy of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 45–50. 55. Richard P. Gousha to David S. Seeley, January 14, 1966, DPI, 2; James M. Laing, “Alternative Methods, Practices, and Concepts for School Desegregation: A Review of the Literature and Annotated Bibliography,” 1969, 5, http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/contentdelivery/servlet/ERICServlet?accno=ED041056; Allen Lesser to Gousha, May 25, 1965, DPI; Memo from Kenneth C. Madden, June 7, 1965, DPI; Madden to David Barus, June 11, 1965, DPI; Madden, “Desegregation Plan: Seaford Special School District, Seaford, Delaware,” June 7, 1965, DPI; Madden, “News Release,” June 15, 1965, DPI; Francis Keppel to Madden, July 15, 1965, DPI. 56. Ceasar Rodney Board of Education, “A Plan for Desegregation of Caesar Rodney Schools,” June 1965, 9, GP; Wise, “Enrollments by School Buildings,” 4. 57. “Special Meeting of the Board of Education, Rehoboth Special School District,” July 14, 1965, DPI; “Special Meeting of Board of Trustees, West Rehoboth Elementary School District #200,” July 14, 1965, DPI; Wise, “Enrollments by School Buildings,” 6. 58. Howard E. Row to Jean Tordella, July 15, 1965, DPI. These figures were gleaned from the handwritten responses to a survey of Delaware public schools that had been requested by Ralph Moyed. Row to R. L. Herbst, “New Release and Information RE: Phase Out,” July 19, 1965, DPI; Row to Gousha, August 11, 1965, DPI. 59. Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), 175–76. 60. William B. Chandler, Jr., to J. Ohrum Small, June 15, 1965, Governor’s Papers. 61. “Minutes of Meeting Between Compliance Section of the Section of the Civil Rights Division and Sussex County School Board Members,” n.d., 2, GP. 62. Ibid., 4. 63. “Statement by Harold Howe II,” March 1966, 2–3, DPI. 64. Howard E. Row, “Status of Delaware Public Schools Re: Desegregation as Defined in Terms of JEW 441, 441–B and Approved Plans 1965–1966,” March 28, 1966, DPI. 65. “A History of School Desegregation in Delaware: May 1954 to July 1966,” n.d., 11–12, DPI,. 66. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, “Does the Negro Need Separate Schools?” JNE 4, 3 (July 1, 1935): 335. 67. James C. Hardcastle to Charles E. Terry, February 11, 1965, Governor’s Papers, italics added. 68. James C. Hardcastle to Members of the Board of Trustees, William Henry High School, February 11, 1965, Governor’s Papers; Clarence P. Norwood to Charles E. Terry, February 24, 1965, Governor’s Papers. 69. Dorothy Oliver, Ramona Parker, and Macdonald T. Coker, “Resolution,” February 25, 1965, Governor’s Papers. 70. William Henry Parent-Teacher Association to Charles L. Terry, March 2, 1965, Governor’s Papers.

Notes to Pages 161–165

287

71. Minutes of Meeting RE Closing of Schools—March 16, 1965, William C. Jason Comprehensive High School No. 192, March 16, 1965, DPI; Minutes of Meeting RE Closing of Schools—March 17, 1965, William C. Henry Comprehensive High School, March 17, 1965, DPI; Gousha and R. L. Herbst to F. N. Postlethwait, March 22, 1965, DPI; Gousha and Herbst to Dustin W. Wilson, Jr., March 22, 1965, DPI; Gousha and Herbst to Dustin W. Wilson, Jr., April 1, 1965, DPI; Gousha and Herbst to Hugh A. Kelly, April 8, 1965, DPI; Gousha and Herbst to Kelly, April 1, 1965, DPI; Gousha and Herbst to Donald H. Vansant, April 8, 1965,DPI. 72. James C. Hardcastle to Dustin W. Wilson, Jr., July 13, 1965, DPI. 73. James B. McClements to Robert H. Reed, July 30, 1965, DPI. 74. James B. McClements and Robert H. Reed, “Highlights from the Joint Meeting of the William Henry High School Board of Trustees and the Dover Special School District Board of Education,” August 12, 1965, DPI. 75. SBOE, “Resolution,” September 13, 1965, DPI; Gousha to Seeley, January 14, 1966; Roger C. Mowrey, Delaware School District Organization and Boundaries (Dover: State Department of Public Instruction, 1974), http://facilitynet.doe.k12.de.us/schooldata/reports/DelSchDistOrg-Boundaries.pdf., 6. 76. Gousha to Seeley, January 14, 1966. 77. Hiram N. Lasher to Charles L. Terry, Jr., July 20, 1965, GP; Mowrey, Delaware School District Organization and Boundaries. 78. Hobart M. Corning, “The Status of School Desegregation and Means Employed to Facilitate the Transition of Educational Programs in Sussex County, Delaware, to a Completely Integrated Educational System in Order to Meet the Needs of a Changing Society,” January 31, 1967, 1–4, DPI; John Hope II to Howard E. Row, May 29, 1967, DPI. 79. SBOE, “Resolution,” February 9, 1965, DPI. 80. H. Lewis Miller and Charles R. Harris to all members of the Boards of Education and Boards of School Trustees in the public school system of the State of Delaware, January 20, 1966, DPI. 81. James C. Hardcastle to Members of the Board of Trustees, William Henry High School, February 11, 1965, GP; William Henry Parent-Teacher Association to Charles L. Terry, March 2, 1965, GP. 82. Louis L. Redding to Gousha, April 23, 1965, DPI. 83. Pauline A. Young, “Supplemental Historical Report on the Administrative Area of the Middletown School District #60 by the Education Committee of the Delaware State Conference of Branches of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,” n.d., DPI; “Middletown Perils School Plan,” MN, February 4, 1965; “Merger a Must for Middletown,” MN, February 12, 1965; “Negro School Ruling Queried,” February 17, 1965; “200 Quiz State on Phase-Out,” EJ, February 17, 1965; “Schools Seek Phase-Out Ruling,” February 20, 1965, MN. 84. James E. Washington and Mary C. Baker, “Report on a Meeting with the Board of the Middletown School District #60 and the Education and Employment Commit-

288

Notes to Pages 165–168

tees of the Delaware State Conferences of Branches of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,” n.d., 2, DPI; Pauline A. Young to James A. Quigley, n.d., DPI. 85. “NAACP Raps Plan U.S. Okd at Middletown,” EJ, July 13, 1965. 86. Leslie E. Timmons to Howard E. Row, July 1, 1965, DPI; Row to Herman M. Holloway, Sr., July 26, 1965, DPI; Gousha to Seeley, January 14, 1966. 87. “Status Report—Placement of Phased-Out Teachers,” August 27, 1965, DPI; Delaware State Education Association, “Resolution,” October 23, 1965, DPI; Delaware State Education Association, “News Release,” September 1, 1965, DPI; Charles E. Harris to Eleanor Tucker, November 9, 1965; Minutes of Joint Meeting of Interracial Committee and Executive Committee, December 17, 1965, DPI; Miller and Harris to all members of boards of education and boards of school trustees in the public school system of the State of Delaware, January 20, 1966; “Teacher Firing Shift Opposed,” MN, March 22, 1965. 88. Howard E. Row to Chief School Officers, October 27, 1965, DPI; Row to Gousha, “Stronger Assignment Policy RE: Phase-Out Teachers,” February 14, 1966, DPI. 89. “Resolution: Implementation of State Board Resolution of February 9, 1965 in Regard to Placement of Teachers and Issuance of Certificates,” February 25, 1966, EvB, italics added; Row to Gousha, “Interpretation—State Board Resolution of February 25, 1965,” April 12, 1966, Governor’s Papers; Gousha and Row to Chief School Officers and Secondary School Principals, April 1, 1966, DPI; Row to Joseph A. Vansant, April 7, 1966, DPI; Gousha and Row to William N. Norton, Jr., April 12, 1966, DPI. 90. U.S. Attorney, District of Delaware, “Information Release,” June 29, 1966, GP; Howard E. Row, “Report and Recommendations RE: Complaint by National Association for Advancement of Colored People Against Middletown School District #60,” April 14, 1966, GP; Gousha to Row, April 20, 1966, DPI; James A. Johnson, Jr., to Gousha, April 21, 1966, DPI; Gousha and Row to Chief School Officers, Secondary and Elementary School Principals, “Placement of Available Teachers,” May 2, 1966, DPI; Row to Gousha, “Placement of ‘Phase-Out’ Teachers,” May 5, 1966; James C. Hardcastle to Olivia Blackwell, April 26, 1966, DPI; Hardcastle to Richard Coles, April 26, 1966, DPI; Hardcastle to Mary C. Floyd, April 26, 1966, DPI; Hardcastle to Freddie Brunson, April 26, 1966, DPI; Hardcastle to Gladys Weaver, April 26, 1966, DPI; Hardcastle to Mary Oliver, April 26, 1966, DPI; Hardcastle to Rachel Warren, April 26, 1966, DPI; Hardcastle to Charles Webb, April 26, 1966, DPI; Hardcastle to Mamie Worsley, April 26, 1966, DPI; James Hardcastle, interview by author, August 14, 2003. 91. Trustees of Millsboro School 204 (Elmer Bethards, Washington Kollock, George E. Oliver, and Wallace Tunnell) to Gousha, April 12, 1966, DPI. 92. Gousha and Row to Bethards, April 20, 1966.

Notes to Pages 173–178

289

Chapter 5. “The Other Side of the Milliken Coin” 1. Carol E. Hoffecker, Corporate Capital: Wilmington in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), 160, 164, 243–44. 2. Quoted in Raymond Wolters, The Burden of Brown: Thirty Years of School Desegregation (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), 205. On the growing interest in the problems of cultural deprivation and disadvantage in 1960s social science circles, see Diane Ravitch, The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945–1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 150–61. 3. Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996). 4. Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007); Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006); Hoffecker, Corporate Capital, 230–35, 46; Wolters, The Burden of Brown, 205–6. 5. Harwick’s remedy to the flight of white residents from Wilmington represented a version of Anthony Downs’s proposal of dispersion as a solution for segregation that was becoming increasingly endemic to many of the nation’s cities. See Anthony Downs, “Alternative Futures for the American Ghetto,” Daedalus 97, 4 (1968): 1331–78. Ravitch, The Troubled Crusade, 168–73; Daryl Michael Scott, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880–1996 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 171; Richard D. Kahlenberg, “Learning from James Coleman,” National Affairs 144 (Summer 2001): 55–58; Jeffrey A. Raffel, Historical Dictionary of School Segregation and Desegregation: The American Experience (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998), 58–60. This idea also received support from the civil rights community, although they did not overtly endorse the notions of black pathology. See William Taylor, Hanging Together: Equality in an Urban Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971), 232–34. 6. Wolters, The Burden of Brown, 206–7. 7. Irving Morris, “The Role of Delaware Lawyers in the Desegregation of Delaware’s Public Schools: A Memoir,” Widener Law Symposium Journal 9, 1 (2002): 24. 8. Ibid., 26; Wolters, The Burden of Brown, 207; SBOE, “Fact Sheet on Suit for Racial Integration in New Castle County,” Desegregation Suit Fact Sheet No. 2, September 1972, University of Delaware Library, Newark. 9. Susan M. Chase, “The Process of Suburbanization and the Use of Restrictive Deed Covenants as Private Zoning, Wilmington, Delaware, 1900–1941,” P.h.D. dissertation, of Delaware, 1995), 38–39, 304–17; Annette Woolard-Provine, Integrating Delaware: The Reddings of Wilmington, Cultural Studies of Delaware and the Eastern Shore (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003), 130; Wolters, The Burden of Brown, 212; Hoffecker, Corporate Capital, 166–67; “Four-Footed Riot Squad,” Life, March 9, 1959. 39; “Desegregation and the South,” The Crisis, April 1959, 245. On the broader process

290

Notes to Pages 178–180

of black suburbanization, see Andrew Wiese, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century, Historical Studies of Urban America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Josh Sides, “Straight into Compton: American Dreams, Urban Nightmares, and the Metamorphosis of a Black Suburb,” American Quarterly 56, 3 (2004): 583–605. 10. Wolters has argued that the lawyers approached the potential black plaintiffs for “tactical reasons.” But as Morris noted, the plaintiff class in Evans were black parents on behalf of their children. The white parents thus had no standing as plaintiffs in a desegregation suit. Wolters, The Burden of Brown, 206–8, 207; Morris, “The Role of Delaware Lawyers,” 26; Jeanne Lewis and Clifton Lewis, interview by the author, Wilmington, August 13, 2003. The fifth original plaintiff, Mary Woods, withdrew from the case because her children were no longer enrolled in Wilmington public schools by the time of the trial. “School Suit Hearings Begin,” EJ, December 13, 1973. 11. Jeffrey A. Raffel, The Politics of School Desegregation: The Metropolitan Remedy in Delaware (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), 45; Wolters, The Burden of Brown, 210; Tomiko Brown-Nagin, “Race as Identity Caricature: A Local Legal History Lesson in the Salience of Intraracial Conflict,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 151, 5 (2002): 1913–76. 12. James H. Sills, Jr., “N.A.A.C.P. Supports the Wilmington-New Castle County School Desegregation Suit,” August 2, 1973, NAACP Collection; Raffel, The Politics of School Desegregation, 82; “NAACP Joins Suit for Integration,” MN, August 4, 1973. 13. Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008), 471–77. 14. Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Macmillan, 2007); Joseph, ed., The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights-Black Power Era (New York: Routledge, 2006); Cedric Johnson, Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Komozi Woodard, A Nation Within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Jeffrey Ogbonna Green Ogbar, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Jerald E. Podair, The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002); Wendell E. Pritchett, Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 221–37. On the politics of community control, see Norman I. Fainstein and Susan S. Fainstein, “The Future of Community Control,” American Political Science Review 70, 3 (September 1976): 905–7; Michael C. Dawson, Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary AfricanAmerican Political Ideologies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 100–102; Kwame Ture and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (New York: Vintage, 1967), 166; Dean E. Robinson, Black Nationalism in American Politics and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 93–94; Gary Gerstle,

Notes to Pages 181–183

291

American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001), 303. 15. “Where Is Delaware’s Black Political Action?” People’s Pulse, May 1970. 16. “Mayor Haskell . . . Is He Turning the City Around?” People’s Pulse, February 1970. 17. Bart Hare, “Name of the Game: Power!: Patterns of Contempt in the Public School System,” People’s Pulse, July–August 1970. 18. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty, 477; Pritchett, Brownsville, Brooklyn, 226. 19. Delaware Department of Public Instruction, “Highlights of the February 18, 1972 State Board of Education Meeting” Newsletter, 1, BH. 20. Sills, “N.A.A.C.P. Supports the Wilmington–New Castle County School Desegregation Suit.” 21. Lassiter, The Silent Majority, 13–14. 22. Irving Morris to Jack Greenberg, “Re: Wilmington, Delaware, School Case,” October 23, 1972, CNPR; “Wilmington NAACP Won’t Enter Desegregation Suit,” MN, October 29, 1973; “NAACP Takes Sideline Role in School Suit,” EJ, October 29, 1973; Morris, “The Role of Delaware Lawyers,” 26; Wolters, The Burden of Brown, 210; “Heavies Head Lineup in Desegregation Suit,” MN, December 14, 1973; Paul R. Dimond, Beyond Busing: Inside the Challenge to Urban Segregation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985), 26; Delaware State Conference of Branches, “Resolution: Offering Support to the Wilmington Board of Education for Its Actions Against the State Department of Instruction,” November 19, 1973; Delaware State Conference of Branches, “Resolution: Position Taken by the Delaware State Conference of Branches of the NAACP on the Court-Ordered Desegregation of Public Schools in New Castle, Delaware: Prepared by Members Representing All Three Branches of the NAACP in Delaware,” March 27, 1976, LMP. 23. Lassiter, The Silent Majority, 280; Dimond, Beyond Busing; Robert L. Carter, “De Facto School Segregation Conference,” The Crisis 73, 10 (December 1966): 514–19. 24. Center for National Policy Review and Potomac Institute, “Summary of Proceedings,” March 16, 1971 (Metropolitan School Desegregation Conference, December 4–5, 1970, Washington, D.C.), 1, CNPR. The list of attendees included Jack Greenberg and James Nabrit (LDF); Marion Edelman (Washington Research Project and the parent body of the Children’s Defense Fund); June Shagaloff and Robert Carter (NAACP); and representatives from the U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, Urban Institute, National Education Association, American Friends Service Committee, Carnegie Corporation, Southern Education Foundation, American Civil Rights Union, Taconic Foundation, and Center for Education for Educational Policy Research. 25. CNPR and Potomac Institute, “Summary of Proceedings,” 9, 14. On the courts’ inconsistency in ruling on de facto segregation, see Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty, 46–89. 26. Jean Fairfax to William L. Taylor, “RE: Metropolitan School Desegregation and the Mood of the Black Communities,” November 6, 1970, 2, CNPR, added.

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Notes to Pages 183–189

27. CNPR and Potomac Institute, “Summary of Proceedings,” 3–4; Carter, “De Facto School Segregation Conference.” 28. Hoffecker, Corporate Capital, 245; Morris, “The Role of Delaware Lawyers,” 26; Dimond, Beyond Busing, 291; “Wilmington, Delaware: A Study of School Plant and Program Requirements and Special Attention to the City’s North, Northeast, and East Sections” (New York: Center for Field Research and School Services, School of Education, New York University, June 1967), xii–xiii, 53–59, CNPR. 29. Wolters, The Burden of Brown, 211; Dimond, Beyond Busing, 291; “House Votes Bill to Block Busing; Sends It to Nixon,” NYT, June 9, 1972; “Major Provisions of the Measure on Aid to Education and Limits on Pupil Busing,” NYT, June 9, 1972. 30. “Resolution to Intervene in Pending Desegregation Suit,” n.d., EVB; “Wilmington School Board Becomes Plaintiff,” June 19, 1972, EVB; “Wilmington Deseg Trial Set to Open Dec. 12,” Deseg Fact Sheet, September 20, 1973, 3, University of Delaware Library; “City Schools Join Suit for County System,” EJ, June 20, 1972; “City Board Joins School Merger Suit,” MN, June 20, 1972. On Nixon’s evolving position on busing, see Dean J. Kotlowski, Nixon’s Civil Rights: Politics, Principle, and Policy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 15–43. 31. Irving Morris to William Prickett, November 15, 1973, Prickett to Morris, November 20, 1973, both in WLF; Evans v. Buchanan, 379 F.Supp. 1219–20 (1974); Dimond, Beyond Busing, 292; “Suit to Desegregate Schools Is Broadened,” MN, February 4, 1972; Louis R. Lucas to Littleton P. Mitchell, May 8, 1973, WLF. 32. On the legislative history of the Educational Advancement Act, see Alice L. Wilson, Jr., “Consolidation History,” MN, January 7, 1974; “End of an Era,” in Department of Public Instruction, Annual Report for the Year Ending June 30, 1965 (Dover: State Board of Education, n.d.); United Forces for Education of Delaware, “Summary of the Delaware Educational Advancement Act (HB 438),” January 1967, DDP; John G. Parres, “Wolcott Report Application to Local District,” Profile 1, 4 (January 1967): 1–3, PYP; “Statement for the State Board of Education as It Relates to the Educational Advancement Act of 1967,” May 25, 1967, Minutes of the Board, 135–41, SBOE; “The Educational Advancement Act,” June 12, 1967, SBOE; “Educational Advancement Act,” May 22, 1968, SBOE; Kenneth C. Madden to Secretaries of Boards of Education and Boards of School Trustees in Delaware School Districts, SBOE Papers, August 15, 1968; and Dimond, Beyond Busing, 290. On the history of modernization and consolidation of public education, see Wayne J. Urban, American Education: A History, 4th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2009), 229–34; and William J. Reese, Power and the Promise of School Reform: Grassroots Movements During the Progressive Era (New York: Teachers College Press, 2002), 100–130. 33. Dimond, Beyond Busing, 293–94. 34. Wilmington City Council Ordinance 69–0790, June 19, 1969; City Council Resolution 69–168, October 2, 1969; City Council Ordinance 70–038, May 21, 1970; City Council Resolution 71–128, June 17, 1971; City Council Resolution 71–254, November 4, 1971; City Council Resolution 72–044, March 3, 1972, Evans; “Heckert Admits ’68

Notes to Pages 189–194

293

School Law Ignored Court,” MN, December 22, 1973; “Heckert Says Segregation Is Not Deliberate,” EJ, December 23, 1973; Dimond, Beyond Busing, 298; Alice J. Nixon to Preston G. Eisenbrey, April 27, 1955. 35. Dimond, Beyond Busing, 294. On the roots of National Association of Real Estate Boards policies, see Stephen Grant Meyer, As Long as They Don’t Move Next Door: Segregation and Racial Conflict in American Neighborhoods (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000). 36. Dimond, Beyond Busing, 297; “Black Buys from White by Wearing Olive Drab,” MN, January 8, 1974. 37. “Realty Code Brought into School Suit,” MN, December 15, 1973; “Segregated Housing Surfaced in School Court Case,” EJ, December 15, 1973; Dimond, Beyond Busing, 294. 38. Quoted in Dimond, Beyond Busing, 295; “Covenants Argued in School Case,” EJ, December 19, 1973. 39. Dimond, Beyond Busing, 300–301; “School Trial Begins Hearing Defense Case,” EJ, January 11, 1974; “Aide Says Schools Heeded 1964 Act,” MN, January 12, 1964; “State Disavows Racial Intent,” EJ, January 12, 1974; “City Lines Kept Separate in ’68, Attorney States,” EJ, January 14, 1974; “Gousha Says Separatism Gone by 1967,” EJ, January 15, 1974; “Desegregation-Suit Defense to Conclude,” EJ, January 15, 1974. Stargatt had considered the constitutionality of the act when it was being considered by the state board but only in response to whether the General Assembly had the authority to pass a law modifying school districts. He believed that the EAA passed constitutional muster because the act vested authority to modify district boundaries with the state board. The matter of Wilmington emerged in state board minutes only in relation to how the board was going to devise new tax rates. Bruce M. Stargatt to Robert L. D. Allen, “Education Advancement Act,” June 6, 1967, SBOE; Jack Dougherty, More Than One Struggle: The Evolution of Black School Reform in Milwaukee (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 104–66; “Gousha Says Separatism Gone by 1967”; “Ex-School Official Backs State Desegregation Claim,” MN, January 16, 1974. 40. “Hindsight on Race Hits School Case,” EJ, January 7, 1974; Dimond, Beyond Busing, 297; “Holloway Testifies He Regrets Vote for Education Act,” MN, December 21, 1973; “Sputtering Educator Comforted by Judge,” MN, January 13, 1974. 41. Evans v. Buchanan, 379 F.Supp. 1223 (1974). 42. Jeffrey A. Raffel and Barry R. Morstain, “Wilmington, Delaware: Merging City and Suburban School Systems,” in Community Politics and Educational Change: Ten School Systems Under Court Order, ed. Charles V. Willie and Susan L. Greenblatt (New York: Longman, 1981), 95; “Judges Order State to Submit 2 School Desegregation Plans,” MN, July 13, 1974; “Wilmington Integration Order Poses the Possibility of Busing,” NYT, July 13, 1974. 43. “Remedy Still Undecided in Desegregation Case,” EJ, July 13, 1974; “School Ruling Draws Comments,” MN, July 13, 1974; Raffel, The Politics of School Desegregation,

294

Notes to Pages 194–198

100–101; Mary F. Ehrlander, Equal Educational Opportunity: Brown’s Elusive Mandate (New York: LFB, 2002), 53. 44. Jeffrey A. Raffel, “Analysis of Alternative Desegregation Plans and Reports of Meetings and Conferences,” June 13, 1975, pp. 35–37, DDP; “Wilmington Parents’ Concerns over Integration Surface,” MN, January 23, 1975; Hoffecker, Corporate Capital, 210; Lassiter, The Silent Majority, 148–74. 45. “School Suit Talks Fairly Calm,” MN, January 31, 1975. 46. “Angry Crowd Delays Talks on School Suit,” MN, January 30, 1975; “Angry Parents Harass Panel on Busing,” EJ, January 30, 1975. 47. Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 (1974); Peter H. Irons, Jim Crow’s Children: The Broken Promise of the Brown Decision (New York: Viking, 2002), 237–43; James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 178–80; “High Court Rejects Detroit Bus Plan,” EJ, July 25, 1974. For a broader review of Milliken v. Bradley, see Dimond, Beyond Busing, 21–118; Bernard Schwartz, A History of the Supreme Court (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 323; Gary Orfield, Must We Bus?: Segregated Schools and National Policy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1978), 33; Lassiter, The Silent Majority, 314–15; Gary Orfield, “Plessy Parallels,” in Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown v. Board of Education, ed. Orfield, Susan Eaton, and Harvard Project on School Desegregation (New York: New Press, 1996), 30–31; Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education, 181; Derrick Bell, Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board of Education and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 110–11; and David J. Armor, Forced Justice: School Desegregation and the Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 41. 48. Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 744 (1974). 49. Evans v. Buchanan, 393 F.Supp. 428 (1975); “Supplemental Finding of Facts,” CNPR; “Desegregation Plans Are Ordered,” MN, March 26, 1975; Brief of Plaintiffs and Intervening Plaintiffs, Evans v. Buchanan, January 6, 1975, CNPR; Mark Whitman, ed., The Irony of Desegregation Law, 1955–1995: Essays and Documents (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener, 1998), 276. 50. Evans v. Buchanan, 207 F.Supp. 820 (1962) at 823–24. Also quoted in Wolters, The Burden of Brown, 216. 51. Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 (1974) at 756; Gary Orfield, “Segregated Housing and School Resegregation,” in Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown v. Board of Education, ed. Orfield and Susan E. Eaton (New York: New Press, 1996), 296. 52. Evans v. Buchanan, 393 F.Supp. 434 (1975). 53. Ibid., italics in original. 54. Ibid., at 439. 55. Ibid., at 442. 56. Ibid., at 445. 57. Louis L. Redding to Nathaniel Jones, March 3, 1975, NAACP Collection. 58. Nathaniel Jones to Louis L. Redding, April 7, 1975, NAACP Collection.

Notes to Pages 199–202

295

59. “A Proposal for the Desegregation and Reorganization of School Districts in New Castle County, Delaware,” April 10, 1975, attached to Jeffrey A. Raffel, “Compliance with the School Desegregation Order,” in Community Survey on Desegregation, Issue 3 (Newark: College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy, University of Delaware, October 1977), DDP; “6–District Merger Favored for Deseg,” EJ, April 3, 1975; “State Studying 5– Way Split to Desegregate City Schools,” MN, April 3, 1975; “State Readies 5–Zone School Plan,” MN, July 9, 1975. 60. Adolph Reed, Jr., Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 95. For a consideration of the rise of black-led school districts in the wake of white flight, see Jeffrey R. Henig et al., The Color of School Reform: Race, Politics, and the Challenge of Urban Education (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 50–55. 61. Board of Public Education in Wilmington, “Principles, Educational Components and Pupil Reassignment Plans” (Wilmington: Wilmington Public Schools, June 11, 1975), 7, CNPR; “Desegregation Plan Involving Wilmington and Suburban School Districts” (Wilmington: Wilmington Public Schools, June 11, 1975), CNPR; Raffel, The Politics of School Desegregation, 56–57, 53, 65–67; “Wilmington Proposes Rotating Students Among Old Districts,” EJ, April 25, 1975; “City Board for ‘Cluster’ Concept in Schools,” MN, April 25, 1975; “5–2 Wilmington OK Sends Deseg Plan to State,” EJ, June 12, 1975; Board Offers Its Desegregation Plan,” MN, June 12, 1975. For a more detailed explanation of the clustering techniques, see Jeffrey A. Raffel, “Clustering,” in Historical Dictionary of School Segregation, 56–57; Staff of the State Department of Public Instruction, Analysis of Nineteen Desegregation Proposals, 30–31, DDP; “Howell Asks Vouchers to Ease School Shifts,” EJ, April 5, 1975; “Vouchers: Parents Offered Pick of Schools,” MN, April 5, 1975; “5–2 Wilmington OK Sends Deseg Plan to State,” EJ, June 12, 1975. 62. Ambrose W. Hagarty, ed., “Summary and Transcript of Public Hearings on Evans v. Buchanan,” July 1975, 37–38, DPI. 63. For a broader consideration of suburban populism, see Lassiter, The Silent Majority, 148–74. 64. Hagarty, “Summary and Transcript of Public Hearings,” 20. 65. Ibid., 3, 10, 18. 66. Reed, Stirrings in the Jug, 180. 67. Hagarty, “Summary and Transcript of Public Hearings,” 69. 68. Ibid., 30. 69. Ibid., 82. 70. Ibid., 3. 71. Ibid., 3. 72. Ibid., 22, 24, 34. 73. Ibid., 50. 74. Ibid., 3. 75. Letter from James A. Venema, May 20, 1975 included in ibid., 5. 76. Hagarty, “Summary and Transcript of Public Hearings,” 59.

296

Notes to Pages 202–206

77. Ibid., 50–51. 78. Ibid., 3, 24. 79. Ibid., 76. 80. “Mt. Pleasant Joins Desegregation Suit,” MN, September 10, 1974; “2 More Districts Join in Desegregation Suit,” EJ, September 12, 1974; “Districts Join Desegregation Court Case,” September 17, 1974; “3 Additional Boards Join in School Suit,” EJ, September 17, 1974; “Deseg Suit Joined by Alexis,” EJ, September 18, 1974; “All County Schools Joining Busing Case Except VoTech,” EJ, September 20, 1974; “Suburban Defendants Hew to State Stance on School Suit,” MN, October 26, 1974; “Suburban Schools File Papers Add Nothing to Desegregation Suit,” EJ, October 29, 1974; “Alfred I. Board Opposes Plan,” MN, April 5, 1975. The De La Warr School Board, whose district was located just south of the city and contained a substantial number of black students, proved the exception. It proposed a countywide district with four attendance areas. Staff of State Department of Public Instruction, Analysis of Nineteen Desegregation Proposals, 15–16, 19–20, 27–28, 32–33, 38–39, DDP; “De La Warr Plan: County Wide Board to Aid Integration,” EJ, June 13, 1975; “Stanton, De La Warr Offer Desegregation Proposals,” MN, June 13, 1975;“Alfred I. Airs ‘Center Concept’ Plan for Busing,” MN, June 11, 1975. 81. Delaware Department of Public Instruction, “State Board of Education Meeting of August 4, 1975,” 103, BH; Delaware Department of Public Instruction, “State Board of Education Meeting of November 13, 1975,” 2, BH; Delaware Department of Public Instruction and State Board of Education, “Annual Report,” Fiscal 1976 (Newark: University of Delaware, 1976), 59–60; SBOE, “A Plan for the Integration of Designated School Districts in New Castle County, Delaware: A Modified Zone Transfer Plan,” September 16, 1975, DDP; “State Board OKs 3 School Plans,” MN, August 5, 1975; “School Plan Uses Bits of Those Rejected,” EJ, August 6, 1975. 82. Ronald P. Formisano, Boston Against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004);  J. Anthony Lukas, Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (New York: Vintage, 1986). 83. Quoted in “Desegregation Plan Poses Questions to Wilmington Schools,” MN, May 27, 1976. 84. Raffel, The Politics of School Desegregation, 64–65, 95; William W. Boyer, Governing Delaware: Policy Problems in the First State (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000), 35. 85. “Assembly OKs 13–Member Interim Board,” MN, June 24, 1976; “Deseg Threats Charged by Lucas,” MN, June 24, 1976. 86. “Crowd of 1,000 Debates Pupil Assignment Plans,” MN, January 28, 1977; “Desegregation: Assigning Pupils Is Tough,” MN, January 30, 1977. 87. Evans v. Buchanan, 555 F.2d 379 (1977), italics added; Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1 (1971), italics added. 88. Raffel, The Politics of School Desegregation, 54–56, 97; Delaware Department of Public Instruction, “Meeting of June 16, 1977,” 1–2, BH; “Newest Deseg Plan: 1-Way Bus-

Notes to Pages 206–208

297

ing from City,” EJ, June 16, 1977; “New Deseg Plan Would Bus Only Out of City,” MN, June 17, 1977; “Final Deseg Plan Is Adopted,” MN, July 6, 1977. 89. Littleton P. Mitchell to Kenneth V. Hilton, August 18, 1977, LMP. 90. “New Deseg Plan Draws More Fire,” MN, June 18, 1977; Raffel, The Politics of School Desegregation, 55–56, 97. Under this plan, students in grades seven through twelve would be transferred in the 1977–78 school year. The next year, the program would extend to all elementary school students, with the exception of kindergarteners. The state board estimated that each district would achieve a level of around 19 percent black students. Wilmington would retain around 3,500 students, 44 percent of them black. In addition, black teachers would be hired in suburban districts according to the number of black students who did not seek exemptions. Disabled and bilingual students were exempt from the plan, as were students at the Howard Career Center, one of the city’s two vocational schools that contained a major concentration of black students. Delaware Department of Public Instruction, “Meeting of July 21, 1977,” 8, BH. 91. “Legislature Offers Own Busing Plan,” MN, June 25, 1977. 92. Robert L. Hayman, Jr., “An Interview with Honorable Murray M. Schwartz,” in Choosing Equality: Essays and Narratives on the Desegregation Experience, ed. Hayman and Leland Ware (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), 166. 93. Evans v. Buchanan, 435 F.Supp. 836–37 (1977). 94. Delaware Department of Public Instruction, “Meeting of August 18, 1977,” 8, BH; Raffel, The Politics of School Desegregation, 56–57; “Scarborough Will Lead CourtOrdered New Board,” EJ, August 11, 1977. 95. The membership of the New Board was decreased to five—the original number of the interim board—and it was freed, for the moment, from some of the particularly sensitive matters that hamstrung its predecessor. Four of the five members of the New Board were holdovers from the interim board, however: the president of the interim board continued as the president of the New Board. Delaware Department of Public Instruction, “Meeting of July 21, 1977,” BH; “New Board Planning Desegregation,” EJ, August 9, 1977; “New Deseg Board Draws Timetable for Finishing Plan,” MN, August 12, 1977; “Deseg Panel OKs Timetable to Comply with Order,” EJ, August 12, 1977; “Planners Skirt Issue of Deseg Tax Shifts,” MN, September 27, 1977; “New Five-Member School Panel Sworn In,” MN, August 11, 1977; “Scarborough Will Lead Court-Ordered New Board,” EJ, August 11, 1977; “New Deseg Board Can’t Duck the Old Issues,” MN, August 14, 1977; Raffel, The Politics of School Desegregation, 75; Delaware Department of Public Instruction, “Meeting of September 15, 1977,” 4, BH; “Board OKs Proposals to Close High Schools,” MN, August 26, 1977; “Board Votes to Shut City, De La Warr Highs,” EJ, August 26, 1977; “New Desegregation War: Open the Closed Doors,” MN, August 28, 1977; “Board’s Work on Deseg Plan Almost Finished,” MN, September 25, 1977; “4 Deseg Areas Are Worked Out,” MN, September 9, 1977; “Planners Set Up Deseg Assignments,” EJ, September 23, 1977; “Board Approves Assignment Plan,” MN, September 23, 1977. 96. Quoted in “Fair Deseg Elusive, Black Leader Says, But Plan Still Lacks,” MN,

298

Notes to Pages 209–214

October 27, 1977; “Wilmington Deseg Plan Upholds All High Schools,” MN, September 29, 1977; “City to Give U.S. Court Its Own Desegregation Plan,” EJ, September 29, 1977. 97. Michael Rodak, Jr., to William L. Taylor, “RE: Claymont School District et al. v. Brenda Evans et al. no. 77–233,” October 3, 1977, CNPR; Rodak to William Prickett, “RE: State Board of Education et al. v. Brenda Evans et al., November 7, 1977,” CNPR; Hayman, “Interview with Honorable Murray M. Schwartz,” 169; “Judge Urges an Out-of-Court Deseg Solution,” MN, October 22, 1977; “Court’s Deseg Plan May Split the Difference,” MN, November 14, 1977; Delaware Department of Public Instruction, “Meeting on November 17, 1977,” 6, BH; “Major Features of Desegregation Plans,” MN, November 20, 1977; “Court Gets Compromise Deseg Plan,” MN, November 23, 1977; “ ‘Plan’ Is Many-Faceted Diamond in the Rough,” MN, November 23, 1977. 98. Evans v. Buchanan, 447 F.Supp. 982 (1978); “ ‘9–3’ Pupil Plan Picked for Deseg,” Profile 4, 4 (January 1978): 1; “Judge Blueprints ‘9–3’ Deseg Plan,” EJ, January 10, 1978. 99. Evans v. Buchanan, 447 F.Supp. 1001 (1978). 100. Delaware Department of Public Instruction, “Meeting of February 16, 1978,” 1–3, BH; Staff of the State Department of Public Instruction, “A Plan for the Reorganization and Desegregation of Designated School Districts in New Castle County, Delaware: A Four District Reorganization Plan,” February 10, 1978, DPP. 101. Evans v. Buchanan, 555 F.2d 373 (1977); “Deseg Order Upheld on Appeal,” MN, May 19, 1977; “Deseg Upheld 4–3, Ratios Dropped,” EJ, May 19, 1977; “School Plan Gets Backing on Appeal,” WP, May 19, 1977; Dayton Board of Education v. Brinkman, 433 U.S. 406 (1977); Buchanan v. Evans, 439 U.S. 1360 (1978). 102. “Deseg Plan Is Adopted Virtually Unchanged,” EJ, April 14, 1978. 103. “For Wilmington Board, It’s 144 Years of History,” EJ, June 20, 1978. 104. Raffel, The Politics of School Desegregation, 28; Jeffrey A. Raffel, “Information About Desegregation: Public Knowledge and Information Sources,” in Community Survey on Desegregation, Issue 2 (Newark: College of Urban Affairs and Public Policy, University of Delaware, October 1977), DPP. Chapter 6. “For and Against School Busing” 1. Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2008), 608, 613. 2. “An Ambitious Young Man,” MN, March 24, 1972; “Youth Threatens Veteran Boggs,” DSN, October 25, 1972. 3. Bill Frank, “Is Joe Biden Just a Young Cale Boggs?” MN, March 23, 1972; Bill Frank, “If Boggs Is the Irresistible Object, Then . . . ,” MN, June 9, 1972; “Biden Tops Boggs—in Collecting, Spending,” MN, September 15, 1972. 4. “Nixon May Ask Congress for Bus Moratorium,” MN, March 3, 1972; “Nixon Asks Justice Dept., Congress Bar New Busing,” MN, March 18, 1972. 5. “Boggs, Roth Support Nixon Busing Stance,” MN, March 18, 1972. 6. Quoted in Julian E. Zelizer, On Capitol Hill: The Struggle to Reform Congress and

Notes to Pages 214–219

299

Its Consequences, 1948–2000 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 135, original in “The Seniority of Strom Thurmond,” WP, April 29, 2001. 7. “Biden to Bid for Senate Nod, Now Thinks He Can Top Boggs”; “Biden Gets off to Flying Start in Bid for Senate,” MN, March 15, 21, 1972. 8. “Biden Vows He Won’t Be a Fence-Sitter,” MN, March 27, 1972. 9. Joseph R. Biden, Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics (New York: Random House, 2007), 106. 10. “Boggs, Biden Debate; ‘Agree’ on Busing Stance,” MN, September 26, 1972; “Boggs, Roth Support Nixon Busing Stance,” MN, March 18, 1972. 11. Nathan Glazer, “Is Busing Necessary?” Commentary (March 1971): 41. 12. Thomas J. Sugrue, “All Politics Is Local: The Persistence of Localism in Twentieth-Century America,” in The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History, ed. Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak, and Julian E. Zelizer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), 302. 13. Timothy N. Thurber, “The Second Reconstruction,” in The American Congress: The Building of Democracy, ed. Julian E. Zelizer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 529–47. 14. Edward Keynes and Randall K. Miller, The Court vs. Congress: Prayer, Busing, and Abortion (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1989), 169, 206, 217, 219; L. A. Powe, Jr., “The Warren Court and the Political Process,” in Zelizer, The American Congress, 548– 59; Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 341–43; Gary Orfield, “The 1964 Civil Rights Act and American Education,” in Legacies of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, ed. Bernard Grofman (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 100–106. 15. Biden, Promises to Keep, 83–96; Keyes v. School District No. 1, 413 U.S. 189 (1973); “Anti-Busing Amendments Added to Education Bill,” Congressional Quarterly, Almanac, 93rd Cong., 2nd Sess., 1974, vol. 30, 455. 16. “Anti-Busing Amendments Added to Education Bill,” 458. 17. On southerners and the limitation rider, see Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), 203. On the legislative battle around the Gurney amendment, see Congressional Quarterly, 1974, 461–62; Congressional Record, 93rd Cong., 2nd Sess., vol. 120, part 11, May 9–16, 1974, 14925; “Busing of Pupils Upheld in a Senate Vote of 47–46,” NYT, May 16, 1975; “Busing Clash Wins Biden Few Friends,” MN, July 10, 1974; Robert D. Loevy, To End All Segregation: The Politics of the Passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1990), 38, 135; Loevy, The Civil Rights Act of 1964: The Passage of the Law That Ended Racial Segregation (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), 163, 190;  Charles W. Whalen and Barbara Whalen, The Longest Debate: A Legislative History of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (Cabin John, Md.: Seven Locks Press, 1985), 214–15; Biden, Promises to Keep, 124–25; Gary Orfield, Must We Bus?: Segregated Schools and National Policy (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1978), 266–67.

300

Notes to Pages 219–225

18. William A. Link, Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism (New York: St. Martin’s, 2008), 80, 101–3. 19. Historian Jeanne Theoharis writes of this historical problem in terms of a “covert language.” See Theoharis, “Hidden in Plain Sight: The Civil Rights Movement Outside the South,” in The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism, ed. Matthew D. Lassiter and Joseph Crespino (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 58. 20. Congressional Record, 94th Cong., 2nd Sess., vol. 121, part 22, September 9–17, 1975, 29102. 21. William Raspberry, “Is the ‘Busing Game’ Worth the Prize,” WP, September 10, 1975; Orfield, Must We Bus? 353. 22. Congressional Record, . . . 94th Cong., 1st Sess., vol. 121, part 22, September 9–17, 1975, 29101–2. 23. Edward William Brooke, Bridging the Divide: My Life (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 65–66.   24. Congressional Record, 94th Cong . . . September 9–17, 1975, 29109. 25. Ibid., 29110. 26. Ibid., 29113; Congressional Quarterly, Almanac, 94th Cong., 1st Sess., 1975, vol. 31, 894. 27. Congressional Record, . . . September 9–17, 1975, 29103. 28. Neal E. Devins, “Regulation of Government Agencies Through Limitation Riders,” Duke Law Journal 3, 1 (1987): 461–62; Frederick M. Kaiser, “Congressional Action to Overturn Agency Rules: Alternatives to the Legislative Veto,” Administrative Law Review 32 (1980): 688; Louis Fisher, “Authorization-Appropriation Process in Congress: Formal Rules and Informal Practices,” Catholic University of Law Review 29, 1 (1979): 68–69. 29. Congressional Record, . . . September 9–17, 1975, 29103. 30. Ibid., 29113. 31. Hugh Davis Graham, The Civil Rights Era: Origins and Development of National Policy, 1960–1972 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 82–83; Orfield, “The 1964 Civil Rights Act and American Education,” 113–14; Congressional Record, . . . September 9–17, 1975, 29116. 32. Ibid., 29121–23. 33. Ibid., 29115. 34. Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (New York: Knopf, 1976), 751–52. 35. Orfield, “The 1964 Civil Rights Act and American Education,” 89–129; Whalen and Whalen, The Longest Debate, 33. 36. Congressional Record, . . . September 9–17, 1975, 29115, italics added. On Senate rules, see Devins, “Regulation of Government Agencies Through Limitation Riders,” 456, 465; Walter J. Oleszek, Congressional Procedures and the Policy Process (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2004), 456–66, 475; Fisher, “The Authorization-Appropriation Process in Congress,” 67–74; Kaiser, “Congressional Action to Overturn Agency Rules,”

Notes to Pages 225–230

301

687–88. On Congress’s commitment to adequately fund compensatory educational measures, see Diane Ravitch, The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945–1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 150. 37. Congressional Record,. . . September 9–17, 1975, 29119. 38. Arthur S. Flemming to Hugh Scott, September 23, 1975, ibid., 29933. 39. “Biden Move on Busing Hit,” WP, September 19, 1975; William Raspberry, “Busing and the Biden Amendment,” WP, September 22, 1975. 40. “Senate Votes to Bar HEW from Forcing School Busing,” WP, September 18, 1975; “Senate Votes Plan to Bar HEW-Forced Busing,” WSJ, September 18, 1975; “Antibusing Measure Approved in Senate,” NYT, September 18, 1975; Congressional Record, . . . September 9–17, 1975, 29123. 41. Gary Orfield, “Turning Back to Segregation,” in Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown v. Board of Education, ed. Orfield, Susan E. Eaton, and Harvard Project on School Desegregation (New York: New Press, 1997), 10–13; Dean J. Kotlowski, Nixon’s Civil Rights: Politics, Principle, and Policy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 15–43. On the rise and consolidation of white reaction against busing in Congress, see Orfield, Must We Bus? 233–78. 42. “Congress Changes Its Busing Tune,” WSJ, October 7, 1975. The Biden amendment passed because of the support of a bloc of northern senators with records of support for civil rights who had previously opposed efforts to attach anti-busing amendments to appropriation bills. They included Thomas Eagleton (D-Mo.), William Symington (D-Mo.), Mike Mansfield (D-Mont.), Lee Metcalf (D-Mont.), Quentin Burdick (D-N.D.), Henry Jackson (D-Wash.), Warren Magnuson (D-Wash.), Jennings Randolph (D-W.V.), and Gaylord Nelson (D-Wis.). “Vote Analysis,” Congressional Quarterly, Almanac, 94th Cong., 1st Sess., 1975, vol. 31, 894; “Senate Votes to Bar HEW from Forcing School Busing.” 43. Quoted in “Congress Changes Its Busing Tune.” 44. Congressional Record, 94th Cong., 1st Sess., vol. 121, part 22, September 9–17, 1975, 29544; Congressional Quarterly, Almanac, 94th Cong., 1st Sess. . . . 1975, vol. 31, 895. 45. Raspberry, “Busing and the Biden Amendment.” 46. Ibid.; Noel Epstein, “Busing: A Confusion of Questions,” WP, September 25, 1975; Congressional Record, 94th Cong., . . . September 9–17, 29106–9. 47. Congressional Record, 94th Cong., 1st Sess., vol. 121, part 23, September 18–27, 1975, 29552; “Cloture Petition Fails in Filibuster on Busing,” WP, September 24, 1975; “Senate Liberals Fail to Shut Off Debate on a Measure That Would Curb Busing,” NYT, September 24, 1974; Whalen and Whalen, The Longest Debate, 195–96. 48. Congressional Record, 94th Cong., . . . September 18–27, 1975, 29551. 49. Ibid., italics in original. 50. Andrew Kull, The Color-Blind Constitution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 155. 51. Congressional Record, 94th Cong., . . . September 18–27, 1975, 29554–55, 30035;

302

Notes to Pages 230–235

“A Curb on Busing Voted by Senate,” NYT, September 25, 1975; “2nd Busing Ban Added to Money Bill,” LAT, September 25, 1975; “Senate Votes 2d Busing Curb,” WP, September 25, 1975. 52. William Raspberry, “Can a ‘Good Guy’ Be Anti-Busing?” Washington Post, September 26, 1975. As entered into the Congressional Record, the amendment read: “Notwithstanding any other provision of this act, the funds contained in this act shall be used in a manner consistent with the enforcement of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964: Provided, that the funds contained in this act shall not be used so as to require the transportation of students for reasons of race unless such transportation is specifically required by a final decree of a court of law.” Congressional Record, 94th Cong.,. . . September 18–27, 1975, 30357. 53. Ibid., 30365. 54. Congressional Quarterly, Almanac, 94th Cong., 1st Sess. . . . 1975, vol. 31, 896; “Antibusing Measure Narrowed,” WP, September 26, 1975; “Senate Softens Antibusing Push,” NYT, September 26, 1975. 55. Congressional Quarterly, Almanac, 94th Cong., 1st Sess. . . . 1975, vol. 31, 898– 900; “Senate Votes to Forbid H.E.W. to Order Public School Busing,” NYT, September 27, 1975; “Racial Busing Curbs on HEW Clear Senate,” LAT September 29, 1975; “House Accepts School Busing Curb,” WP, December 5, 1975. 56. Eric Wentworth, “Biden: A Liberal Breaks Ranks,” WP, September 28, 1975. 57. Jules Witcover, Joe Biden: A Life of Trial and Redemption (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 139–41;  Joshua M. Dunn, Complex Justice: The Case of Missouri v. Jenkins (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 50.   58. Gordon Foster, “Desegregating Urban Schools: A Review of Techniques,” Harvard Educational Review 43, 1 (February 1936): 5–36; Jeffrey A. Raffel, Historical Dictionary of School Segregation and Desegregation: The American Experience (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998), 56, 196. 59. Congressional Record, 95th Cong., 2nd Sess., vol. 123, part 17, June 23–30, 1977, 21243, 21246. 60. Ibid., 21252. 61. Ibid., 21256. 62. Orfield, Must We Bus? 275, 317–18; “House Votes to Balk Carter Busing Policy,” NYT, June 17, 1977; Hugh Davis Graham, “Civil Rights Policy in the Carter Presidency,” in The Carter Presidency: Policy Choices in the Post-New Deal Era, ed. Gary M. Fink and Graham (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 209–10; Julian E. Zelizer, Jimmy Carter (New York: Times Books, 2010), 93–94. 63. Mr. Roth and Mr. Biden, S.1651, A Bill To insure equal protection of the law as guaranteed by the fifth and fourteenth amendments to the Constitution of the United States, June 9 (legislative day, May 18), 1977, CNPR ; Keynes and Miller, The Court vs. Congress, 222.

Notes to Pages 236–245

303

64. Hearings Before the Committee on the Judiciary, 95th Cong., 1st Sess. on S.1651, June 15, 16, and July 21, 22, 1977, 2. 65. Keynes and Miller, The Court vs. Congress, 223, 225. 66. Transportation as a Remedy in School Desegregation, 95th Cong., 1st Sess., June 27, 1977, 2, 6–7, 11, CNPR. 67. Hearings Before the Committee on the Judiciary, 17, 36. 68. Nathan Glazer, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970); Dean E. Robinson, Black Nationalism in American Politics and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 111–15, 114; Stephen Steinberg, Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 90. 69. Hearings Before the Committee on the Judiciary, 95th Cong., 1st Sess. on S.1651, June 15 and 16, July 21 and 22, 1977, 65–66. 70. Ibid., 68. 71. Ibid., 76. 72. Ibid., 219–35, 102–23. 73. Ibid., 111. 74. Ibid., 118. 75. Ibid., 123. For a broader review of the illogic of this policy, see National Legal Defense and Educational Fund, “It’s Not the Distance, ‘It’s the Niggers,’ ” in The Great School Bus Controversy, ed. Nicolaus Mills (New York: Teachers College Press, 1973), 322–56. 76. Congressional Quarterly, Almanac, 95th Cong., 2nd Sess., 1978, vol. 34, 6–C. Epilogue 1. “Bar Observes Brown’s 50th,” NJ, May 4, 2004; “Those Who Cried Tears and Those Who Dried Tears,” NJ, June 11, 2004; “Pioneers Honor Claymont’s Role in Integration,” NJ, September 19, 2004; “Claymont, Cornerstone of Brown v. Board” (Wilmington: Delaware Heritage Commission, Claymont Community Center, and the Tryon Family, n.d.); “Milford 11’s Pioneering Celebrated,” NJ, July 18, 2004; “Separate But Equal,” NJ, May 18, 2004; “School Marks 50th Anniversary of Milford 11,” NJ, September 9, 2004; “Milestones,” The Crisis (November 1998): 7; “The Louis L. Redding Civil Rights Symposium,” Widener Law Symposium 9 (2002–3): i; “Yearlong Brown Observance Culminates with Exhibit Unveiling and Gala Tribute,” Capstone Online 25, 11 (May 24, 2004), http:// nccvthighschools.com/HOWARD/alumni.php. 2. “Harry F. Thermal,” NJ, May 10, 2004. 3. Quoted in “Separate But Equal,” NJ, May 17, 2004. 4. Renee Christine Romano and Leigh Raiford, eds., The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006); Owen J. Dwyer and Derek H. Alderman, Civil Rights Memorials and the Geography of Memory (Chicago: Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago, 2008). 5. “The Imperfect Past of Brown v. Board,” NJ, May 17, 2004.

304

Notes to Pages 246–248

6. Board of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowell 498 U.S. 237 (1991); Freeman v. Pitts, 503 U.S. 467 (1992); Missouri v. Jenkins 515 U.S. 70 (1995); Gary Orfield, “Turning Back to Segregation,” in Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown v. Board of Education, ed. Orfield, Susan E. Eaton, and Harvard Project on School Desegregation (New York: New Press, 1997), 19–22; Jeffrey A. Raffel, Historical Dictionary of School Segregation and Desegregation: The American Experience (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998), 24–25, 109–11, 168–70; Mark Whitman, ed., The Irony of Desegregation Law, 1955–1995: Essays and Documents (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener, 1998), 304, 317. 7. Orfield, “Turning Back to Segregation.” For one of the most cogent critiques of this succession of Court rulings, see Justice Thurgood Marshall’s dissent in Board of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowell, 498 U.S., 251–69. 8. Board of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowell, 498 U.S., 250. 9. Coalition to Save Our Children v. State Board of Education, 901 F.Supp. 796 (1995). 10. Ibid., 804. 11. Ibid., 823, 824. 12. Randy James Holland, The Delaware State Constitution: A Reference Guide (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002), 205. 13. Neighborhood Schools Act of 2000, 14 Del.C. §§220–23; Michele Fuetsch and Leland Ware, “Race, Class, and Resegregation in Delaware: Delaware Schools Fifty Years After Brown,” in Choosing Equality: Essays and Narratives on the Desegregation Experience, ed. Robert L. Hayman and Ware (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), 289. 14. Neighborhood Schools Act of 2000, §224 (a) Neighborhood School Plans. 15. Leland Ware, “Redlining Learners: Delaware’s Neighborhood Schools Act,” Delaware Lawyer 20, 3 (2002): 14.

Index

Absalom Jones School, 93 Adams, George F., 122, 123 affirmative action, 2, 215, 216, 245 Agreen, Robert, 201 Alabama, 12 Aldisert, Ruggero J., 206 Alexander, Raymond Rae, 29 Alfred I. du Pont School District, 107, 174, 202, 203 Allen, James, 230 Allen Frear Elementary School, 156 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 6, 128, 175, 178 American Dilemma, An (Myrdal), 17, 139 American Jewish Congress, 121 Anderson, James D., 18, 36 Anderson, Leon V., 88–89 anti-busing legislation, 2, 215, 219–23, 227–34, 238–40 Anti-Defamation League, 121 Arden, Delaware, 88 Arden Elementary School, 88 Arkansas National Guard, 147 Atlanta, Georgia, 101 Atlanta Declaration, 101, 109 attorneys, role of, 5 Bacon, Walter W., 26, 34 Baker, Frederick, 158 Baker, Mary, 165 Baltimore, Maryland, 24 Bancroft Junior High School, 94 Bancroft School, 59 Bartley, Numan, 10 Battaglia, Victor F., Sr., 183

Baxter, James H., 231 Beach, Jack, 130-32 Beebe, James, 158 Bell, Derrick, 19 Belton, Ethel Louise, 71, 81, 82, 88 Belton v. Gebhart, 6, 69, 83, 96, 126, 129, 137 Benjamin Banneker School, 110 Bennethum, William, 45, 48–50 Berryman, Mary, 43, 53 Bethards, Elmer, 168 Biden, Joseph, 1–3, 19, 213–16, 218, 219, 221–24, 226–28, 230–36, 238–40 Biehn, Gordon, 83 Biggs, John, Jr., 68, 144, 150 Birmingham, Alabama, 5, 216 black administrators, 164, 166, 169 Black Panther Party, 5 black power, 6, 19, 179, 180 black teachers, 156, 160, 162, 164–67, 169 Blackwater School No. 207, 60 Boggs, J. Caleb, 55, 57, 114, 115, 123, 125, 133, 213 Bolling v. Sharpe, 6 Booth, Wendal, 38 Boston, Massachusetts, 220, 229 Bove, Januar D., Jr., 149 Bowles, Bryant, 102, 116–17, 119, 120–24, 130, 135, 138; criticism and prosecution of, 131–34 Boyce, William H., 140 Bradley, Russell, 112–14 Brandywine School District, 247, 248 Brannen, Evelyn, 28 Brennan, William J., Jr., 210, 211 Bridgeville, Delaware, 61, 62, 149

306

Index

Briggs v. Elliott, 6, 143, 223 Brooke, Edward, 220–21, 223, 224, 230, 233, 238 Brown, Sterling, 31 Brown v. Board of Education, 6, 7, 13, 14, 61, 89–98, 104, 120, 135, 188, 191, 245; contested meaning of, 229; criticism of, 3; fiftieth anniversary of, 241; implementation decree (Brown II), 137, 139–40, 168, 239; limits on meaning of, 224; relation to Milford High School case, 128, 129; relation to Roth and Biden bill, 235–36 Bruner, Jerome S., 74 Bulah, Sarah, 63, 65–66, 71, 72, 82–84, 88, 242 Bulah, Shirley, 63, 65–66, 70, 81, 83, 84, 88, 93, 98, 242 Bulah v. Gebhart, 6, 69, 83, 129, 137 Bunche, Ralph, 31 Burger, Warren, 195 Bush, Charles W., 40 busing, 1–3, 189, 193, 194, 201–3, 207, 211, 213–15, 217–23, 225, 227–29, 234, 236–40, 245; and Congress, 218–19, 235; forced, 201, 202, 219, 223, 227 Byler, Claire, 89 Byrd, Robert, 228–30, 232 Caesar Rodney School District, 149, 156 Caldwell, Arthur B., 133 Califano, Joseph, 233 Camp, Orlando, 109-11 Capital School District, 167 Carlson, William, 26, 27, 34, 35 Carmichael, Stokely, 179 Carpenter, Edmund, 55 Carr, Wilber, 178 Carter, Jimmy, 233–34 Carter, Robert L., 28, 61, 74, 77, 90, 183 Carvel, Elbert N., 37, 38, 40, 54 Carver Vocational School, 94 Casson, Lloyd, 184, 185 Castle, Michael, 241 Center for National Policy Review (CNPR), 6 Chachkin, Norman, 182, 183 Chandler, Lorenzo, 153 Chapman, Oscar J., 48–50, 53

Charles R. Drew School, 106 Charlotte, North Carolina, 182 Cheyney, Ethel, 89 Christiana, Delaware, 107 Christina School District, 247, 248 Civil Rights Act of 1957, 118, 216 Civil Rights Act of 1964, 13-15, 138, 154–55, 159, 164, 168, 169, 188, 191, 219; and busing, 215, 220. See also Title VI Civil Rights Bill of 1866, 8 Civil Rights Congress, 56 civil rights liberalism, 3, 4, 28, 181, 242; and Redding, 30, 32; versus black power, 6 Clarendon County, South Carolina, 78 Clark, Charlene, 201 Clark, Kenneth, 77–79, 123 Clark, Mamie, 77 Claymont, Delaware, 66, 71, 107 Claymont Board of Education, 202 Claymont Community Center, 241 Claymont Elementary School, 107 Claymont High School, 66, 70, 72, 81, 83, 88, 89, 241 Clayton, Delaware, 149 Coalition to Save Our Children v. State Board of Education, 247 Cobbs, Ramon C., 109 COINTELPRO, 133 Colburn, Allan P., 46 Coleman, James, 228 Coleman, Lillian, 40, 46 Coleman, William, 78 Coleman Report, 175, 182 Collins Park, Delaware, 178 Colonial School District, 247, 248 communism, 131 community control, 6, 180–83, 228 Conaway, James, 207 Congress, U.S., 216–19, 222, 224, 227, 234, 235 Congress of Racial Equality, 179 Congressional Quarterly, 240 Congressional Record, 220, 228 Conrad Area School District, 203 Constitution, U.S.: Fifth Amendment, 218; Fourteenth Amendment, 8, 44, 45, 63, 68, 78, 90, 91, 93, 97, 143, 202, 218, 248; Fifteenth Amendment, 8

Index Corbin, Herbert L., 144 Corder, Max, 139 Corning, Hobart, 163 Craven, Joseph Donald, 136, 143 Crespino, Joseph, 11 Current, Gloster, 40, 42, 101 David W. Harlan Elementary School, 173 Davis v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, 6 de jure segregation, 2, 13, 61, 98, 169, 192; compared to de facto segregation, 11–12, 14, 176, 197, 215, 233, 234, 236, 243, 248, 249 De La Warr School District, 208 Delaware, as a border state, 7–8 Delaware Bar Association, 29, 241 Delaware City, Delaware, 107 Delaware Code, 144 Delaware Commission on Higher Education, 43 Delaware Committee on the School Decision, 193–94 Delaware Congress of Parents and Teachers, 200 Delaware Court of Chancery, 69 Delaware Fellowship Commission, 62 Delaware Heritage Commission, 241 Delaware High School Principals Association, 164 Delaware Public Archives, 241 Delaware Revised Code, 23 Delaware School Auxiliary Association, 18, 111, 141 Delaware School Boards Association, 181 Delaware State Board of Education, 66; and Brown, 103 Delaware State Chamber of Commerce, Education Advisory Committee, 55 Delaware State College, 19, 23, 25, 35–58, 62; accreditation crisis, 40, 47, 50, 54, 57; closure recommendation, 55–56; reforms, 48, 50, 53, 57; role after Parker, 53–55; state’s investment in, 58; student strike, 35–37 Delaware State Education Association, 166–67 Delaware State News, 109, 130 Delaware Supreme Court, 83, 86, 93, 96, 126,

307

127; Milford High School case, 128–29 Delaware Technical & Community College, 163 Democrats, 8, 14, 16, 31, 214-16 Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), 155–56, 157–59, 165, 217, 219, 222–23, 226, 227, 230, 232–34 Department of Justice, 133, 154; Civil Rights Commission, 216 desegregation: delays in, 145; opposition to, 14–15, 17; implementation of, 141, 144. See also Brown v. Board of Education: implementation decree (Brown II) Detroit, Michigan, 2, 182, 195 Dilsworth, Richardson, 119 Dimond, Paul, 209 district consolidation, 151 District of Columbia, 89, 137 DiVirgilio, Mary, 208 Doermann, Humphrey, 52 doll test, 77, 78–79 Dorsey, Emmett, 31 Dover, Delaware, 30, 61, 102, 123, 149; black high school in, 85 Dover High School, 149 Dover Metropolitan Council of Negro Women, 43 Dover Special School District, 139, 162, 166 Drew Elementary School, 94 Drewry, Henry N., 52 Du Bois, W. E. B., 29, 160 du Pont, Pierre S., 18, 111, 141 Dudley, Edward R., 33, 35 Duke, Robert W., 130 Dunbar-Nelson, Alice, 152 E. I. Du Pont de Nemours & Company, 108 Eagleton, Thomas, 231–32 Eastman, Herbert, 4 Edgemoor Terrace, Delaware, 108 Education Advancement Act (EAA), 185, 186, 188, 191, 192; constitutionality of, 193, 195, 197–98 Education Amendments of 1972, 235 educational versus constitutional rights, 147, 149

308

Index

Edwards, Ira S., 23, 24, 25 Eisenbrey, Preston, 65, 84 Eisenhower, Dwight, 118 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, 180, 218, 221 Ellendale, Delaware, 122, 153, 164 Ellison, Ralph, 4, 17, 74 English, Harold, 144 Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974, 235 Equal Employment Opportunity, 108 Ervin, Richard, 52 Evans v. Buchanan, 142, 143, 144, 198, 205, 247 Evans v. Members of the State Board of Education, 142 Fair Employment Practices, 125 Fair Housing Act of 1968, 197 Fairclough, Adam, 84 Fairfax, Delaware, 108 Fairfax, Jean, 183 Faubus, Orval, 147 Fauser, David K., 188 FBI, 133–34 federal funding, 154, 156, 159 Federal Housing Administration, 108 Felton, Delaware, 149 Ferndale, Michigan, 226 Fisher, Randolph, 109, 113, 114 Five-District Reorganization Plan, 204 Fleming, G. James, 57 Flemming, Arthur S., 226 Florida Agricultural and Mechanical College for Negroes, 52 Florida Supreme Court, 52 Ford, Gerald, 218 Fourteenth Amendment. See under Constitution, U.S. Frank, Bill, 213 Frankford School #206, 60 Frankfurter, Felix, 29, 92 Frazier, E. Franklin, 31 Frear, J. Allen, Jr., 125 Frederick D. Stubbs School, 106 freedom of choice plans, 13, 104-6, 146, 153, 155, 157–59, 194, 217, 224

Garrett, Hermania, 184 Garrity, W. Arthur, 204 Gebhart, Fred, 83 geographic sectionalism, 3, 10, 249 Georgetown, Delaware, 112, 124 G.I. Bill, 107, 121 Gibbons, John, 188, 196 Gibson, Judith, 152 Glazer, Nathan, 214, 237–38 Glynn, George E., 208 Goldstein, Eric, 121 Gordon, William, 105 Gousha, Richard, 154, 161, 163, 168, 192 graduation rates, 63 Graglia, Lino A., 236–37 Graham, Augustus W., 202 Grapperhaus, Ralph, 143, 144 Greater Wilmington Board of Realtors, 190, 197 Greenberg, Jack, 30, 181; desegregation of primary and secondary schools, 67–69, 72–75, 78, 91–92, 95–96; University of Delaware case, 41–42, 44–48, 51 Greene, David B., 122 Greenwell, Janet, 175 Greenwood, Delaware, 139 Gregg, Howard D., 36–39 Gregory, Rebecca, 201 Groveland Four case, 133 Guerke, Ann T., 190 Gurney, Edward J., 218 H. Fletcher Brown Vocational High School, 105 Hagy, Robert, 134 Hammond, Hall, 44 Hampton Institute, 49 Handy, Helen, 46 Hardcastle, James, 160–62, 164, 167 Hare, Bart, 180 Harrington, Delaware, 127 Harrington, William Watson, 34, 45 Harris, Abram, 31 Harris, Charles, 166 Hartford, Connecticut, 182 Hartly, Delaware, 126, 149 Harwick, Marilyn, 173–75

Index Haskell, Harry, 174, 183 Hastie, William, 29 Hastings, Daniel O., 29, 30 Hathaway, William, 225 Hawkins, Virgil, 52 Hayman, Robert L., Jr., 8 Hayes, George E. C., 91 Heckert, Clarice, 188 Helms, Jesse, 219–21, 222, 223, 227, 228, 230 Henry school. See William W. M. Henry Comprehensive High School Heslip, Jesse, 29 Hilton, Kenneth, 206 historically black institutions, 6, 19, 25, 49, 152–54, 160, 228; closure and assimilation of, 163, 164 Hockessin, Delaware, Citizen’s Committee, 84 Hockessin School No. 29, 63, 66, 70, 72, 81, 83, 88, 93–94 Hockessin School No. 107, 63, 70, 72, 81, 83–84, 88, 93 Holland, Jerome, 56, 57 Holloway, Herman, 192, 205 Holmes, Peter, 226 Hoover, J. Edgar, 131, 133 Hope, John, II, 164 Houghton, Charles, 202 housing discrimination, 186, 189–90, 206, 210, 231, 246 housing policies, 13, 14 Houston, Charles Hamilton, 29, 31, 182, 243 Howard High School, 33, 78, 92, 94, 106, 152, 184; conditions, 72, 81, 88; long commute to, 62, 66, 70, 71; transfer program, 105 Howard High School of Technology, 242 Howard University, 24, 241 Howe, Harold, II, 158 Howell, Wendell, 199, 205, 206, 208, 211 Hrivnak, Judy, 202 Hullihen, Walther, 23, 25 Human Rights League of Delaware, 39 Humphrey, Hubert, 227 Insinga, Mildred C., 89 Irvin, Walter, 134

309

Jackson, Earl, 192 Jackson, General L., 190 Jackson, Kenneth, 108, 114 Jackson, Robert, 96, 120 Jackson, Wagner D., 104–5, 123, 126 James, Albert, 44–45, 48, 52 James, Arthur R., 37, 59, 60 Jamison, Jean, 33 Jason, William C., 25 Jason school. See William C. Jason Comprehensive High School Jersey City, New Jersey, 182 Jewish Americans, 121 John M. Clayton School District, 122, 139, 157, 158 Johnson, Charles, 83 Johnson, George A., 152 Johnson, Joseph E., 209 Johnson, Lyndon B., 13, 138, 154, 216, 224 Johnson, Mrs. Arthur, 66 Johnson v. Beebe, 67 Jones, Nathaniel, 198 Journal of Negro Education, 83 Journal-Every Evening, 43, 132 Kandler, Gerald, 175 Kansas, 77, 82, 89, 90, 91, 137 Kansas City, Missouri, 232 Kee, Ed, 241 Kennedy, John F., 224 Kent County: black enrollment in white schools, 149; black students in, 85–86; implementation of desegregation, 141, 143; resistance to desegregation, 112; resources per pupil, 63; southern characterization of, 8 Kentucky, 26 Kilson, Martin Luther, 84 Kimmel, Dean, 109, 113–14, 122 Kimmel, William, 109 Kirby, Paris, 113 Kirk, George V., 188, 208 Klarman, Michael, 26, 127 Klineberg, Otto, 73 Kluger, Richard, 8, 69, 71, 82, 97, 224 Kruse, Edwina B., 152 Ku Klux Klan, 133

310 Kull, Andrew, 229 Kutz, Frederick B., 66 Lane, George, 74 Lasher, Hiram N., 163 Lassiter, Matthew, 11 Laurel, Delaware, 139, 158 Laurel Board of Education, 139 Laurel State Register, 130 Lawrence, Paul F., 72–73 Laws, Ruth, 40 Lawson, Steven, 17 Layton, Caleb R., 147 Layton, L. Lee, 131 Leahy, Paul, 142, 150 Lee, Chungmei, 7 Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc. (LDEF), 32, 130, 181–83 Lewes, Delaware, 149 Lewis, David Levering, 31 Lewis, Jeanne and Clifton, 178 Lewis, Oscar, 200 Lincoln, Delaware, 122, 153 Lincoln University, 26 Little, George, 182 Little Rock Central High School, 147 localism, 103 Louis L. Redding Comprehensive High School, 86, 163 Louisville, Kentucky, 220, 229 Lucas, Louis R., 181, 185–86, 188–89, 206 Lynch, Howard, 113, 115, 124, 126, 128 MacLean, Nancy, 117 Madden, Kenneth, 156, 186, 206 Mansfield, Mike, 218 Marshall, Thurgood, 23–24, 33, 42, 91, 96, 101, 136 Marshallton, Delaware, 149 Marvel, William, 124, 126, 128 Maryland, 8, 23–24, 26, 37, 202 Massado, Frederick, 145 massive resistance, 1, 7, 102, 111, 116, 135, 147 McAdam, Doug, 12 McAllister, Harry, 139 McCall, Willis V., 133–34 McClelland, John, 201

Index McCready, Esther, 44 McCulloch, William, 224 McGinley, Conde J., 117 McGovern, George, 214 McGuire, Danielle, 118 McNair, Edward H., 66 McSherry, Harry, 131 Mercer, F. Robert, 158 Meredith March, 179 metropolitan school desegregation, 182, 185, 206 Metropolitan Wilmington Urban League, 241 Midcentury White House Conference on Children and Youth, 77 Middle States Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools, 39–41, 42, 45, 47, 50, 54, 57, 62 Middletown School District No. 60, 163, 165, 167 Middletown School District No. 120, 165, 167 Milford, Delaware, 102, 109, 112, 139, 149 Milford High School, 7, 110, 112–15, 121–26, 128–30, 134, 241; effects of desegregation, 139 Miller, Elaine, 181 Miller, George, 26, 27, 67, 80–81, 88, 93, 140, 143 Miller, Ward, 94, 104 Millsboro, Delaware, 122 Millsboro School No. 204, 168 Milton, Delaware, 139, 153, 166 Ming, Robert, 78 Minus, Homer, 41, 46 Missouri, 26 Mitchell, Clarence, 238–39 Mitchell, Littleton, 58, 153, 186, 206 Mitchell, Robert, 184 modified attendance zones, 13, 102 Moody, Daniel, 41 Moore, Grace, 88, 89 Moore, Robert B., 195 moral escapism, 139 Morris, Hugh M., 27, 34, 42, 45, 52 Morris, Irving, 175, 179, 181 Motley, Constance, 42 Mount Pleasant High School, 173 Mount Pleasant School District, 174, 188

Index Moyer, Maurice, 153 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 201 Murray, Donald, 23–24 Myrdal, Gunnar, 17, 111, 139 Nabrit, James, 91 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 12–13, 243; and black teachers, 165, 169; campaign to desegregate higher education, 23–24, 27–28, 32–35, 40, 42, 44, 52; campaign to desegregate primary and secondary schools, 62, 63, 67, 69, 77, 81–82, 87, 90–91, 95–96, 98, 101, 142, 153; claim of segregation as unconstitutional, 51, 74; and community control, 180; criticism of, 132; criticism of Delaware State College, 58; damage argument, 74, 92; Delaware as central to desegregation efforts, 6; implementation of desegregation, 136, 139, 145–46; inequalities of schools, 60; influence on civil rights movement, 3, 5; and Jews, 121; and Parker decision, 57; Second Amenia Conference, 30; social science research, 73, 81; traditions of and influences upon, 6 National Association for the Advancement of White People (NAAWP), 102, 115–22, 123, 130, 134, 135, 138; criticism of, 131–33 National Association of Real Estate Boards, 189, 190 National Council on School House Construction, 62 National Forum, 131 National Negro Congress, 32 Negro Bloc, 31 Negro Welfare Council, 59, 60 Neighborhood Schools Act, 248 Nelson, Elwood, 36, 38 New Castle, Delaware, 67 New Castle County, 70, 104, 107, 139, 188; and Civil Rights Act, 156; dual school system in, 179, 185; resources per pupil, 63 New Castle County Housing Authority, 174,

311

197 New Castle County Planning Board of Education (New Board), 207–9, 211 New Deal, 19, 53, 68 New York University, 183 Newark, Delaware, 67, 107 Newark High School, 66, 68 Newport, Delaware, 1, 93, 149 News Journal, 242, 245 Nickel, Gilbert, 43 9-3 Plan, 209, 211 Nixon, Richard M., 185, 213, 227 No. 5 School (Wilmington), 59 No. 29 School (Wilmington), 59, 60 North Carolina, 42, 219 Norwood, Clarence, 161 Oakmont, Delaware, 178 Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis, 180 Ocean View, Delaware, 122 Odessa, Delaware, 107 Oklahoma, 26, 63 O’Reilly, Kenneth, 133 Orfield, Gary, 7, 13 P. S. du Pont High School, 173 Parker, John, 143, 224 Parker v. University of Delaware, 46, 52–53, 57–58. See also University of Delaware Payne, Charles, 17 Pennsylvania, 202 People’s Pulse, 180 Perlstein, Rick, 213 Peters, William, 89 Phillips, Ulrich, 10 Plant, Al O., 207 Ploener, Phyllis, 175 Podair, Jerald, 180 Pound, Roscoe, 29 Powell, Mrs. David, 66 Prickett, William, 191 Prince Edward County, Virginia, 78 Princeton Plan, 156, 165 pupil assignment policies, 102, 143, 164, 176, 209, 218, 229 Racial Isolation in the Public Schools, 175 racial violence, 7

312

Index

Raffel, Jeffrey, 212 Raspberry, William, 219–20, 228, 230 Rauh, Joseph, Jr., 226 Rayfield, George, 178 real estate industry, 189 Real Estate License Act and Primer, 197 Reconstruction, 8 Red Clay School District, 247, 248 Redding, Lewis A., 29 Redding, Louis: background and early career, 28–32; and constitutional rights of blacks, 175; and Delaware State College, 54, 57–58; desegregation of Milford High School, 109, 114, 115, 124, 128; desegregation of primary and secondary schools, 62, 65, 67–69, 71– 74, 80, 84, 91, 95, 136; desegregation of University of Delaware, 28, 33, 35, 40, 41–46, 50, 57; honored for his work, 241–42, 245, 249; implementation of desegregation, 139–40, 142, 152, 164, 168; pupil assignment policies, 102; reform to Wilmington schools, 178, 179, 198; twelve-year plan, 149 Redding Middle School, 163 Reed, Adolph, Jr., 98, 199 Rees, Carl J., 41 Rehnquist Court, 246–47 Rehoboth, Delaware, 149 Rehoboth Special School District, 157 Republicans, 37, 216 resegregation of schools, 249 residential housing patterns and segregation, 176, 182, 189–90, 196, 237–38, 248. See also housing discrimination reverse discrimination, 16 Richards, Robert H., 34, 35 Richardson, Lillian, 178 Richmond, Virginia, 182 Robbins, George, 122 Robinson, Dean, 4 Robinson, Ralph W., 25 Robinson, Spottswood, 91 Robinson, Sue, 247 Rodgers, Daniel, 15 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 68 Rosa, John, 122 Rose Hill Minquadale School District, 107

Rosenthal, Joseph, 175 Ross, Thomas, 5 Rossell, Christine, 247 Roth, William, 234–36, 239–40 Row, Howard E., 157, 168, 191 Rowan, Carl, 65, 84 scholarships, out-of-state for black students, 26–27 Schwartz, Murray, 207, 209–10, 241 Scott, Bertha, 66 Scott, Daryl Michael, 74, 97 Scott, Hugh, 218, 226, 227 Scott, James, 46 Seaford, Delaware, 139, 140, 149 Seaford Board of Education, 127 Seaford Special School District, 156 sectionalism, 10, 11 segregation: and children’s social skills, 74; damaging effect on black children, 61, 70, 71, 74–78, 90, 91, 96 Seitz, Collins J., 8, 241–42; desegregation of primary and secondary schools, 69, 81–83, 87, 93; University of Delaware case, 45–48, 50–52, 54 Selma, Alabama, 216 separate but equal doctrine, 47, 51, 52, 229 Shagaloff, June, 129 Sharp, Mildred, 119 Shepard, Samuel, 134 Short, Harrison H., 163 Sills, James H., Jr., 179, 181 Sipple, William V., 122 Sipuel, Ada Lois, 33 Six-District Plan, 199, 200, 202, 204 Skelcher, Bradley, 242 Slaughter Neck, Delaware, 153 slavery, 8 Slawik, Melvin A., 193 Small, Lester, Jr., 190 Smith, Kenneth, 201 Smyrna, Delaware, 149 social science, and race, 73, 74, 79, 81, 90, 237 socialism, 31 Souls of Black Folk, The (Du Bois), 29 South Carolina, 77, 82, 87, 89, 137 Southbridge Housing Project, 178 Southerland, Clarence A., 86–87, 126–27,

Index 128–29 southern exceptionalism, 11 Southern School News, 111 Spinner, Stuart, 200 Springarn, Joel, 31 Stahl, Harvey E., 88 Stanton, Delaware, 203 Star Hill School, 156 Stargatt, Bruce, 191 State School Survey Commission, 62 Staten, Madeline, 110 Staten, Melvin, 110 states’ rights, 15, 61 Steiner, Edmund F., 122, 123 Stewart, Potter, 196 Stouffer, S. M., 60 Stubbs Elementary School, 94 student-teacher ratios, 72 suburbanization, 107 Sugrue, Thomas, 31, 101, 103, 215 Supreme Court, U.S.: Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, 239; and busing, 3; Cooper v. Aaron, 147; Dayton Board of Education v. Brinkman, 210; Gaines v. Canada: Missouri ex rel., 26, 35; Green v. County School Board of New Kent County, 202, 204, 217, 229, 236, 246; implementation decree, 124, 136–37; individual rights, 216; Keyes v. School District No. 1, 217, 229; McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, 51; Milliken v. Bradley, 2, 195–96, 198, 227, 232, 237, 246, 247; Plessy v. Ferguson, 7, 34, 47, 51, 61, 78, 82, 83, 95, 97, 169; reconfiguration of desegregation remedies, 246; Sipuel v. Board of Regents of University of Oklahoma, 33, 35; Swann v. CharlotteMecklenburg Board of Education, 193, 206, 214, 217, 229, 237, 246; Sweatt v. Painter, 33, 51, 82. See also Brown v. Board of Education Sussex County: black enrollment in white schools, 149; black students in, 85–86; implementation of desegregation, 141, 143, 163; resistance to desegregation, 112, 122; resources per pupil, 63; southern characterization of, 8

313

Sussex County Alumni Association, 43 Sussex County Teachers Association, 164 Sweatt, Heman, 33 Sylvester, George I., Jr. 65 Symington, Muriel, 56 Taeuber, Karl, 190–91 Taggart, Robert, 111, 112 Talmadge, Herman E., 120 Taylor, Harley F., 86 Taylor, Irvin S., 143 Taylor, John H., 33, 34, 35 Taylor, William, 181, 238 Tennessee, 26, 42 Terry, Charles, 157, 160, 163, 188 Texas, 63 Thermal, Harry F., 242 Thomas, Solomon, 55 Thomasson, Maurice E., 41, 46, 73 Thompson, Charles H., 39, 47–48 Time magazine, 134 Title VI, Civil Rights Act of 1964, 154, 159, 220, 222–23, 226, 227–28 Townsend, Delaware, 107 Trager, John, 1 transfer plans/requests, 102, 106, 150, 151, 203 transportation services and policies, 63, 65, 70, 83, 84, 93, 155, 156, 157 Tribbitt, Sherman W., 193 Truman, Harry S., 68 Tullos, Allen, 12 Tunnel, James M., 149 Turner, Edna, 110 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 10, 249 Tushnet, Mark, 24, 93, 137 twelve-year plan, 145, 147, 149–50 Tybout, F. Alton, 144 Tynes, Reginald Stanton, 40 University of Delaware, 23, 25–28, 33–35, 40–46, 51–52, 241; admission policy, 43–45; out-of-state tuition program, 27 University of Florida, 52 University of Maryland Law School, 23–24 University of Maryland School of Nursing, 44 University of Oklahoma, 33 University of Texas School of Law, 33

314

Index

urban crisis, 173 Urban League, 108 urban retrenchment, 107, 175, 196, 199 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 174 U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, 144, 150, 206 U.S. District Court for the Third District, 67, 68 Van Sant, Donald, 158 Vann, Ronald, 111 Venema, James, 202 Virginia, 8, 26, 82, 87, 89, 137 voluntarism, 6, 24, 30 W. B. Simpson Elementary School, 156 Wagstaff, Roy, 184 Wall Street Journal, 227 Walker, Vanessa Siddle, 152 Walters, Ronald, 199 Ware, Leland, 248 Warren, Earl, 7, 96–97, 101, 128, 137, 149, 229 Warrington, Maneas, 118, 120, 121 Washington, James, 165 Washington Post, 219, 230 Weiker, Lowell, 225, 230 Weiner, Leon, 178 Wentworth, Eric, 230 Wertham, Frederic, 74–76, 82 West, Charles, 119 West Rehoboth Elementary School District No. 200, 157 West Virginia, 26 White, Walter, 80, 101, 123 white backlash politics, 14, 16, 18 white flight, 107, 108, 173–74, 175, 196, 199, 201, 202 white supremacy, 17, 73, 117 Whitman, Fred, 119 Whitten, Benjamin C., 33, 34, 35 Wiley, Harold B., 89 Wilkins, Roy, 31, 101, 226 William C. Jason Comprehensive High School, 86, 126, 152, 155, 161, 163, 164

William Henry Middle School, 163 William Penn High School, 66 William W. M. Henry Comprehensive High School, 86, 155, 156, 160–62, 164, 166, 167 Williams, Franklin W., 61 Williams, Irving, 40, 41 Williams, John J., 7, 125–26, 154 Williams, Leonard L., 29, 189 Wilmington, 14, 16, 105–6, 135, 188–94, 198–200, 209–11; and busing, 1–2, 209, 234; black high school in, 62; and Civil Rights Act, 156; metropolitan strategy for desegregation of, 181–86; northern position of, 8, 9; racial isolation of, 188; residential segregation in, 189–90, 196; school conditions and quality, 59, 60, 94, 194; white flight, 173–74; zone transfer plan, 203 Wilmington Board of Education, 92, 94, 174, 179–80, 183–85, 191, 193, 197, 199–200, 205, 212; and Brown, 104; and freedom of choice plan, 105 Wilmington Housing Authority, 108 Wilmington Morning News, 193, 214 Wilmington Municipal Court, 29–30 Wilmington Parent-Teacher Association, 60, 175 Wilson, Woodrow, 160 Wilson v. Beebe, 67 Witcover, Jules, 231 Woolard-Provine, Annette, 30 Works Progress Administration, 53 World War II, 68 Wright, Caleb M., 151, 196, 198, 207 Wright, Steven J., 72 Young, Hyman Albert, 68, 70, 79–80, 82, 83, 86, 88, 89, 93, 95; desegregation in Milford, 114, 125, 127; Jewish heritage, 121; and NAAWP, 132–33 Young, Pauline, 152 Young, Walter A., Jr., 206 zone transfer plan, 203–4

Acknowledgments

I have enjoyed the great support of family, friends, colleagues, and institutions. Without them, this book would not have been possible. Dean Robinson has been an intellectual role model, mentor, and friend. Nancy MacLean provided steadfast support. For their thoughtful comments and suggestions, I owe great debts to Michael Sherry, Martha Biondi, and Dylan Penningroth. Micaela id Leonardo, Steven Hahn, Josef Barton, Robert Wiebe, and Adolph Reed challenged me to deepen the theoretical foundation of my work and helped me understand the intellectual and political stakes of historical work. It is difficult to imagine this book coming into being without the considerable amounts of institutional support I received. Fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution, the Spencer Foundation, and the National Academy of Education provided essential aid. I also received valuable grants from the Hagley Museum and Library and Delaware Heritage Commission. We would know precious little of our past without librarians and archivists. Special thanks to staff of the University of Delaware Archives, Special Collections Department in the Morris Library at the University of Delaware, Delaware Public Archives, Historical Society of Delaware, Hagley Museum and Library, Special Collections at the Howard Tilton Memorial Library at Tulane University, and Manuscripts Division at the Library of Congress. Emory University has provided generous support that allowed me to complete the research for this book. Throughout this process I have enjoyed the counsel and friendship of a number of very smart and talented people. I am indebted to Wallace Best, Michael Allen, Chernoh Sesay, Elizabeth Prevost, Charlotte Brooks, Karen Leroux, Marisa Chappell, Anastasia Mann, David Johnson, and Erik Gellman, in particular, who helped me push through some difficult historical and historiographic obstacles. James Anderson has been a thoughtful and engaging mentor. My colleagues in the Department of African American Studies, and Leslie Harris, Rudolph Byrd, Carol Anderson, and Mark Sanders in particular, have been my supporters, providing camaraderie, advice, and guidance. Joseph Crespino has been a friend and fellow traveler in American

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history. Many thanks to Earl Lewis, Allen Tullos, Martha Fineman, Gyanendra Pandey, Mary Odem, Jonathan Prude, Jim Grimsley, Dana White, Martine Brownley, Corinne Kratz, Ivan Karp, and the participants of the History Department Seminar. Julie Delliquanti and Michael Page’s artistic and cartographic vision helped me put the finishing touches on the manuscript. Raphael Davis and Madhava Martin proved to be amazing research assistants. For many long brainstorming sessions, I am especially grateful to Matthew Lassiter, Kevin Kruse, Nathan Connolly, Devin Fergus, Farrell Evans, Robert Patterson, and Todd Moye. Rhonda Williams, Jack Dougherty, Michael Katz, Alonzo Smith, Ann Boylan, Peter Kolchin, Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Andrew Wiese, Sarah Igo, Leah Gordon, Tracy K’Meyer, and Roger Horowitz have also helped me in ways both tangible and intangible. V. P. Franklin and David Goldfield provided early feedback that helped shape the contours of this project. My thanks to them for permission to reproduce portions of this research, published by the author, that appeared in somewhat different forms in the Journal of African American History and the Journal of Urban History. It is an honor to be included among the historians in the Politics and Culture in Modern America series at the University of Pennsylvania Press. My deepest gratitude goes to Robert Lockhart, Senior History Editor, for his vision, confidence, and guidance. Special thanks to Alison Anderson and Jennifer Backer who shepherded the book through the production process. I am also truly thankful to Thomas Sugrue and the rest of the series editors for selecting the book for publication. Finally, my family has provided my strongest support. I am deeply grateful to my mother and father, Carmen and Isaac, and my brother Brian. My gratitude goes as well to my growing network of family, including the Smiths, Hugheses, Turnboughs, Grimmettes, and Qawiys. My father-in-law, Eric Trethewey, has been a thoughtful and enthusiastic listener. My wife and best friend Natasha has helped immensely throughout this entire process. None of what I have accomplished would have been possible without her unwavering encouragement, patience, and belief in my work. Her love of words, ideas, humanistic inquiry, and the academic mission has been the inspiration for all my efforts. To her I dedicate this book.