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

Rachel Devlin
Offered By:

Thorndike Press

Thorndike Press is a leading publisher of large-print books. The company publishes more than 1,100 new large print titles each year, with the vast majority focused on large-print editions of current bestsellers and genre fiction.
ISBN-10: 1432853198
ISBN-13: 9781432853198
DDC: 379.2
Shipping Weight: 1.65 lbs ( .75 kgs)
620 Pages | Hardcover
Published/Released July 2018
79532097315068895434604458455118375

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Nonfiction - Large Print Standing Order Plan

Option Number: [3]

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About

Overview

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.

Reviews

Customer Reviews

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

“A thoroughly researched, well-written work about civil rights, American history, and the momentum of political change that young people, particularly women, initiate.”
— Library Journal

“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