Rachel Devlin's A Girl Stands at the Door: The Generation of Young Women Who Desegregated America's Schools provides an excellent study, centring on the activism of women and girls working across the US South at the grassroots level, highlighting their role as plaintiffs and community leaders in the effort to desegregate America's schools. Devlin makes a compelling case for the long and gendered nature of school desegregation, proposing that it was the commitment of young women and girls (and their parents) that provided the impetus for the historic Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, which deemed the doctrine of “separate but equal” unconstitutional in the field of public education. Utilizing a rich combination of personally conducted interviews, alongside archival materials and secondary reading, Devlin provides a lens that forces historians to reevaluate the history of school desegregation in the United States.

Scholarship on the civil rights movement's use of litigation in the field of education has traditionally centred on the campaign of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Brown decision. More recently, the turn to a grassroots analysis and the wide acceptance of Dowd Hall's “long civil rights movement” have enabled historians to trace the history of school desegregation before Brown. Gary Lavergne's Before Brown (2010) and Ophelia De Laine Gona's Dawn of Desegregation (2011) analysed individual cases to demonstrate that local southern communities’ early efforts provided the impetus for the NAACP's national campaign. Thus Devlin makes a vital contribution in articulating a previously understudied dimension of the struggle for school desegregation and expanding black women's educational activism from the classroom to the courtroom.

The book's case-study framework enables an exploration of the grassroots efforts of young women that initiated the fight for school desegregation in the 1940s. Using the examples of Lucile Bluford and Ada Lois Sipuel, Devlin analyses the gendered strategies and tactics employed by female activists and the obstacles they faced. Moreover, Devlin's study breaks ground by uncovering the undeniable pressure placed on the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund by young girls and their parents. She successfully posits that in filing grade-school desegregation lawsuits, local communities placed great pressure on the NAACP, leading them to abandon their efforts for equalization. In placing over a dozen local cases, such as those of Marguerite Carr and Ruby Bridges, at the centre of the fight to end school segregation, while also highlighting the roles of local women, such as Esther Brown and Lucinda Todd, Devlin reveals the grassroots and gendered nature of early school segregation battles. Thus Devlin's evidence forces us to reevaluate the position of the NAACP as leaders in the fight for school desegregation.

As Devlin highlights the centrality of women and young girls to school desegregation efforts in the 1940s and 1950s, she wrestles with the question of why black girls outnumbered boys as plaintiffs two to one in the battle to integrate public schools. Devlin suggests that young women and girls were often motivated by personal experience and a sense of moral obligation to their communities, stating that they considered it “their call to arms, a mission they felt to be their own” (xv). Moreover, Devlin argues that the particularity of school desegregation required not only physical courage but also social finesse and a personal dedication that could withstand sustained interaction with white students, principals and superintendents who often actively opposed their presence. She maintains that through experiences of domestic work, black girls were in possession of tools that prepared them for the psychological complexity and social nuance required of them, that they were uniquely trained in how to “act” in sustained interactions with whites (xxv).

However, this was not a lesson reserved for young black girls, with black boys also being taught preservationist behaviours, such as crossing the street for white women and how to address whites. Moreover, the case studies employed from the rich interviews with girls involved lack details of experiences of domestic work, or having observed their mothers working in white homes as serving as a catalyst for their desegregation efforts. Therefore this argument serves as a limitation of Devlin's study, with more work needed to provide a fully supported explanation as to why girls in particular felt an obligation to desegregate schools.

Nevertheless, A Girl Stands at the Door successfully brings previously unrecognized female leadership to the forefront and sheds new light on an important battle of the civil rights movement. Moreover, it raises important questions for future research on the role of women and girls in the fight against segregation and highlights the continued necessity for gendered analyses of the wider civil rights movement.