A Girl Stands at the Door

A Girl Stands at the Door

By Rachel Devlin
Unabridged
$16.25 $24.99
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“Revelatory…Devlin reminds us that the task of publicly and constitutionally challenging racial discrimination in education was laid on the bodies of black girls. This is a reality with which America has yet to reckon.”

New York Times Book Review

Winner of Lillian Smith Book Award, 2019

Winner of Darlene Clark Hine, 2019

Winner of Kansas Notable Book, 2019

Winner of Lillian Smith Book Award, 2019

Winner of Darlene Clark Hine, 2019

A new history of school desegregation in America, revealing how girls and women led the fight for interracial education

The struggle to desegregate America's schools was a grassroots movement, and young women were its vanguard. In the late 1940s, parents began to file desegregation lawsuits with their daughters, forcing Thurgood Marshall and other civil rights lawyers to take up the issue and bring it to the Supreme Court. After the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, girls far outnumbered boys in volunteering to desegregate formerly all-white schools.

In A Girl Stands at the Door, historian Rachel Devlin tells the remarkable stories of these desegregation pioneers. She also explains why black girls were seen, and saw themselves, as responsible for the difficult work of reaching across the color line in public schools. Highlighting the extraordinary bravery of young black women, this bold revisionist account illuminates today's ongoing struggles for equality.