Memorial honors desegregation fight

At almost 98 years old, Reba Hollingsworth has never met a challenge she didn’t take head-on.

Growing up in Milford during segregation, she had to live with another family to attend high school in Dover, and worked her way through college. Along the way, she pushed the University of Delaware to change its grading policy, and it did. Her hard work paid off, as she rose along the ranks of education, ending with a doctorate in counseling.

“When people put stumbling blocks in your way, use them as stepping stones or something better,” Hollingsworth told a crowd gathered May 16 to dedicate a memorial at Legislative Hall in honor of the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court case that eventually put an end to Delaware’s separate-but-equal system of education.

Gov. John Carney joined a list of speakers who shared stories of Delaware’s move to desegregation. In 1950, he said, Salesianum in Wilmington was the first school to accept Black students, and there was no violence and little drama at Claymont High School when it was among the first public schools to have a Black student enroll. “Claymont was out there on its own,” he said. 

A Delaware Heritage Commission article notes that University of Delaware was the first state-supported institution in America to be desegregated by law for undergraduates.

Delaware’s role in the Brown case stood strong when two Delaware cases, Bulah vs. Gebhart and Belton vs. Gebhart, were consolidated and eventually became part of Brown’s U.S. Supreme Court case.

Now the memorial stands in honor of those who fought to end school segregation. Legislators attending the event say the end of segregation helped bring about change throughout the state.

“The Legislature looks different from what it looked like 30 years ago,” said Senate President Pro Tempore Dave Sokola.