Victory Without Triumph: School Desegregation in Delaware

Brett Gadsden

The central thrust of my project investigates how school desegregation proponents highlighted the inequalities between black and white schools and noted the constitutional protections denied black citizens. Victory Without Triumph argues that activists challenged many of the organizational typologies and tropes that historical actors, historians, and legal scholars have used to frame understandings of possibilities and limits of racial reforms. Thus, it explores how activists deployed legal and extra-legal arguments in their quest for formal equality and equitable access to resources, and ultimately challenged an abiding faith in the distinctions between city and suburb and de jure and de facto segregation that delineated the limits of racial reform in the post-Jim Crow era. Victory Without Triumph also charts the impact that white resistance to race reforms had on the public policy outcomes of court mandates and the ways that black communities continually assessed the merits of desegregation in the broader campaigns to expand educational opportunities for black students and achieve racial equality. Building on the insights of scholars who alternately stress the significance of supportive elite and grassroots actors in measuring the outcome of civil rights struggles, this project stresses the ways that reform, especially as law was translated into public policy, reflected the prerogatives of its detractors—as constitutive actors in Long Civil Rights Movement histories—as well as its supporters.

About Brett Gadsden

Brett Gadsden is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, GA. (Ph.D., Northwestern University, 2006; M.A., Northwestern University, 1998; M.A., University of Massachusetts, 1996; B.S., James Madison University, 1991). His book, Victory Without Triumph: School Desegregation in Delaware, is under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press. Gadsden is the recipient of fellowships and grants from the Smithsonian Institution, Spencer Foundation, American Historical Association, Hagley Museum and Library, and Delaware Heritage Commission. Portions of his book project have been published in the Journal of African American History. His research focuses on questions of school and residential segregation in the Jim Crow era and beyond, civil rights and school desegregation, white resistance to civil rights advances, and the allocation of public educational resources.