Although we touched briefly upon the notion of fragmentation within the black community with regards to the desegregation movement in class, chapter five of A Girl Stands at the Door more thoroughly explores and articulates this tension. African Americans were not unified in their support for the desegregation of schools, and the erasure of this nuance is an ambivalence to the true history of the civil rights movement. Devlin points out that there were “numerous parents who, while they were willing to protest unequal schools, simply wanted a better education for their children” instead of a “long, hard campaign against a long-standing Supreme Court precedent.” These parents acknowledged that the structure of education was both contradictory and discriminatory, but were hesitant to risk the safety and future of their own children for the sake of a cause that continued to be met with hard opposition and vehement backlash. Parents and teachers who originally spoke out against segregated schooling often lost their jobs in doing so; they were “terrified into silence,” eventually resisting “outright any suggestion of school desegregation” out of fear that they would be personally persecuted. Caldwell among others like him took yet another stance in the African American community in regards to desegregation. He outrightly rejected the idea of integration, cracking down on black isolation in schoolings, relocating African American students to separate lunch tables and classrooms. Whether or not he was selling out, the fact that a black man took on this role made the situation all the more excruciating for those affected by his authority, and further divided and complicated the role and effort of African Americans in the desegregation movement.

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