Gebhart v. Belton

Gebhart v. Belton, 33 Del. Ch. 144, 87 A.2d 862 (Del. Ch. 1952), aff'd, 91 A.2d 137 (Del. 1952), was a case decided by the Delaware Court of Chancery in 1952 and affirmed by the Delaware Supreme Court in the same year. Gebhart was one of the five cases combined into Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 decision of the United States Supreme Court which found unconstitutional racial segregation in United States public schools.

Gebhart is unique among the four Brown cases in that the trial court ordered that African-American children be admitted to the state's segregated whites-only schools, and the state Supreme Court affirmed the trial court's decision. In the remaining Brown cases, Federal District Courts all found segregation constitutional, though some judges questioned its effects on African American students.

The unusual status of Gebhart arose in large part because of Delaware's unique legal and historical position. At the time of the litigation, Delaware was one of 17 states with a segregated school system. Even though Delaware is nominally a northern state, and was mostly aligned with the Union during the American Civil War, it nonetheless was de facto and de jure segregated; Jim Crow laws persisted in the state well into the 1940s, and its educational system was segregated by operation of law. In fact, Delaware's segregation was literally written into the state constitution, which, while providing at Article X, Section 2, that "no distinction shall be made on account of race or color", nonetheless required that "separate schools for white and colored children shall be maintained." Furthermore, a 1935 state education law required:

The schools provided shall be of two kinds; those for white children and those for colored children. The schools for white children shall be free for all white children between the ages of six and twenty-one years, inclusive; and the schools for colored children shall be free to all colored children between the ages of six and twenty-one years, inclusive. ... The State Board of Education shall establish schools for children of people called Moors or Indians.

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