Delaware’s role vital to school desegregation Supreme Court ruling

Louis Redding — Delaware’s first Black attorney and a lawyer for the NAACP legal defense — argued the two Delaware school segregation lawsuits. In one case, Gebhart v. Belton, eight students were denied entry to Claymont High School while being bused in Wilmington for school. In the second case, third-grader Shirley Bulah was denied the right to ride on a bus that passed by her house everyday with white children to the Hockessin school or attend a white school.

The challenges by Redding and others across the country were part of a coordinated effort by the NAACP to prove segregation was unconstitutional. Black families asked the states to allow their children to attend white schools — only to be told no.

Redding’s arguments were the only ones of all the cases that were successful. Rev. J.B. Redding said her father felt very isolated as an attorney fighting injustice.

“When he first began practicing before the courts, they tried to keep him in the back of the courtroom in the segregated section for Blacks,” she said. “That’s the courage in him — he just refused and came up front.”

Chancery Court Chancellor Collins Seitz heard the combined First State case in 1951. Unlike the four other cases in the Brown decision, Delaware was the only place in the country where the courts ruled in favor of the Black families.

Local historian Lanette Edwards said Seitz is an unsung hero in the landmark Brown ruling.

“If we don’t do anything else, we need to champion that man. Because without him, you don’t have integration in the United States of America,” she said.

Seitz visited the Black and white schools and concluded they were not equal. Seitz’s son, Collins Seitz, Jr., is now a Delaware Supreme Court justice. He said what his father did was unique from what other judges did in the Brown cases.

“He ordered the immediate integration of the Delaware schools,” he said. “Most states said, ‘I will give you time to bring the Black schools up to the level of the white schools.’ My father said, ‘No, justice delayed is justice denied.’”