You can read part one of this series here and part three here.
Tensions in Wilmington once again spiked as the end of summer loomed in 1975. On Sunday, Aug. 17, 13-year-old Sheila Ferrell was with friends picking peaches from a tree on a vacant property on the corner of 35th and West Streets when an angry white man and woman pulled up. After the children scattered, the man kept chasing Sheila and shot her in the chest as she ran away. She would briefly survive but died from her injuries on Aug, 30, and enraged protesters met in Rodney Square.
The protesters were led by former State Rep. Chezzy Miller, a former Wilmington Youth Emergency Action Council worker, and Vera Wilson, whose son had been killed by Wilmington Police Department just a few months earlier. As they attempted to march down Market Street, the WPD blocked their way, leading to a pitched battle that lasted throughout the day as riot police violently attacked the protesters.
As battles between residents and police raged in the streets of Wilmington, another battle was taking place in the Administration Building of the Wilmington School District. After four months of bargaining, the Wilmington Federation of Teachers officially broke off negotiations with the school board on Aug. 29, enraged that the board was not negotiating in good faith. On Tuesday, Sept. 2, the teachers voted to begin a strike that would put the brief conflict two years earlier to shame, becoming the longest and most bitter strike of public employees in Delaware history.
Cut the Maloney
The man in charge during this crisis was Thomas Maloney, the young, handsome Democratic mayor who had been elected in 1972. Maloney was the poster boy for a new generation of politicians. He had graduated from Salesianum and worked a series of odd jobs while earning his law degree with night classes and then was elected as the youngest-ever city councilman in 1968 at just 26 years old. However, though he had the youth and shaggy hair of many student radicals, he ran on an explicitly fiscally conservative platform, hoping to spur economic development with property tax cuts and business incentives.
For an ambitious politician who had his eyes on a U.S. Senate seat in 1976, Maloney had picked a bad time to become the mayor of a major city. Nationally, faith in elected officials was plummeting in the era of Vietnam and Watergate. At the local level, the urban riots of the 1960s were followed up by the bottoming out of city budgets as urban decay and stagflation took hold. In February 1975, the Big Apple fell into a deep fiscal crisis that nearly saw the city go bankrupt. Now, these problems were coming to Wilmington, and Maloney soon found himself in a lot of trouble.
The contract negotiated by the Wilmington Federation of Teachers in 1973 had put a temporary halt on labor battles over the city’s education budget, but Wilmington’s broader budget was still in trouble. The steady decline of Wilmington’s population from 110,000 residents in 1950 to 80,000 in 1970 strained the budget, as did the drying up of federal funds after Nixon dismantled the Great Society. Some of the effects of demographic change and disinvestment had been somewhat eased by a new wage tax in 1970, but still more needed to be done. For Maloney, that meant looking anywhere for new revenue and budget cuts.
As a young Democrat, Maloney was at times surprisingly progressive; he sought to collect more back-taxes from delinquent properties, turning them into homesteading properties to encourage ownership. However, he was also more fiscally conservative. When he sought to streamline garbage collection and save $400k by reducing garbage crews from five to three men, the local union struck in opposition. Maloney brought in private non-union crews and white-collar workers to collect the garbage instead, earning him the reputation of a scab politician that would haunt him for years. It was around this time that the protest slogan “Cut the Maloney” became a common appearance on signs at union events.
After earning the ire of the unions, Maloney also provoked the anger of much of the Black community when he made appointments to the city’s Board of Education in July of 1974. He chose four new members, with one of them being Wendell Howell. On his face, Howell seemed like a community choice: he was a Black former basketball star from Salesianum, had served as director of United Neighbors for Progress where he had been known to criticize the status quo, and had worked in the state division of drug abuse control.
However, by 1974, Howell had racked up a good deal of controversy. In 1972, he had quit his job in the drug abuse control division after being suspended, and later that year he ran unsuccessfully against the legendary Herman Hollway at the behest of Democratic city boss Leo Marshall. Holloway, along with Leonard L. Williams and Howard Brown, had tried to stop Maloney from appointing Howell, but Maloney ignored their pleas.
Why did Maloney choose these new members? After slashing the proposed education budget over the past years, he was looking for members who were able to deal with budget problems and were aware that, as he said, “there is not an endless supply of money for the schools.”
There was a battle coming over school funding, and Maloney wanted to have soldiers he could trust.
A Statewide Teachers Strike
Maloney was not the only one facing money problems. At the state level, Gov. Sherman Tribbitt was dealing with the aftermath of financial woes that had gained steam under former Gov. Russ Peterson, who Tribbitt defeated in the 1972 general election. To make matters worse, a shipping accident took out the Penn Central railroad bridge across the Delaware & Central Canal, putting the state’s downstate economy in crisis. As with Wilmington, these budget issues began to collide with the school system.
By the early 1970s, the Delaware State Education Association was beginning to find its footing as a bonafide labor organization. It now represented most school teachers outside of Wilmington, and after a few local walkouts in the early years, DSEA made its first major stand in 1974. The legislature had closed its session in June by passing pay raises for all state workers, apart from teachers. Frustrated with their lagging salaries in the face of rising inflation, DSEA led a statewide walkout on the first day of school, Sept. 5, 1974 — the first statewide teachers’ strike in Delaware history.
The one-day walkout was just a warning shot, but Tribbitt took the message. He promised to obtain a substantial teacher pay raise for the legislature the following year. In January 1975, he worked with the new class of “Watergate babies” to pass a small tax on the Getty Oil Refinery in Delaware City, costing about a third of a cent for every gallon of crude oil it processed. The refinery, in response, flooded the legislature with its workers and threatened to close shop if the tax went into effect. Tribbitt, stuck between losing the refinery by passing the bill and causing a teachers strike by killing it, chose the latter choice by vetoing the new tax on Feb. 10.
Teachers didn’t walk out immediately, facing pressure from the state. Tribbitt offered the carrot by working to find other solutions while legislators, and the Attorney General, offered the stick by threatening DSEA with legal action if they decided to walk out. But on Tuesday, Feb. 18, schools across the state once again shut down as teachers began the largest strike in Delaware history. Most of the major school districts in the state were shut down apart from three notable exceptions: Wilmington, Conrad, and Capital, all of which had large numbers of WFT teachers.
The Wilmington Federation of Teachers was dealing with its own contract fight later that year, and given the history between WFT and DSEA, they didn’t feel any need to get involved with this strike that wouldn’t benefit them in any way. Luckily for DSEA, their help was not needed. Though the state threatened the teachers with legal action, Tribbitt was working tirelessly to find new sources of revenue to meet the teachers’ demands. The carrot and stick worked on DSEA, which ordered teachers back to work on Friday, after just three days on strike, with the agreement that charges would be dropped and salaries would still be raised.
The relative success of DSEA’s strike was one of many factors that raised the stakes of WFT’s upcoming contract fight in the fall of 1975. Another obvious factor was the ever-increasing cost of living that was hurting everyone’s bottom line. Inflation had reached a record-high 11.4% in 1974, and didn’t show signs of substantially slowing down. In March of 1975, Warnick reminded the board of the cost of living as they debated how to cut the education budget, declaring that this would once again be a key part of WFT’s demands.
Economic pressure was joined by a changing political situation. After declaring that Wilmington would need a new desegregation plan in 1974, a three-judge federal panel of the U.S. District Court of Delaware ruled in March of 1975 that a metropolitan plan, in which all the city and suburban districts would be combined, was not off the table. Sensing where the wind was blowing, the Wilmington Federation of Teachers announced their support for a unified county district in May.
Support for a county district was a bold move for the federation. Outside of Wilmington, most of New Castle County’s teachers were represented by DSEA, and a strict membership comparison would heavily favor them over WFT. However, James Warnick believed that the Federation could prove their worth to teachers across the state by negotiating the best possible contract in Wilmington this upcoming year.
“Suburban teachers will receive a great deal of benefits,” said Warnick, commenting on a potential merger, “and they’re going to know the reason why — the Wilmington contract. I’m sure the suburban schools boards are hoping the [Wilmington school board] doesn’t give us a thing.”
Wilmington’s Last Great Strike
Luckily for the suburban school boards, the Wilmington Board of Education didn’t intend to give the WFT much of anything. While the governor had catered heavily to statewide teachers seeking a pay raise throughout the last year, the Wilmington Board refused to budge on teachers’ demands. Negotiations were at a standstill throughout the summer as the Board began to rearrange its negotiating team. In July, Wendell Howell was elected president of the Board, which now had only one member who had served before 1974. In August, they added Perry Goldlust, the assistant city solicitor who had developed a reputation for playing hardball with the city’s unions.
On the Wednesday before the school year started, the WFT officially broke off negotiations. The board was not interested in discussing salary increases, and actually wanted to roll back non-salary benefits that the union sought to expand. They claimed that the union’s demand would cost an additional $1.7 million while their state funds had been cut by $300,000, and the city council had refused to provide enough money to make up for the deficit. As teachers moved toward a strike, board officials took a more militant position than they had in 1973. Two years prior, the board had sought to continue negotiations even during the walkout. In 1975, an almost completely new board, under the leadership of Wendell Howell, said they would seek legal action to prevent teachers from striking.
Nevertheless, James Warnick and the WFT decided it was time to pull the trigger. On the afternoon of Tuesday, Sept. 2, nearly 800 teachers packed into the Longshoremen’s Hall in Wilmington and voted to strike by a vote of 501-170.
“Our policy is no contract — no work,” declared Warnick. “The board wants to see this union in jail… and if they’re concerned about really having education going on — they would have responded and negotiated.”
The legal backlash began as soon as workers stepped out of the Longshoremen’s Hall. Public employees were prohibited from striking, but previous walkouts had been settled amicably enough that no charges ended up sticking. This was not the case for this strike. As soon as the strike vote was held, the Chancery Court issued a temporary restraining order against the strike, the first ever proactive action taken against one of these teachers’ actions. At the same time, Perry Goldlust and the Board of Education sought to have the teachers held in contempt of court.
Despite these threats, the teachers went on strike. Picket lines formed on the morning of Wednesday, Sept. 3 as teachers sought to influence their colleagues to stay home. On the first day of the strike, only 16% of teachers in the district showed up to work, forcing many schools to close early. The following day, the teachers managed to shut down all three of the city’s high schools while the remaining schools dismissed at 12:30pm.
The Wilmington strike was part of a larger wave that was sweeping the nation. Teachers in Chicago, New York City, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and many other states walked out to demand higher wages from their local school districts. However, the situation in Delaware was quickly becoming more dire.
With the Federation ignoring their restraining order, the board and the court moved fast. On Friday, just two days into the strike, Chancellor William T. Quillen found the WFT in contempt of court along with five of its leaders, including Warnick, in an all-day hearing. The punishment for the union itself was a fine of $5,000 that would increase by $1,000 for every additional day the strike continued, and a $350 a day fine for each leader. Still, the union held firm. In a two-hour rally on Saturday, Warnick rallied the troops as teachers sang protest songs and promised to picket again on Monday.
Throughout the first days of the strike, the reaction of the community could best be described as a muted frustration. Most residents agreed that the teachers deserved a raise, but they just wanted their kids to be able to go to school and were exasperated with both the school board and teachers union. Attendance hovered around 50% as parents stepped in to help maintain some of the basic education over the first few days. By the second week, this frustration had started to boil over. On Friday, Sept. 12, as the teachers’ strike became the longest in Wilmington history, the Home and School Council, fresh off their split from the statewide PTA, began to picket city, state, union, and school board offices to try to bring both sides to the table. This eventually escalated to a full-on sit-in, with parents occupying the education administration building throughout the weekend.
The school board and union both responded in different, but telling, ways. Board President Howell named a time and place that he was willing to start negotiations, with the caveat that teachers must go back to work first.He offered little more in regards to concessions. Warnick and the WFT, on the other hand, went directly to the community. When the Home and School Council held a community meeting on the evening of Saturday, they invited all members of the conflict. Warnick showed up and explained the teachers’ side of the conflict and agreed to reopen negotiations. Howell and Mayor Maloney refused to show.
On the morning of Monday, Sept. 15, Warnick arrived at the School Administration Building flanked by 25 parents with an offer to negotiate. Howell refused to talk unless they agreed to return to work. As Warnick left the building, the parents turned firmly against the Board, chanting: “The board won’t negotiate!”
Ruth Graham, the president of the Home and School Council, now called for a citywide boycott of all schools, stores, and businesses in the city until the Board agreed to negotiate. The next day, attendance in the school plunged to 35%, the lowest so far of the strike. The Black community had seemingly won a victory with a more representative board just five years prior, but now they were organizing against it.
As the community began to rally behind the teachers, the city struck back. Throughout the week of Sept. 8, while the union was opening up to the possibility of federal mediation, city police had been collecting information on strikers. On Monday evening, the city sent out court summonses to 160 teachers charging them with criminal contempt and official misconduct. This was on top of the $11,000 in fees that had already accumulated for the union and the $1,050 in fees for its leaders.
The threats were enough to bump teacher attendance up to 21% even as student attendance fell even further to 25%, but the union still held firm. On Wednesday, the school board took its next step of retaliation by announcing mass firings of striking secretaries — 59 of the 83 secretaries who were on strike — sending 40 of them notices of dismissal.
On Thursday, Mayor Maloney came out publicly against the strike, condemning the WFT and ruling out any tax increases to help raise their pay.
“If being in support of the laws of this nation and making tough decisions from falling into bankruptcy results in making some people angry, then so be it,” Maloney raged. By this point, 202 people had now been charged, as arraignments began in municipal court. “I will not allow this city to become a New York City.”
Throughout the first weeks of the strike, attempts to restart negotiations were brief and fruitless, so the WFT decided to meet the city’s escalation with an escalation of its own. On the morning of Saturday, Sept. 20th, as the board of education put an ad in the paper blasting the WFT, Warnick and union members headed down to a state AFL-CIO conference in Rehoboth Beach. The AFL-CIO, which was already furious at Maloney and the city over previous union-busting moves, declared support for a one-day general sympathy strike to back the teachers demand on the following Wednesday.
Then, early in the morning on Monday, striking teachers showed up at the School Administration Building at 14th and Washington and crowded around the entrances, blocking the board and superintendent from entering the building. As the cops showed up and began to cart people away, teachers sang “Solidarity Forever” and “We Shall Overcome”. By the end of the demonstration, 150 teachers had been arrested, including James Warnick. But on Wednesday, the proposed general strike ended up falling flat as few workers walked out, so things returned to a standstill.
Strike Breakers
At this point, the strike had been going on for three weeks with no signs of stopping: schools were not closed but remained at half days as pickets continued outside, attendance slowly started to rise for both teachers and students, and court proceedings continued for the 202 charged teachers. By the end of September, teacher attendance was hovering just below 30% while student attendance had once again risen above 50%.
In the week after the blockade, talks had once again started tentatively. Losing money with every passing day, the WFT was now asking for pay raises of 8.8% in the coming year and 7.5% the year after. The board only offered raises of 1.6% and 2.4%, but was once again inquiring if the state might be willing to contribute any more money to help cover part of the difference. Another sticking point was a non-reprisal clause: The union wanted to see charges dropped against striking teachers and the secretaries who had been fired to be re-hired.
With negotiations now inching forward slowly, frustrations moved from organized actions into smaller acts. On Oct. 2, 1975, a Wilmington High School teacher and coach who had been continuing to go to work found that the windows on his car had been smashed outside his home. The following Monday, Howard Career Center closed early after some windows were broken, and the parking gate outside the Administration Building was jammed to prevent cars from getting in. Believing the union to be behind the acts of vandalism, Chancellor Quillen tripled the daily fines against the individual union leaders and increased the fines against WFT to $5000 per day. At this point, the Wilmington Federation of Teachers was completely broke, relying on donations from other unions to keep up with the fines.
“We never thought it would get to this point,” said treasurer James Shaw in the News Journal. “We thought we would have concluded a contract by now.”
On Oct. 10, the news that everyone had been waiting for finally arrived. At 4:00am, early on Friday morning, the negotiators from both sides had agreed to a contract. The deal was a decidedly mixed bag. It provided 6% raises each year over the next three years, much closer to the union’s goal than the board’s. It also included hiring back all fired teachers and secretaries, and some new small technical rights for the teachers. However, the teachers did not win compression of pay scales, one of their key demands, or any new fringe benefits or limits on class sizes.
Both sides quickly declared victory.
“We basically brought one hell of an agreement, with little surrender of management powers,” declared Warren Howell from the board’s side. But James Warnick was less tactful.
“I’m sitting here laughing at Howell’s bragging,” declared Warnick. “Let me tell you, he got raped. He paid through the nose.”
However, things were not necessarily that rosy for the union. The WFT still owed $18,032.35 in fines, to be paid back through dues that otherwise would have gone to other purposes, and arrested teachers still needed to be processed through municipal court, where they mostly received modest fines.
The battle was now over, for better or for worse. However, as municipal court and Chancery Court proceedings determined the outcomes of individual teachers and individual fines, it would be the U.S. District Court that would decide the ultimate fate of the Wilmington Federation of Teachers and the future of education in Delaware.