Constitution Day 2021

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. One hundred and seventy-five years after one of the greatest documents ever written laid the foundation for a new country called the United States of America, little equality existed between descendants of former slaves, and descendants of former slave owners. The laws of the land suggested that all men were NOT created equal. The school system in much of America reinforced this belief. This is the story of two great men, one black, one white, one lawyer, one judge, both born into circumstances that should have kept them from achieving hero status, who laid the foundation to change the nation’s most fundamental sign and cause of racism: an unequal school system separated by race. Louis Redding, Delaware’s first black attorney, was the nation’s first attorney to win a public school desegregation case and Collins Seitz, an Irish American, became the nation’s first judge to suggest that desegregation was unconstitutional. In doing so, they helped America to come closer to the ideals laid out in the Declaration of Independence and the democracy laid out in the Constitution.

Between North and South chronicles the three-decade-long struggle over segregated schooling in Delaware, a key border state and important site of civil rights activism and white reaction. Historian Brett Gadsden begins by tracing the origins of a long litigation campaign by NAACP attorneys who translated popular complaints about the inequities in Jim Crow schooling into challenges to racial proscriptions in public education. Their legal victories subsequently provided the evidentiary basis for the Supreme Court's historic decision in Brown v. Board of Education, marking Delaware as a center of civil rights advancements. Gadsden's further examination of a novel metropolitan approach to address the problem of segregation in city and suburban schools, wherein proponents highlighted the web of state-sponsored discrimination that produced interrelated school and residential segregation, reveals the strategic creativity of civil rights activists. He shows us how, even in the face of concerted white opposition, these activists continued to advance civil rights reforms into the 1970s, secured one of the most progressive busing remedies in the nation, and created a potential model for desegregation efforts across the United States. Between North and South also explores how activists on both sides of the contest in this border state--adjacent to the Mason-Dixon line--helped create, perpetuate, and contest ideas of southern exceptionalism and northern innocence. Gadsden offers instead a new framework in which "southern-style" and "northern-style" modes of racial segregation and discrimination are revealed largely as regional myths that civil rights activists and opponents alternately evoked and strategically deployed to both advance and thwart reform.

Before 1954, both law and custom mandated strict racial segregation throughout much of the nation. That began to change with Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark decision that overturned the pernicious "separate but equal" doctrine. In declaring that legally mandated school segregation was unconstitutional, the Supreme Court played a critical role in helping to dismantle America's own version of apartheid, Jim Crow. This new study of Brown-the title for a group of cases drawn from Kansas, Virginia, South Carolina, Delaware, and the District of Columbia-offers an insightful and original overview designed expressly for students and general readers. It is concise, up-to-date, highly readable, and very teachable. The authors, all recognized authorities on legal history and civil rights law, do an admirable job of examining the fight for legal equality in its broad cultural and historical context. They convincingly show that Brown cannot be understood apart from the history of caste and exclusion in American society. That history antedated the very founding of the country and was supported by the nation's highest institutions, including the Supreme Court whose decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) supported the notion of "separate but equal." Their book traces the lengthy court litigations, highlighting the pivotal role of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and including incisive portraits of key players, including co-plaintiff Oliver Brown, newly appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren, NAACP lawyer and future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, and Justice Felix Frankfurter, who recognized the crucial importance of a unanimous court decision and helped produce it. The authors simply but powerfully narrate the obstacles these individuals faced and the opportunities they grasped and clearly show that there was much more at stake than educational rights. Brown not only changed the national equation of race and caste-it also changed our view of the Court's role in American life. The dramatic story of the road to and from Brown, despite the retrenchments of recent years, needs to be heard anew. As we prepare to commemorate the decision's fiftieth anniversary in May 2004, this book invites readers to walk that road again and appreciate the lasting importance of what is indisputably a landmark case.

The Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 has long been heralded as a landmark in the progress of civil rights in the United States. But as the forces opposing affirmative action and supporting resegregation have gained ground in recent years, its legacy has been questioned. Some wonder whether the decision did more harm than good, by fomenting a backlash, or whether the desegregation it brought about might not have been accomplished anyway through legislation. Others worry about the racial paternalism they see as inherent in the desegregation project and reflected in the Brown ruling.

This book identifies ten pivotal policies in Delaware that still impact public life in this small state. Much that has happened since the mid-twentieth century in Delaware public policy evolved from particular events. These events consisted of court decisions, laws passed, or incidents that happened to particular persons. They prompted public policies, the effects of which were not clearly understood, that were often counter to what was anticipated, had undesirable side effects, or were inadequate to deal with the problems encountered. This chronicle begins in 1954 when the U.S. Supreme Court confronted racially segregated Delaware with the necessity to desegregate its public schools " with all deliberate speed." Chapter 2 evolves from 1964, when the Supreme Court ordained--by virtue of its "one-person-one-vote" decision--that states end over-representation of rural voters in their state legislatures. Chapter 3 turns to the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King followed by the Delaware National Guards occupation of Wilmington for over nine months. Chapter 4 focuses on the 1970 establishment of the cabinet system in Delaware's state government. Chapter 5 concentrates on the 1971 enactment to protect Delaware's coastal zone, and its aftermath. Chapter 6 records 1977 as a turning point for Delaware's response to increasing crime by option for increasing punishment in place of rehabilitating prisoners. Chapter 7 highlights how the General Assembly's over-ride of the 1978 budget evoked consensus and bipartisan politics . Chapter 8 focuses on the newly ensconced pro-business climate, illustrated in 1951 by the Financial Center Development Act that deregulated credit card banking. Chapter 9 tells that story of how Delaware sought to confront its high cancer rate, beginning with the 1990 report of the Governor's advisory council. Chapter 10 concentrates on Delaware's troubled efforts to develop energy policies, beginning with the 1999 legislation deregulating electric power. The book's Afterword broadly assesses how these major policy developments have effected systemic institutional change in how Delaware is governed.