Gebhart V. Belton - The Trial

The Trial

Gebhart was filed in 1951 in the Delaware Court of Chancery by lawyers Jack Greenberg and Louis L. Redding under a strategy formulated by Robert L. Carter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Redding was the first African-American attorney in the history of Delaware and had developed a notable civil-rights practice in his years before the bar. Frequently, he would be sought out by families unable to afford his services, offering his assistance anyway. Over the years, Redding had developed a reputation as a skilled advocate for racial equality, most notably in Parker v. University of Delaware, 75 A.2d 225 (Del. Ch. 1950), which resulted in a ruling from the Court of Chancery that segregation at the University of Delaware was unconstitutional. The prospect of Southern-style segregation being adjudicated by a court of equity which had previously expressed an opinion prohibiting racial segregation was clearly attractive to Greenberg and Redding.

Presiding over the Gebhart trial was Chancellor Collins J. Seitz, who had issued the Parker opinion the prior year. In 1946, at the age of 35, Seitz had been appointed to the Court of Chancery, making him the youngest judge in the history of Delaware. Just prior to the Gebhart litigation, Seitz had given a graduation speech at a local Catholic boys' high school, in which he discussed the courage that would be required to address "a subject that was one of Delaware's great taboos -- the subjugated state of its Negroes. How can we say that we deeply revere the principles of our Declaration and our Constitution and yet refuse to recognize these principles when they are applied to the American Negro in a down-to-earth fashion?"

The plaintiffs presented evidence throughout the course of the trial demonstrating the patently inferior conditions of the Wilmington and Hockessin schools, consisting of testimony and documentary evidence of the schools' infrastructures. In addition, the plaintiffs offered expert testimony from psychologists, psychiatrists, anthropologists, and sociologists -- none of which was rebutted by the defense—demonstrating that the inadequate educational facilities and curricula found in segregated schools were harmful to the mental health of African-American children.

Dramatically illustrating the disparate conditions in the schools were fire insurance valuations prepared by the State of Delaware in 1941, which featured photographs of all Delaware public schools as well as their assessed value. For example, the "colored" school in Hockessin was valued at only $6,250.00, while the whites-only Hockessin school was valued almost seven times higher. The most powerful evidence, however, probably came from the plaintiffs themselves, who described the conditions in their segregated schools and the hardship they were forced to endure to attend those schools in lieu of the much nicer, and more convenient, whites-only schools.

In summary, the plaintiffs argued that:

• Segregated schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution, in that they did not offer African-American children equal protection of the law; but, if not, then:
• The separate facilities and educational opportunities offered to African-American children were not equal to those furnished to white children similarly situated.