From segregated classrooms to civic leaders

A panel of veteran African American educators convened Feb. 22 to share how their experiences growing up during segregation formed their philosophies as teachers and civic leaders in the Cape Region.

The Rehoboth Beach Historical Society and Museum’s Black History Month presentation of “Those Who Led the Way” featured the Rev. Janet Maull-Martin; Waynne Paskins; and Rep. Stell Parker Selby, D-Milton. 

All three retired educators attended segregated schools as children and spent their entire careers working in the Cape Henlopen School District. 

Maull-Martin was a teacher, coach and administrator who is now pastor of Prospect AME Church in Georgetown and a Cape school board member. She attended the DuPont Avenue School from first to sixth grade and William C. Jason High School in seventh grade before transferring to the desegregated Lewes Junior High in eighth grade. She is an alumna of the first graduating class of Cape Henlopen High School.

Paskins was one of the first Black teachers at Cape after desegregation and is past president of the Sunshine Circle Club. She attended Rehoboth School 200-C, and the C stood for “colored,” she said. She graduated from Jason High, which at the time was the only high school for Black students in Sussex County.

After her career as a teacher and administrator, Parker Selby entered politics, serving on the Cape school board and Milton Town Council, and later as vice mayor. She now represents District 20 in the Delaware House of Representatives. She attended Milton School 196-C and also graduated from Jason High.

As a 12-year-old, Parker Selby said she witnessed a cross burning in her yard as retaliation against her father, who was working actively to desegregate county schools.

“Believe it or not, that happened very smoothly in Sussex County, the last county that wanted to get rid of slaves,” Parker Selby said, noting her own genealogical research has shown she is the sixth generation from slavery.

“Watching my parents deal with the ills of segregation and how they handled it … gave me the model to be a no-hate person,” she said. “I had role models who showed me the way to treat others, and it wasn’t with hate. We were taught love. My whole teaching career, my whole lifestyle, even now, is to spread love.”

Paskins and her peers said they were nurtured at their segregated schools by Black teachers who cared and continually stressed their importance. However, she said, at times some people expected her and her friends to move out of the way on the Boardwalk, but they refused. 

Rehoboth would have public dances where white and Black kids had a good time, Paskins said as several audience members murmured their own recollections of dancing on the Boardwalk as teens.

Maull-Martin said the integration of schools impacted her to this day. It’s something that stays with you, she said, and has guided her life so that she treats everyone for who they are, without preconceived ideas. 

In ninth grade, she was on the academic college-bound track. The only African American student in her algebra class, she had gotten to the point where she needed help. 

“So I raised my hand,” she said. “I held my hand for so long that I had to use the other one in order to keep it up. My question was never asked; I was never acknowledged, and I sat there with tears running from my eyes until I got up and left the class.”

Maull-Martin shut the classroom door and cried alone in the hallway until a student came out, put her arm around her and apologized. The classmate then told Maull-Martin that when she was not in the classroom, stories and jokes were told about Black people.

Although she always wanted to be a teacher, Maull-Martin said she had her class changed and concentrated on business studies rather than teaching. 

“I knew I was college material, and I wanted to bash myself because I allowed someone to defer my dream,” she said. 

However, she said the incident molded her into the teacher she turned out to be, as she made a point to stand at her classroom door to greet every student who came through each morning. 

“I wanted them to know that they were somebody,” she said. “Somebody cared about them. That whatever their dream was, they could achieve it if they worked at it, and don’t ever let anyone take your dream away.”

Athletics opened the door for a lot of Black students, Maull-Martin said, by helping them feel more comfortable. As the first African American to play varsity field hockey as a freshman, Maull-Martin said she is grateful to the teammates who took her in and helped her along the way.

Maull-Martin said she had everything she needed in the small, in–town Lewes community surrounding her neighborhood school. She didn’t recall seeing “Whites only” signs in Lewes, but it was implied; her grandfather told her to step out of the way of white people walking. 

You could go into Bill Clifton’s shop on Second Street to buy an ice cream, she said, but you couldn’t sit at the counter to eat it. She was allowed to watch movies in the Savannah Road theater, but had to sit upstairs.

“But it was OK being upstairs because you could throw popcorn downstairs,” she said to laughter from the audience. “And after a while, those that were sitting downstairs thought, hey it’s cool to be upstairs, and they started going upstairs.”

Maull-Martin said she never knew Beach 2 in Lewes as Beach 2; it was always the Black beach, she said to nods and affirmations from the audience. Johnnie Walker operated his restaurant on the Black beach, she said, so everyone called it Johnnie Walker’s beach. 

In 2021, town leaders voted unanimously to officially name the once-segregated beach after the prominent African American businessman, an act Maull-Martin applauded, although she said Lewes is not the same community in which she grew up. 

“I have been in Lewes and I’ve been at Blockhouse Pond, and there are those who don’t look like me who look at me and say, what are you doing? And look at me as if I don’t belong here,” she said.

Maull-Martin said a white man once approached her family’s home on Fourth Street across from where Shipcarpenter Square is today and offered her father $75,000 for the house. Her father had some choice words for the man, who quickly got back into his car and drove away.  

Later, when a white man did move in down the street, he went door-to-door to introduce himself as their neighbor, she said, and had a big block party so he could get to know everyone in the neighborhood.

Maull-Martin said she respected and appreciated his actions because he didn’t want to come in and change the neighborhood; he wanted to be part of it.

At Rehoboth Elementary, Paskins said she worked with nice people and an impressive principal, O.D. Basinski. 

“I remember, as an African American teacher, there were some parents who did not want me to teach their children,” she said.

Basinski was not her first principal, she said, so perhaps before his time such requests were arranged. 

“There was a parent who said to O.D., I don’t want my son to be taught by an African American teacher, and O.D. said, I’m not changing it,” she said. “It worked out fine, and I will always remember him for that.”

Acknowledging Maull-Martin’s sentiments, Parker Selby said some people moving into the Cape Region are bringing something she didn’t experience growing up. Blacks and whites in the three towns got along, she said; there were differences and challenges, but not the hate-mongering that is often seen today.

“We did not grow and become who we are by hating or not liking this one or that one, or separating,” she said.

Parker Selby said her father was a teacher, so she didn’t want to be one; instead, she initially wanted to work with children as a social worker. Before being hired as a teacher at Rehoboth Elementary, she worked as a playground aide, substitute teacher and teacher’s aide.

“I worked my way from the outhouse to the white house,” she said with a chuckle. “Because of the misunderstandings of my race, I knew I had to go and do 120% more.”

That said, Parker Selby earned certifications in everything the State of Delaware offered to make sure she would be highly qualified in her role. Selby said she instilled in her students, Black and white, they were important.

“We taught children,” she said. “They never forgot who we are, and never worried what color we were. Our classrooms showed that the children were important to us, not their race.”

Lewes, Milton and Rehoboth schools fought each other as separate districts before the three merged to form Cape Henlopen School District, she said.

“We are the beginnings of Cape Henlopen,” Selby said. “We were there when it all started, and that district became a district that everyone admired.”