This month in History: March 1966 response to NAACP resolution

On February 23, 1966 the Delaware State Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, NAACP, issued a resolution stating "We contend that education provides the fundamental medium for the perpetuation of segregation and discrimination in our society. Delaware State College continues as this medium of injustice."  It accused DSC of "tokenisum" by virtue of the small number of white students. Furthermore, the resolution calls for the closure of Delaware State College in order to perpetuate the integration of University of Delaware which was begun in 1950.

The letter bearing the resolution was sent to DSC President Mishoe by Littleton P. Mitchell, President of the Delaware State Conference of NAACP.  Mitchell had been a member of the NAACP since he was thirteen.  In the 1930's he completed high school at Howard High and spent two years at West Chester University of Pennsylvania on an athletic scholarship. His collegiate education was cut short when he joined World War II as a flight instructor for the Tuskegee Airman.  I personally wonder how these experiences, attending a segregated high school and serving the US Army in a segregated unit, must have impacted him. Mitchell became a formidable force for the NAACP and served as a conference president for more than thirty years. Among his many accomplishments he successfully led the movement for the desegregation of Delaware hospitals.

In March of 1966, after receiving the NAACP resolution,  President Luna I. Mishoe was obviously dismayed with its message. He drafted a thirteen page special report to the Board of Trustees and painstakingly responded to every accusation Mitchell had publicly laid against Delaware State College.  His chief message was "From all evidence available to me, this College is at least 10% integrated and the chart is still moving upward.  This cannot be accurately called tokenism when most of this happened within the past THREE years...Our faculty is more than 30% integrated."

To me, what is interesting is that today's society commonly perceives the NAACP as fighting against white institutions that barred blacks. What this resolution reminds us is that the NAACP fought against all segregation. In fact, the NAACP resolution states, "It is our position that each of Delaware's institutions of higher learning is segregated...As a result, therefore, Negro and white students of both institutions continue to receive an inferior education." I don't wish to speak for Littleton Mitchell, but what I would like to think he was conveying is the idea that students of any race cannot learn from each other's experiences if they do not learn together. 

The NAACP resolution may be viewed in the Harriet R. Williams Collection; box 2; folder 5, part 2.  If you would like to study the current statistics on the make-up of the student body you may be interested in the Delaware State University Factbooks viewable at https://www.desu.edu/academics/academic-affairs/institutional-effectiveness/institutional-research-planning-analytics/fact-book.