Gebhart V. Belton - The Aftermath

The Aftermath

The State Attorney General appealed Chancellor Seitz' decision in Gebhart to the Delaware Supreme Court. The plaintiffs, believing the Court of Chancery had not gone far enough in overturning the concept of "separate but equal", cross-appealed. The Supreme Court affirmed the decision in a relatively short opinion, relying on Plessy to reject arguments that segregation per se was unconstitutional, while ordering integration and leaving open the possibility of resegregation in the future. From there, the school-district defendants appealed to the United States Supreme Court, where the consolidation with Brown occurred.

After the Brown decision, a sea change occurred in American and Delaware politics and society. In Delaware, most were willing to accept the Supreme Court's mandate, but some holdouts were to be found in the southern portion of the state. The state Department of Public Instruction agreed to integrate all Delaware schools in light of the Supreme Court's order. However, on September 27, 1954, as African-American students were preparing to enroll at the previously all-white Milford High School in Milford, Delaware, unrest from angry townspeople was feared to be imminent. In response, Louis Redding issued an urgent telegram to Delaware Governor J. Caleb Boggs requesting the presence of state police officers "adequate to assure personal safety of eleven children whose admittance to that school last night was confirmed by state board of education." Redding closed his telegram with an optimistic line: "Hope also no occasion for powers of the police will arise."

The end result of the Gebhart and Brown litigation was that Delaware—a state which by no means had suffered the intense vagaries of segregation like some states in the South—became fully integrated, albeit with time and much effort. Unfortunately, some argue that while the state of race relations was dramatically improving post-Brown, any progress was destroyed in the wake of the rioting which broke out in Wilmington in April 1968 in the wake of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis. Delaware's response to the Wilmington riots was notoriously heavy-handed, involving the virtual occupation of the city for over one year by the Delaware National Guard.

For his efforts in defeating segregation, Louis Redding was honored with a life-size bronze statue of him embracing a young African-American schoolboy and a young white schoolgirl outside the City-County government complex, also named for him, in downtown Wilmington. He was also honored by the naming of Louis Redding Middle School in Middletown, New Castle County.