Warriors on the front lines for justice and equality
2nd July 2018 · 0 Comments
By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer
Several years ago, while she was an instructor at Tulane University, Rachel Devlin interviewed two African-American women who, when they were girls, were leaders in the fight to integrate the schools of New Orleans and the state of Louisiana.
The women Devlin profiled — Leona Tate and Tessie Prevost Williams — joined with Gail Etienne and enrolled at McDonogh 19 school in 1960 to integrate New Orleans schools after years of legal battles.
That integration experience at McDonogh was tough enough, but when the trio—who by then had become known as the McDonogh Three—advanced to Semmes Middle School, they endured even more spite and violence, all of which was encouraged by the faculty and staff.
As Devlin interviewed Tate and Prevost Williams—roughly a half-century after they braved hate and bigotry to test and ultimately shatter the sham legality of Jim Crow — Devlin was floored by the trailblazers’ courage and determination.
“They were hit, they were punched, they were kicked, they were spit on,” Devlin said in an interview last week. “It was a war, but they made it.”
The discussions with the now-grown women served as one of the main inspirations behind Devlin’s new book, A Girl Stands at the Door: The Generation of Young Women who Desegregated America’s Schools.
The book examines how that, beginning with the Brown v. Board of Education — which was filed in 1951 and decided in 1954 – and running through the next three decades-plus, the majority of the plaintiffs behind the landmark desegregation lawsuits and court decisions were girls and young women.
All over the nation — not just in the South and Midwest — civil rights attorneys such as Thurgood Marshall and other NAACP legal counsels drafted dozens of girls and young women to take on a Herculean task. Quite often, the girls and their parents weren’t too keen on taking on the enormous monolith known as Jim Crow.
“Somebody had to go [to court],” Devlin said, “but it wasn’t a job many people were raising their hands to do. They knew it would be hellish. They knew it was going to be a huge sacrifice.”
But why were girls and young women chosen, more often than not, instead of boys to file desegregation lawsuits? Devlin said it was because girls tended to have the character and personality traits needed to withstand the withering hatred and threat of violence.
“They were good at it because they had certain skills,” said Devlin, who is now an associate professor of history at Rutgers University after teaching at Tulane for 13 years. “They were poised, they were patient, and they were polite. But they were also self-possessed and diplomatic, with a steely determination.”
Devlin, whose research has focused on the history of childhood and in particular the way black girls are represented in pop culture, started digging into the subject of civil rights lawsuits by examining 20 years of back issues of Ebony magazine and the publication’s coverage of such legal actions, from preschoolers to college students.
Devlin then went to the Library of Congress and poured through the archived papers of the NAACP—including newsletters, correspondence, articles and documents—an action that revealed that not only were girls frequently chosen to lead desegregation lawsuits, but also that the NAACP and civil rights attorneys hadn’t planned on issuing legal challenges to Jim Crow as early as they did.
Devlin said that while the NAACP didn’t even have a complete legal strategy assembled in the years immediately after World War II, the group’s attorneys realized — with a fair amount of concern and uncertainty — that the timing and circumstances meant they were faced with a “now or never” scenario.
That forced them to try to recruit girls and young women who had recently suffered a setback in their educational progress because of segregation—and, ready or not, those girls and their families were thrust into the white-hot spotlight of history.
Devlin’s new book includes interviews with 30 of the women who led the fight for justice, and the author relates the courtroom battles and schoolhouse confrontations that occurred across the county — in Topeka, in Little Rock, in Washington D.C., and significantly in Baton Rouge, where in the early 1960s, 24 teenagers integrated Baton Rouge High School. Of those two dozen, 18 were young women.
From New Orleans to Baton Rouge and beyond, Devlin said, brave girls who were often reluctantly drafted for an important movement became unsung heroes in the greatest legal battle of the 20th century. With her new book, Devlin said that hopefully those young women will be unsung no more.
“Everyone needs heroines to look up to,” Devlin said. “We needed someone to lead the way.”
This article originally published in the July 2, 2018 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
