A Girl Stands at the Door

Within the reading of A Girl Stands at the Door, Rachel Delvin introduces many females that had an important part of desegregating schools. A lot of these women are not talked about, but without them, the movement for desegregated schools would have taken much longer than it already did. An example of a strong, persistent women who was the first African American to apply to an all-white graduate school in the United States after World War II is Ada Lois Sipuel. I think something that stood out about Sipuel was that she was fully determined. In class, we discussed how fear and competition were key reasons why discrimination took place. People who did not want to see change feared Sipuel due to the fact that “she was engaging, and at times even exuberant, with press, she had both tough words and a ready smile for reporters, and she communicated in such a way as to make her presence on the University of Oklahoma campus appear not only possible, but natural”. During our in class debate, we discussed the importance of being a part of the “Talented Tenth”. A recurring part of A Girl Stands at the Door and The Talented Tenth was the need of policy change. As stated at the end of chapter 3, “it was these young women and girls- alongside activist mothers and fathers- whose willing participation in the early desegregation lawsuits paved the way for those cases that would, several years later, make their way to the Supreme Court” (pg. 105). Parents such as Martha Sipuel, who was an active member of the NAACP, were big influences on their children. The sense of community was important to know right from wrong. Specifically for Ada Sipuel, she did not believe that opening a Negro Law School would solve anything; a Negro Law School still was segregated. Overall, these young women were constantly discriminated against, which make them even stronger for standing up against society.

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