Founded in 1867 and named for Freedmen's Bureau commissioner and Howard University founder Oliver Otis Howard, Howard High School was Delaware's only public high school for Black students statewide, forcing many students onto hour-long bus rides past nearer white schools. That inequality made Howard central to Belton v. Gebhart, one of the five cases combined into the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. In 1960, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his only public address in Delaware in the school's auditorium. Howard was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2005 and became an affiliated area of Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park in 2022.