The Forgotten Girls Who Led the School-Desegregation Movement
Before the 9-year-old Linda Brown became the lead plaintiff in <em>Brown v. Board of Education</em>, a generation of black girls and teens led the charge against the “separate but equal” doctrine in public schools.
There’s an enduring myth that the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was “” in the fight to desegregate schools. Rachel Devlin, an associate professor of history at Rutgers University, is looking to upend that myth. , her new account of the black girls and teens who laid the groundwork for the historic ruling, draws from interviews and archival research to show that before Linda Brown, a 9-year-old, became the lead plaintiff in the Supreme Court case, a generation of black girls and young women from the Deep South to the Midwest fueled the grassroots crusade to strike down the “separate but equal” doctrine in America’s public schools and colleges.
