A Girl Stands at the Door by Rachel Devlin

Author:Rachel Devlin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2018-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

Between 1948 and 1950, while Thurgood Marshall was pouring his energies into Briggs, grade school activists lit up the phones of lawyers in Washington, DC, Virginia, Kansas, and Delaware. In Washington, the Consolidated Parent Group, established in 1948, had continued to bring lawsuit after lawsuit, covering every grade from kindergarten to high school. Charles Houston was acting as counsel for the organization in 1948 and 1949. And while Houston was more cautious than Gardner Bishop—he asked that buildings set aside for whites be transferred to black students and for damages, as he had been doing since 1938 in Bluford v. Canada—the rhetoric of the CPG continued to make it clear that they wanted to take on segregation head-on. In 1949, Houston filed Haley v. Corning on behalf of Gloria Odessa Haley, Barbara Ann Edmonds, Bessie Boyd, Adolph Graves, and other Cardozo High School students, demanding access to buildings and equipment reserved for white students. But while Houston’s strategy had not changed much, his language had. “Defendants,” he said, “arbitrarily, willfully and maliciously refused to assign these surplus buildings, equipment, facilities and teaching appointments… to the use of Cardozo High School students because of their own race prejudice.” He had come some distance since declaiming, “A girl stands at the door.”38

By 1950, Houston’s health was deteriorating fast and it was necessary for Bishop to find another civil rights lawyer. Houston recommended James Nabrit, a professor of law at Howard Law School who had previously been consulted by the Browne PTA to help with the Carr case. In 1950, acting as counsel to Bishop’s CPG, Nabrit filed Cogdell v. Sharpe on behalf of Valerie Cogdell, two other girls, and one boy. The first paragraph of the complaint reads, “This is a suit for… a permanent injunction to restrain the enforcement, operation and execution of certain Acts of Congress which require the segregation of white and colored children in the public schools of the District of Columbia, on the ground that such Acts are repugnant to the Constitution of the United States.” Nabrit was a different lawyer, with a very different approach—an approach more suited to a transformed legal and political landscape.39

In November 1950, Nabrit mysteriously removed Valerie Cogdell from the top of the list of plaintiffs and put Spottswood Bolling and his brother Wanamaker Bolling there instead, with three girls listed below in alphabetical order. The Bolling complaint is virtually identical to that filed on behalf of Cogdell. The change is highly unusual: there is no evidence in the files of the CPG or the NAACP that explains why the lead plaintiff changed. Cogdell’s parents may have gotten cold feet. Or, perhaps Valerie Cogdell and the other two girls would soon graduate from high school and Spottswood and Wanamaker Bolling were younger (Spottwood was fourteen in 1953) and therefore eligible to remain on the lawsuit for the years it would be in court. Another possibility, one can speculate, is that Marshall looked at the steady stream of lawsuits filed on behalf of girls and decided to intercede.

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