Hollywood's portrayals of African American girls’ sacrifices to the civil rights movement received rare attention in the 1990s with Spike Lee's haunting documentary 4 Little Girls. Lee's 1997 film narrated the 1963 Ku Klux Klan bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley. Two films that followed featured unconventional Disney heroines: Ruby Bridges (1998) portrayed the six-year-old who desegregated the New Orleans Parish Schools, and Selma, Lord, Selma (1999) depicted eleven-year-old budding activist Sheyann Webb. Since then, African American girls’ civil rights stories have resumed obscurity, perhaps with the exception of an eerie, impressionistic early scene in Ava Duvernay's Selma (2014) that portrayed four girls engaged in Sunday morning banter as they walked down a church stairway minutes before a bomb exploded and shattered their innocent bodies. Hollywood's omission of African American girls’ civil rights stories is endemic to American society. Political historian Jeanne Theoharis describes this blotting out of females from civil rights history as an egregious political misuse of this history. In A Girl Stands at the Door: The Generation of Young Women Who Desegregated America's Schools, author Rachel Devlin resoundingly disrupts this history in her painstaking account of America's school desegregation “firsts.”
Drawing primarily on retrospective interviews of aging school desegregation pioneers hailing from a sweeping terrain, Devlin argues persuasively that a grassroots movement heralding girls and women as apt ambassadors for social change was well underway before the NAACP and its Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) counterpart litigated Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Devlin meticulously fills in critical historical gaps in Brown’s canon, detailing the behind-the-scenes deliberations, internal motivations, and wide-ranging emotions of the young plaintiffs, their parents, and NAACP and LDF officials and attorneys. The author unapologetically lifts the veil on the inner workings of the NAACP, exposing conflicts among local, state, and national NAACP branches, sometimes with antiheroic portrayals of legal pantheons Thurgood Marshall and Charles Hamilton Houston.
The book includes an introduction, seven chapters, and an epilogue addressing the age-old question, was Brown worth it? The first three chapters chronicle the experiences of 1940s school desegregation pioneers in the Midwest and Northeast who laid the groundwork for Brown through filing higher education and precursory grade school desegregation cases. Using the embarrassing legal defection of a familiar African American male plaintiff, Lloyd Gaines (Gaines v. Canada, 1938), from the University of Missouri law school desegregation case as a backdrop, chapter 1 features twenty-eight-year-old Lucile Bluford's parallel battle to desegregate Missouri's journalism school. Devlin portrays Bluford as saving the day for the NAACP after Gaines vanished prior to his case's adjudication. Chapter 2 highlights “desegregation champion” Ada Lois Sipuel, the first African American person to apply to an all-white graduate school (University of Oklahoma College of Law) in the United States after World War II. Chapter 3 addresses the attempts of several girls to desegregate grade schools in Washington, DC—Marguerite Daisy Carr, sisters Judine and Barbara Jean Arnold, and an atypical white female high school plaintiff, Karla Galarza—at the reluctance of Thurgood Marshall, who could not afford to lose desegregation cases, and Charles Hamilton Houston, who sought to build more grassroots momentum before tackling segregation head-on. Chapter 4 departs from focusing on African American female protagonists to examine the neglected contributions of Jewish firebrand Esther Brown of South Park, Kansas. A self-described “housewife with a conscience,” and daughter of a Communist labor movement Russian emigrant, she is presented as an unassuming linchpin to Brown. Devlin uses Esther Brown's story to segue to the second half of the book's chronicling of Brown’s materialization. These final three chapters spotlight grade school desegregation cases brought by plaintiffs in lesser-known but pivotal rural and urban communities in Kansas, Delaware, South Carolina, Virginia, Louisiana, Georgia, and even Brooklyn, New York.
The book's strong suit is its masterful weaving of multiple personal accounts, supported by primary and secondary sources, that humanize the civil rights struggle through school desegregation pioneers’ reflections on their intimate emotions, thoughts, and motivations before, during, and after Brown. It also includes rare photographs of some of the book's key figures (chapter 5). Although methodological concerns about modified and unreliable memories are certain to arise, it is essential to hear the voices of pioneers who sacrificed so much for the civil rights struggle. Devlin poignantly reveals their range of conflicting emotions—pride and humility, bravery and fear, certainty and doubt, solidarity and isolation. She also situates these pioneers squarely within the quintessential African American cultural institutions of family, church, and community. Although the pioneers spoke candidly about grappling with the dissonance between pursuing equalization of all-black schools versus desegregation of all-white schools, they generally concluded that they could not have persevered without the support of African Americans.
The book has some notable blind spots, for example, a woeful minimization of the danger African American males confronted during Jim Crow. Besides giving a nod to historians’ assumptions about white parents’ fears of black boys as an insufficient explanation for why boys were not plaintiffs as frequently as girls, Devlin does not satisfactorily address the justifiable visceral fears motivating African American parents’ protecting their sons from white aggression and violence. Chapter 6 offers slightly more nuance about why African American boys may have opted out of desegregation, including implicit admonitions from their parents about attending schools where “teachers could relate to you as a human being” (p. 196), sons being granted more autonomy to make decisions than daughters, and military or residential relocation as viable exit options. However, a more rigorous historical treatment of African American males as longstanding victims of white violence is desperately warranted. Furthermore, the introduction should better foreground the book's pervasive themes of equalization versus desegregation, particularly ongoing arguments about what was gained and lost in all-black schools (addressed more insightfully in the epilogue); the politics of respectability (alluded to cursorily but never explicitly mentioned); and the historical connotations of using girl to describe women well past childhood and adolescence, especially African American women (commonly denigrated as “gal” in the US South). Finally, while the emphasis on Esther Brown offers important insights about Brown’s materialization, more explicit mention of her story's centrality at the outset seems warranted given the book's express emphasis on young African American women.
Overall, A Girl Stands at the Door is a welcome counterpoint to the traditional historiography of Brown. Devlin disrupts political misuses of civil rights history where men overshadow women, adults overshadow young people, and the US South overshadows all other regions of the country. Devlin reminds her audience that segregation was (and still is) deep-seated and ubiquitous, separating black and white children as far north as Brooklyn, New York, as far west as Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, as far east as Washington, DC, and as far south as Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She humanizes the civil rights struggle by validating the perspectives of African American girls and women. The book intimates a cautionary tale about how not to recommit the sins of omission in writing new histories of rising social movements—#MeToo, Black Lives Matter—inspired and led by young African American women.
