Untold Stories of Black Delaware: SDARJ’s 250th Town Hall Brings History to Life
On June 30th, the Southern Delaware Alliance for Racial Justice (SDARJ) hosted a powerful town hall at the Cinema Art Theater, gathering historians, educators, journalists, and community members to explore a subject too often left out of America’s semiquincentennial celebrations: the deep, complex, and largely untold story of Black Delaware.
Framed around the nation’s upcoming 250th anniversary, the evening opened with SDARJ founder and chairperson Charlotte King reminding attendees that the wealth and promise of this country were built, in large part, on the backs of enslaved people who nonetheless remained among America’s most devoted patriots. Her welcome set the tone for a night dedicated to reclaiming a fuller picture of Black Delaware — one that stretches from the colonial era to the present day.
Voices of Black Delaware, Past and Present
Rev. Marjorie Belmont, managing editor of Black Voices — Delaware’s only Black-owned magazine, reaching roughly 17,000 readers per edition in Sussex County — spoke about the publication’s mission to spotlight the county’s overlooked contributors and to recruit new writers, both young and seasoned, to keep telling these stories.
Historian and Delaware State University professor Cliff Von Howell addressed the active erasure of Black history happening across the country, from removed references at Arlington National Cemetery to sanitized textbook language. He argued that education is the single greatest indicator of quality of life, and that gaps in curriculum directly fuel misunderstanding and division.
Local historian Syl Wolford introduced the audience to Joshua Parker, once the wealthiest Black man in Delaware, whose life traced a path from enslavement to influential political patronage jobs in Dover and Washington, D.C. — a story he noted goes almost entirely untold in mainstream Delaware history.
Dr. Marlene Saunders traced the evolution of Black women’s political power in Delaware, from the suffrage organizing of Alice Dunbar Nelson and Blanche Williams Stubbs in the early 1900s to today’s General Assembly, where twelve African American women now hold seats, including the Speaker of the House and House Majority Leader.
Attorney and law professor Ron Collins closed with the remarkable, and rarely taught, story of Louis Redding, Delaware’s first Black attorney, whose 1950s Delaware school desegregation cases were the only rulings among the five Brown v. Board of Education cases to find segregation unconstitutional at the state level — a legal milestone still missing from most constitutional law textbooks.
Why Black Delaware’s History Matters Now
Throughout the evening, panelists and audience members alike returned to a shared call to action: push local school boards for stronger African American history curricula, support pending legislation like SB330 establishing a statewide African American Heritage Commission, and keep documenting the stories of Black Delaware before they’re lost.
SDARJ will celebrate ten years of this work at its anniversary gala on October 24th — continuing a mission to ensure Black Delaware’s history is remembered as what it has always been: American history.
A video of the event will be available soon.
