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Emily B.: Black History Month 2021: Black Women in Science (0 comment)
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A Girl Stands at the Door: The Generation of Young Women Who Desegregated America's Schools

by Rachel Devlin
A Girl Stands at the Door: The Generation of Young Women Who Desegregated America's Schools

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ISBN13: 9781541697331
ISBN10: 1541697332



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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.

Review

"Before reading A Girl Stands at the Door I would have imagined that nothing new could be said about the struggle to desegregate schools — and I would have been wrong. Rachel Devlin has uncovered a neglected history of how parents and, importantly, children braved rejection, hostility, even assault to insist on their right to a decent education. Possibly most surprising, these courageous students were mostly girls, a finding that challenges some assumptions about risk-taking behavior. Not least, the book is a great read." Linda Gordon, author of The Second Coming of the KKK

Review

"The decade of work Devlin put into recovering this underappreciated aspect of civil-rights history is fully on display." Booklist

Review

"In this accomplished history of the school desegregation fight from the late 1940s through the mid-1960s, Devlin...offers a cogent overview of the legal strategies employed and delves into the stories of the African-American girls (and their families) who defied the ignominious public school systems of the Jim Crow South....Devlin's use of diverse secondary and primary sources, including her own interviews with some of the surviving women, bring fresh perspectives. This informative account of change-making is well worth reading." Publishers Weekly

Review

"[A] groundbreaking new work of recovered history... Devlin, a Rutgers University historian, spent ten years tracking down and interviewing dozens of women who endured harassment and abuse to desegregate schools, whether or not their lawsuits prevailed...Devlin's chronicle...promises to reignite public conversation and debate about racial disparities in public education." Smithsonian

About the Author

Rachel Devlin is an associate professor of history at Rutgers University. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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Trip McCrossin , June 18, 2018 (view all comments by Trip McCrossin)
This is an extraordinary book. I recently finished it, and my first impulse was to return to the beginning, and, having arrived again at the end of the epilogue, my impulse is to return to the beginning yet again. We should all read this book -- ALL of us -- or listen to it, or both at once, as the case may be. To do so is to enjoy a fundamentally better understanding of a crucial seam in the social and political fabric of the United States, and of those who wove it. Brown v. Board of Education is "a defining decision in US history," Devlin writes, "but it is time to incorporate the stories of girls and young women who were integral to the school desegregation process" that it reflects, which "would not have happened without their commitment and skills." Their collective story, she continues, and not just the famed decision that resulted, is "in the twenty-first century, a vital measure of American Democracy" -- of what young girls and women, young people generally, can accomplish, with the support of grown-ups around them and an unwavering moral compass. To read this book is to have one’s faith restored in the arc of history, and in those who will bend it toward justice, even in the face of extreme adversity, and who are, as it turns out, just exactly right in front of us. And "not least" among its accomplishments, no less than Linda Gordon testifies, "the book is a great read" -- a GREAT read! To strive for intellectually rigorous writing is surely to risk writing that is overly "academic." Not so here, in the least. It is a joy to read, a "page turner" to be sure, with many, many "radio moments" -- in which, arriving here or here, we find ourselves still standing on a train station platform, or sitting in a parked car, anxious to finish reading or listening to this or that bit of the story. "On the morning of April 13, 1947," the story begins, "fourteen-year-old Marguerite Daisy Carry went with her father to Eliot Junior High School, the white middle school closest to her home in Washington, DC, and attempted to enroll." The process of telling it begins in earnest, Devlin recounts in the "Acknowledgements," when she first reached out to speak with her, in 2008, now Marguerite Carr Stokes. "What took you [historians] so long?," she mused. Now that the wait is over, finally, and we have the full story, finally, we ALL should wait not a moment longer before enjoying and learning from it.

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Product Details

ISBN:
9781541697331
Binding:
Hardcover
Publication date:
05/15/2018
Publisher:
Basic Books
Language:
English
Pages:
384
Height:
1.40IN
Width:
6.30IN
LCCN:
2017055188
Illustration:
Yes
Author:
Rachel Devlin

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