Via #Delaware.gov: When Dr. King spoke to the packed audience in the Howard High School auditorium on September 12, 1960, he delivered a message of patience and persistence. “Protest, yes, but with dignity and discipline to achieve our goals,” said King in this newspaper clipping from the News Journal.
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Dr. King’s first and only visit is just a small part of Delaware’s history during the civil rights movement. Did you know that Brown vs. The Board of Education comprises of 5 cases, one of which was from Delaware? These cases were unsuccessfully tried in lower courts then appealed to the Supreme Court where they were combined to create Brown vs. The Board of Education. The case from Delaware, which began as two cases before being combined, involved a one-roomed school house in Hockessin and Howard High School in Wilmington, where Dr. King spoke on his visit. In both cases, students traveled nearly an hour to attend schools that were not equal in resources.
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ABOUT HOWARD HIGH SCHOOL
Howard High School, named for General Oliver Otis Howard, who founded Howard University and was the Commissioner for the Freedmen’s Bureau from 1865 to 1874, opened in 1867 at 12th and Orange St. with educator Edwina Kruse as its principal.[5][6][7][8] Despite being a public school, Howard received very little state funding, particularly compared to white-only schools, and conditions rapidly declined.[8] For many years, Howard families appealed to the government for financial aid for the building, which had been deemed “hazardous to an extreme degree, although inadequate for instructional purposes.”[9][10] In the early 1920s, businessman Pierre S. du Pont, who had a history of supporting education for Black students in Delaware, donated a swath of land in Wilmington for the purpose of building a new Howard High School.[8][11]
In 1953, Howard was the subject of Gebhart v. Belton, a desegregation case wherein parents of Howard students sued for the opportunity for their children to attend all-white schools in their town rather than the much-further-away Howard High School, which by this point had become run-down.[12][7] Gebhart v. Belton was combined with four other cases in the US Supreme Court to form the Brown v. Board of Education suit in 1954.[12][7]
In 1975, Howard High School closed and was replaced by the Howard Educational Park, then the Howard Career Center.[5] It sits adjacent to the original Howard High School.[7] The school settled on its current name, Howard High School of Technology, in late 1993.[13]
