“That, to me, is the most racist concept you can come up with,” he added. “What it says is, in order for your child with curly black hair, brown eyes, and dark skin to be able to learn anything, he needs to sit next to my blond-haired, blue-eyed son. That’s racist! Who the hell do we think we are, that the only way a black man or woman can learn is if they rub shoulders with my white child?”
The Milford 11
The Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education upended the American educational landscape, reversing decades of the “separate but equal” doctrine with its finding that racially segregated schools were unconstitutional. Mr. Biden was 11 years old and had just moved with his family to Delaware from Scranton, Pa., when the unanimous ruling came down in May 1954.
The case had an immediate impact throughout the country. But it was particularly resonant in Delaware, a state that, while not in the Confederate South, had laws on its books that required its public school pupils to attend segregated schools. A desegregation suit filed in Delaware had been one of five cases the Supreme Court merged in hearing Brown.
The young Mr. Biden was well aware of the effect segregation was having in Wilmington’s black communities. Though he attended Archmere Academy, a private Catholic school in nearby Claymont, his family lived in racially diverse Wilmington, which helped him foster relationships with black residents that were unusually intimate for the time.
“I remember the stories they’d tell about how they were treated by whites day in and day out,” Mr. Biden said in his 2007 autobiography, “Promises to Keep.” “Every day, it seemed to me that black people got subtle and not-so-subtle reminders they didn’t quite belong in America. It was a dozen small cuts a day.”
After the Brown decision, Louis Redding, a black lawyer who had handled the Delaware suit, set out to test the state’s commitment to desegregation. He recruited a group of 11 black students to try to enroll in an all-white high school in Milford, a city south of Wilmington, one of the more conservative areas of the state.