Previous black students had attended Frederick Douglass High School (formerly the "Colored High School" - second oldest in the nation - founded the same year as Poly - 1883) and the Paul Laurence Dunbar High School  Dehuff later served after his 37 years career at Poly, as the president and Dean of Faculty at the University of Baltimore on Mount Royal Avenue. Most Baltimore City public schools were not integrated until after the Supreme Court decision in "Brown v. Board of Education". BPI had an unusually advanced and difficult college engineering "A" preparatory curriculum which included calculus, analytical chemistry, electricity, mechanics and surveying; these subjects were not offered at the black high schools in the city before 1952. BPI was a whites-only school but supported by taxes on the general population. No black schools in the city (black students could not attend whites-only schools) offered such courses, nor did they have classrooms, labs, libraries or teachers comparable to those at BPI City College. Because of this a group of 16 African American students, with help and support from their parents, the Baltimore Urban League and the NAACP, applied for the engineering "A" course at the Poly; the applications were denied and the students sued. The subsequent trial began on June 16, 1952. The NAACP's intentions were to end segregation at the 50-year-old public high school. In the BPI case they argued that BPI's offerings of specialized engineering courses violated the "separate but equal" clause because these courses were not offered in high schools for black students. To avoid integration, an out-of-court proposal was made to the Baltimore City school board to start an equivalent "A" course at the "colored" (for non-whites) Frederick Douglass High School. The hearing on the "Douglass" plan lasted for hours, with Dehuff and others arguing that separate but equal "A" courses would satisfy constitutional requirements and NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall arguing that the plan was a gamble and cost the city should not take. By a vote of 5–3, the board decided that a separate "A" course would not provide the same educational opportunities for African American students, and that, starting that fall, African American students could attend Poly. The vote vindicated the NAACP national strategy of raising the cost of 'separate but equal' schools beyond what taxpayers were willing to pay. Thirteen African American students, Leonard Cephas, Carl Clark, William Clark, Milton Cornish, Clarence Daly, Victor Dates, Alvin Giles, Bucky Hawkins, Linwood Jones, Edward Savage, Everett Sherman, Robert Young, and Silas Young, finally entered the school that fall.