A Girl Stands at the Door

The struggle to desegregate America's schools was a grassroots movement, and young women were its vanguard. In the late 1940s, parents filed lawsuits with their daughters, forcing Thurgood Marshall and other civil rights lawyers to take the issue to the Supreme Count. After "Brown v. Board of Education," girls far outnumbered boys as volunteers to desegregate schools. Historian Rachel Devlin tells their remarkable stories, and explains why black girls were seen, and saw themselves, as responsible for the difficult work of crossing color lines.