In the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr on April 4, 1968, the city of Wilmington was on edge. When riots began in the following days, Gov. Charles Terry, a southern Democrat, called in the Delaware National Guard. Despite only mild violence in Wilmington compared to other cities in the country, the National Guard would remain in the city for the rest of Terry’s term — almost nine months. This would become the longest military occupation of an American city since the Civil War.
The occupation of Wilmington was the end point of decades of decline in Delaware’s largest city, but it also marked the beginning of a new era in the state’s political and economic history. Out of this crisis came a new opportunity: a militant union that would win some of the most consequential victories in Delaware labor history, before falling victim to the backlash of the 1970s. This is the story of the rise and fall of the Wilmington Federation of Teachers, and the era of unrest, stagflation, desegregation, and austerity that it helped define.
Liberal State, Radical Possibilities
By the late 1960s, Delaware existed as a sort of corporatized liberal state. Since the New Deal era, the government had adopted policies in place around the nation, from relatively high taxes on the wealthy to a welfare system that provided limited support to low-income residents. However, these transformations also came at the peak of the influence of DuPont, family and company alike, which had strenuously opposed the expansion of social democracy that the era represented. To make up for a still-underwhelming welfare state, they used their immense wealth to provide a variety of public goods. These programs benefited the citizens of Delaware, though only under the watchful eye of its largest employer.
Despite this public and private support, Wilmington was on the tail end of decades of decline when the National Guard entered the city in 1968. While DuPont and its white collar workers thrived throughout the years, blue collar manufacturing jobs had slowly disappeared in the decades after World War II. So when new highways arrived and carried those thriving white collar workers away into the suburbs, historic urban neighborhoods were left to be filled up with lower-income Black workers coming from the South looking for opportunity. They would not find it.
Just as Wilmington was gaining new Black residents, structural poverty began to deepen for reasons outside their control. Projects like I-95 and the Poplar Street redevelopment, pioneered by the DuPont-funded Greater Wilmington Development Council (GWDC), greatly disrupted long-standing communities. While the Eastside had long had a thriving Black community, huge numbers of people were forced to leave their now-decimated homes for historically white working-class neighborhoods like West Center City and the northeast. To make matters worse, Wilmington’s longtime residents were now competing with hundreds of newcomers, crowding into the limited existing housing stock.
Between 1960 and 1968, the percentage of Black residents in the West Center City neighborhood increased from 12% to 54%. In the same time period, the northeast areas of Eastlake and the Ninth Ward went from being 30% Black to 88%. Overall, the proportion of Black residents in Wilmington increased from 7.6% in 1950 to 43.6% by 1970. Most of these new Black residents were forced into old, poorly-maintained housing that had been subdivided into apartments by slumlords and former city residents who had fled to the suburbs.
While white residents often responded to these changes by moving out of the city, the new Black residents, still limited by residential segregation, attempted to bring about positive change in their new neighborhoods. In the era of 1960s idealism, poor and working-class Black Wilmington residents took the existing tools provided by the state and private sector and experimented with new ways to address the rising problems of violence and poverty. The People’s Settlement Association, led by James Sills starting in 1963, moved its focus to Black poverty: supporting rent strikers and even helping organize an occupation of Legislative Hall to protest the cutting of welfare programs.
The Wilmington Youth Emergency Action Council (WYEAC), founded in 1967 after the murder of a popular gang member in northeast Wilmington, was supported by the YMCA and Catholic Social Services along with the GWDC. Developed by an Alinsky-inspired sociology student working for the diocese of Wilmington, WYEAC was able to bring together members of gangs from across the city and provide them with jobs organizing other street youths to come together for a variety of athletic and social activities and general self-improvement.
Most of these programs were enabled in some way by the liberal state. WYEAC was largely funded by the Economic Opportunity Act, a Great Society program under President Lyndon B. Johnson. Other organizing efforts, like those arranged by Sills and the People’s Settlement Association, found the support of government and community officials who were eager to experiment and find ways to address problems of poverty and inequality, even ones that made challenges to the system.
However, these radical experiments were not to last. The 1968 National Guard occupation of Wilmington increased criminalization and disenfranchisement of the Black poor, especially in West Center City and the Eastside. While the People’s Settlement would survive, WYEAC did not. In August, police arrested WYEAC members engaging in target practice at the Cherry Island landfill who were wearing badges that read: “I have already been drafted into the Liberation Army.” Wilmington police later raided their homes and found even more guns and ammunition.
For a city already under military occupation, this seemed like evidence of a widespread uprising in the works, spurred and funded by the WYEAC. Within a year, after a series of Congressional investigations and local pressure, the group was defunded and disbanded. With cities burning across the country, white liberals and suburbanites now saw Black radical organizing as more of a cause of unrest than a solution to it.
However, out of these turbulent months of occupation came a different sort of radical organizing, one focused on another arm of the liberal state: the education system. 1968 now saw the final resolution of a years-long effort to organize Wilmington’s largely Black teachers into a powerful labor union that would for the first time secure exclusive bargaining rights with the city’s school board.
The Wilmington Federation of Teachers
The unrest of the 1960s hadn’t just hit Wilmington’s neighborhoods, it had also swept into the city’s schools. After Delaware’s school code was updated in 1919, funding poured in from DuPont Corporation president Pierre S. du Pont, and then the New Deal, to construct a new set of state-of-the-art schools in the 1920s and 1930s. However, as Wilmington shrank from its peak population in the 1940s and 50s and became more Black in the following decades, investment for new facilities and even basic operating costs dried up.
In 1954, the Wilmington School District, its own entity at the time, actually implemented Brown v. Board quickly and relatively quietly, but white parents responded either by putting their kids in private school or fleeing to the suburbs. In 1954, the Wilmington school population was 20% Black. By 1960, it was over 50%, and by 1968 it was nearly 100%. As white students left, so did white teachers, leaving behind a city and school district that was suddenly more Black and disenfranchised than anyone could have predicted when Brown v. Board was handed down.
After the riots broke out in April 1968, the white suburbs wanted even less to do with the city. When the state passed the Educational Advancement Act in 1968 to consolidate the array of tiny suburban school districts, they explicitly designed the legislation to keep all Wilmington students in one district, separate from any of the new majority-white suburban districts.
The same year, the Wilmington Board of Education hired Dr. Gene Geisert as superintendent. Geisert was brought in from Michigan to take on the management of the school district of a city struggling with poverty and racial unrest. As a part of his experience in education, he brought the expectation of working with a teachers’ union. So once he took over, he decided that the district would hold a union election, bringing a battle that had been simmering for decades into the light.
Despite collective bargaining being prohibited in the public sector, Delaware did have two teachers’ unions by 1968: the Delaware State Education Association (DSEA) and the Wilmington Federation of Teachers (WFT). The two had long existed side by side, but they had largely worked towards different goals. DSEA was founded in 1919 as a professional association, seeking to organize teachers and administrators alike into a society dedicated to the betterment of the education system.
WFT, on the other hand, took a more activist role. In the 1940s, DSEA did not allow Black members, but Evelyn Dickey, a white physical education teacher at PS DuPont high school, led an effort to desegregate the organization. After attempting unsuccessfully to desegregate DSEA at its October 1942 convention, Dickey founded and became president of Local 762 of American Federation of Teachers in Wilmington in spring of 1943, which affiliated with the AFL and admitted teachers regardless of skin color.
WFT quickly became the go-to organization for Black teachers, putting them in community with a white activist membership. In 1945, DSEA finally ended its policy of discrimination in response to public pressure rallied by the WFT, but the organizations remained separate. While DSEA proudly included school administrators in its membership and leadership, WFT was strictly made up of classroom teachers, who the union believed had different and often contradictory interests from the administrators.
What the two groups had in common was that they didn’t represent any teachers in actual collective bargaining. The 1930s had seen an upsurge in union organizing, but most teachers were public employees, who were still forbidden by law from forming unions and bargaining collectively. Instead, DSEA and WFT used education campaigns and member lobbying to pass legislation and influence public opinion.
However, by the 1960s, the same rush of union activity that had hit the private sector during the New Deal now hit the public sector. In 1959, Wisconsin became the first state to legalize public sector unions, and in 1962, President Kennedy signed executive order 10988 to give federal employees the same rights. Delaware joined in on the trend when Gov. Elbert Carvel signed an executive order on Sept. 28, 1964 giving public employees in Delaware the right to join a union. This right was codified by the General Assembly, which passed House Bill 249 the following year, enshrining the right of state, county, and municipal employees to unionize in state law.
However, House Bill 249 explicitly excluded teachers from the groups it allowed to organize, but by this point the genie was out of the bottle. After reaffirming that it wasn’t a union and decrying collective bargaining as backstabbing in 1964, DSEA flip flopped and pushed for a bill to allow for “teachers’ associations” to engage in the process in 1966.
Now that they were actually facing off in a real election in 1968, DSEA and WFT began to butt heads more explicitly. On the eve of the 1968 representation election, the Wilmington chapter of DSEA technically had more members than the Wilmington Federation of Teachers when the election began, and both organizations asked for broadly the same things in negotiations. But in a majority Black city that was still occupied by National Guard troops under the command of a conservative, white governor, issues of race and militancy came to the forefront. DSEA was a white-led organization, and about twenty percent of its members, including its recently-resigned president, were administrators who were seen to be on the side of management. The WFT, on the other hand, had just elected a Black man as its president — 36-year old PS DuPont High School teacher I. James Warnick Jr. — and took a more militant pro-labor stance, allying itself with the state AFL-CIO and the federal American Federation of Teachers.
When the election was held on Dec. 10, 1968, the Wilmington Federation of Teachers scored an upset victory of 416-325, becoming the sole bargaining agent for Wilmington teachers. WFT officials immediately laid out their demands: a salary increase of over 25%, paid insurance, sick days, more aides, and 10 days of personal leave. Negotiations took months, legal challenges were raised, and the teachers threatened to strike, but just days before the start of the 1969-70 school year, the WFT approved the state’s first ever teacher union contract.
After losing the battle for Wilmington, DSEA turned its focus to winning the war for Delaware. Just weeks after the WFT ratified its contract in 1969, the legislature passed Senate Bill 228, codifying the rights of teachers to unionize and bargain. Over the next couple of years, DSEA was able to use its larger membership statewide to become the sole bargaining unit in nearly every school district outside of Wilmington. With bargaining rights secured, the DSEA negotiated its own, less substantial, contracts.
Wilmington teachers didn’t get everything they wanted, but the WFT had won them the best pay in the entire state, along with new grievance procedures and better health and life insurance benefits. WFT President Warnick took a conciliatory tone in victory: “We have a good working relationship with the administration because of the open door policy [Superintendent] Dr. Geisert has established for any interested citizen — not just the union — to participate.”
But the young president of the union had proven through strike threats, rallies, and mass meetings that Wilmington teachers were willing to fight to get what they wanted. The radical goals and tactics of the 1960s had migrated from the streets to the board of education.
Building Black Power
Upon taking office in January 1969, Republican Gov. Russell Peterson’s first act in office was to withdraw the National Guard from the city of Wilmington. By then, Wilmington was a deeply divided and troubled city. Most of the radical possibilities of the 1960s had been snuffed out by the occupation, and federal money dried up during the Nixon administration. Still, many of the remaining Black residents would try a variety of new ways to rebuild their community.
One method that Black Wilmingtonians used was gaining control of whatever sources of power they could. Despite the fact that Wilmington became a majority-Black city in the early 1970s, it was still 20 years away from its first Black mayor and still had a solidly white majority on the city council. In 1970, local activists like Henrietta Johnson and Charles “Chezzy” Miller joined Herman Holloway as part of a lonely group of Black representatives in Dover, but they were still a small minority. The only place that Black Wilmingtontians could exert majoritarian influence right away was the school system.
In November 1969, Wilmington’s Council of Parent Teacher Associations pulled out of the Delaware Congress of PTAs and formed its own organization: the Wilmington Home and School Council. The new group was chaired by Elise Grossman, a Jewish activist with the League of Women’s voters, who was heavily dedicated to achieving better outcomes for Black students and more representation for Black parents. The Council proposed an expansion of the Wilmington Board of Education, and Russ Peterson, the liberal Republican governor, accepted. In June 1970, the Wilmington Board of Education gained its first ever Black majority when Peterson appointed four new members, two of which had been recommended by the Council.
Black power wasn’t the only game in town, though, as some pushed instead for a broader integration. In 1971, five Black parents, supported by the ACLU, successfully requested that the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware reopen Evans v. Buchanan. This case was originally filed by Brenda Evans, a parent down in Clayton, but it was now being applied to declare that the Wilmington schools were still legally segregated. As evidence, they pointed to the Educational Advancement Act of 1968, which had consolidated all the majority-white suburban school districts but kept the nearly 100% Black Wilmington district untouched.
Just as political power was finally within reach for Black residents, the prospect of holding that power was getting less appealing. In the early 1970s, the post-war economic boom which had allowed much of the prosperity and experimentation of the 1960s was morphing into stagflation. Unemployment and inflation were now growing together, and it was affecting government and personal pocketbooks.
The first effects were seen in a political sea change. In 1972, Gov. Peterson, the Republican poster child of the liberal corporate state, was replaced by conservative Democrat Sherman Tribbitt after Peterson’s budget mismanagement nearly caused a fiscal crisis. A similar shift occurred in Wilmington, where the corporate liberal Mayor Harry Haskell was replaced by Thomas Maloney, an ambitious young politician who promised to tighten the belt on the city’s finances, especially its school system.
As government budgets began to struggle, inflation was also putting pressure on everyday people. For many people, this led to support for tighter fiscal policy: lower taxes and lower government spending. But for Wilmington teachers, increasing cost of living meant that their revolutionary contract in 1968 wasn’t enough to even maintain their standard of living. The pressure of inflation wasn’t the only thing troubling James Warnick and the Wilmington Federation of Teachers. On top of the decreasing purchasing power of their salaries, the union and teachers were being forced to accept more and more interference from above.
To complicate negotiations, WFT’s preparation for that year’s contract fight was interrupted by a surprise attack from DSEA in January of 1973. The rival union demanded a new election, blasting WFT for giving into the changes from Wilmington’s Board of Education and claiming they had already had 30% of teachers sign onto their effort. Despite the fact that the WFT wasn’t up for recertification until 1974, the district scheduled an election for May 1973.
The result was not what DSEA wanted. Rather than striking a blow against the WFT, the election resulted in a landslide 619-83 margin for the Federation. Warnick hoped to ride this overwhelming victory into a strong contract fight, and prepared a 103-page document of demands to begin negotiating with the school board. At the core of Warnick’s demands was a salary increase of 8-9% in an attempt to keep salaries above the pace of inflation.
Negotiations continued fruitlessly throughout the summer, and in September the parties still had not reached an agreement. After threatening to strike, the WFT agreed to reopen negotiations and continue to work on with their previous contract. Throughout the process, the DSEA was a constant thorn in Warnick’s side. Linda Romaine, the group’s president, met separately with negotiator Joseph Johnson behind the back of Warnick, causing Warnick to lash out: “Johnson’s wife is a [DSEA] member and he’s trying to keep that organization alive… he’s trying to play us [WFT and DSEA] against each other so the board can gain ground.”
When WFT and the district failed to reach an agreement by the morning of Thursday, Oct. 18, the union voted overwhelmingly to go on strike and walked out en masse, crippling the city’s 22 schools. The tactic proved to be a major success. Within 48 hours, the district brought a new proposal to the union, and the teachers approved it overwhelmingly on Sunday evening.
The contract was no doubt a compromise, only raising pay 6% that year and 7% the following year, an amount above the district’s goal of 5% and below the union’s goal of 8%. However, it solidified what had originally seemed like shaky ground for Wilmington Federation of Teachers. At the rally where the contract was ratified, a national AFT official praised Warnick and the teachers: “You have the most disciplined group of bargainers I’ve seen in my work throughout the 50 states. But you must continue to remain strong. United we stand or divided we’re chipped off one at a time.”
WFT had indeed become a pillar of strength in unity in a divided city. In the face of a declining workforce, poverty and violence, and less support from Dover, the teachers seemed to be forging an alternative. Through militant labor action, they were winning rights for teachers and students, and increased funding for them and their classrooms. However, the trouble was only beginning. Over the following years, WFT would enter a new battleground, being torn apart from all sides by forces well outside their control.