Belton v. Gebhart and Bulah vs. Gebhart, other minor cases in Brown vs. Board, demonstrated the extent local communities went to exclude African Americans from their public school system. Although they were separate cases, the issues were the same where black students were excluded from white schools. For Belton v.Gebhart, the Black students in Claymont were not allowed to attend the local school with 400 students. Instead, they had to be bused to downtown Wilmington where they attended Howard High—a school of 1300 students. In addition to the distance and school size, the faculty at Claymont had higher levels of education and offered a variety of courses while Howard High did not. As a result, the parents petitioned the State Board of Education to admit their children to the local school that was not ninety-minutes away. Bulah vs. Gibert began as an initiative to integrate the public school buses. In the rural village of Hockessin, Sarah Bulah drove her daughter two miles to the one-room school house in the village while the school bus for the white children would drive past her house to the pretty little school on the hill. Ignoring the differences in the actual facilities, Ms. Bulah petitioned the State Board of Education for a bus for the black children of Hockessin. Her request was denied. After the failure, Louis Redding, Jr. changed her goal from integration of buses to integration of schools. Although both petitions failed, the failure brought in NAACP legal counsel Louis Redding, Jr. to take these issues into court as a violation of separate but equal policy. Eventually, both of these cases were combined into the Brown vs. Board of Education case. After the Brown case, integration into the Delaware school system did not take full effect until 1980. This is when Delaware became one of the most integrated states in the country for the time.
Posted on: Tue, 24 Jun 2014 15:56:52 +0000
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