Gebhart was filed in 1951 in the Delaware Court of Chancery by lawyers Jack Greenberg and Louis L. Redding under a strategy formulated by Robert L. Carter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
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Even though Delaware is nominally a northern state, and was mostly aligned with the Union during the American Civil War, it nonetheless was de facto and de jure segregated; Jim Crow laws persisted in the state well into the 1940s, and its educational system was segregated by operation of law.
Seitz's father, Collins J. Seitz, was a chancellor of Delaware who wrote the 1952 decision in Gebhart v. Belton, which paved the way for Brown v. Board of Education.
Belton, South Carolina | Belton | Gebhart v. Belton | Belton House | Sharon Sayles Belton | RAF Belton Park | James Belton Bonsall | Émile Gebhart | Belton, Lincolnshire | Belton Chalets |
A group of legal scholars, including University of Iowa law professor James Tomkovicz, wrote an amicus curiae brief asking the court to overturn the 1981 case, New York v. Belton, that granted police the authority to search a person's vehicle even if that person is not in the vehicle.
Gebhart v. Belton was combined with cases from three other states and the District of Columbia to become part of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case in 1954 known as Brown v. Board of Education.