In-Person History Forum:The Girls Who Desegregated America’s Schools

, Saturday, January 11, 2025 11:00AM

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Saturday, January 11, 2025 11:00AM

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A new history of school desegregation in America showing how Black girls led the fight for interracial education.

 

Historian Rachel Devlin shows how young Black girls were at the center of the grassroots movement to desegregate America’s schools and fight racial inequity in public education. In her award-winning book A Girl Stands at the Door, Devlin takes us beyond the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision and refocuses our attention on the remarkable stories of the young Black girls who led the fight. From filing desegregation lawsuits with their parents, to bravely enduring harassment and abuse while integrating formerly all-white schools, Black girls took on the difficult work of reaching across the color line in public schools. A revelatory history that recovers the underappreciated contributions of a generation of civil rights pioneers. 

Biography:

Rachel Devlin is professor of History at Rutgers University and a historian of the cultural politics of girlhood, sexuality, and race in the Postwar United States. She is the author of the award-winning book A Girl Stands at the Door: The Generation of Young Women who Desegregated America's Schools and Relative Intimacy: Fathers, Adolescent Daughters, and Postwar American Culture.