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NY Times Sunday Book Review, August 5, 2018
Who Desegregated America’s Schools? Black Women
By LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant
A GIRL STANDS AT THE DOOR
The Generation of Young Women Who Desegregated America’s Schools
By Rachel Devlin
342 pp. Basic Books. $32.
April 13, 1947, holds little significance in the American historical
memory, and yet that day was one in a long series that led to the legal
desegregation of American schools. On that morning, Marguerite Daisy
Carr, a 14-year-old black girl from Washington, D.C., attempted to
enroll at Eliot Junior High School, the all-white middle school closest
to her home. Carr’s efforts to integrate the school, which were
supported by her family and local black community, preceded the landmark
Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education by seven years.
Recognizing the young black girls and women who were at the forefront of
the civil rights movement is the central achievement of Rachel Devlin’s
meticulously researched history, “A Girl Stands at the Door.” Devlin’s
interest in the role such women played in the struggle for desegregation
leads her briefly back to 1850, to Sarah Roberts, a 5-year-old
African-American who lived closer to several white schools than to the
one designated for black students, and who became a plaintiff in the
country’s first school desegregation case: Roberts v. City of Boston.
The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled in favor of Boston, which
resisted the desegregation effort on the grounds that adequate
provisions had been made for black students in the form of separate
schools. Roberts’s case was later cited to support the “separate but
equal” ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, but it also shed public light on
the underfunding and inadequate conditions prevalent in black schools —
conditions that endured, virtually unchanged, for another 120 years.
Devlin’s account is necessarily situated largely in the 20th century and
includes the stories of Ruby Bridges and Melba Pattillo Beals (one of
the “Little Rock Nine”), among many others; she reveals the creative
tactics these young people used — sometimes successfully, sometimes not
— to integrate public schools, a battle in which black girls outnumbered
black boys as plaintiffs two to one.
Devlin, a historian at Rutgers, cites Carr’s case as one of the first of
nearly a dozen that went to court before the N.A.A.C.P. resolved to
tackle the contentious matter of school desegregation. The successful
class-action suit the group eventually filed featured 13 mothers and 1
father, acting on behalf of their children, and the question Devlin
stresses is Why so many girls? Her answer, while somewhat
unsatisfactory, is also revelatory: Like the young black American men
who were inspired to serve in World War II, young black women
experienced their own “call to arms” — an ethical obligation to
participate in the struggle for integration. They maintained this sense
of mission even when their families, aware of the verbal and physical
abuse to which they were frequently subjected, encouraged them to give
up their educational pursuits.
As Devlin wrestles with the question “Why girls?,” she offers readers a
pill that is difficult to swallow. She detects “a strong, though
unstated cultural assumption that the war to end school desegregation
was a girls’ war, a battle for which young women and girls were
especially suited.” Yet black girls were not obliged to serve because
desegregation was considered feminine work. Rather, black girls’
familiarity with domestic servitude and the most intimate forms of
racism gave them an uncanny, collective ability to cope with white
violence; many endured harassment and worse with extraordinary deference
and self-control.
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.
Sixty-four years after Brown v. Board, the promise of that decision, and
of integration more generally, remains unfulfilled. “A Girl Stands at
the Door” tells an important story about young black women who ushered
in a movement. Just as black women “set the world on fire” — to quote
the historian Keisha N. Blain — in global freedom struggles, young black
girls took it upon themselves to stand up when others would not.
A Rough Rehearsal, a Suicide and a Broadway Show in Turmoil
LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant is an associate professor of Africana
studies at Williams College.
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