Crescent City Girls: The Lives of Young Black Women in Segregated New Orleans

by LaKisha Michelle Simmons

Overview

What was it like to grow up black and female in the segregated South? To answer this question, LaKisha Simmons blends social history and cultural studies, recreating children’s streets and neighborhoods within Jim Crow New Orleans and offering a rare look into black girls’ personal lives. Simmons argues that these children faced the difficult task of adhering to middle-class expectations of purity and respectability even as they encountered the daily realities of Jim Crow violence, which included interracial sexual aggression, street harassment, and presumptions of black girls' impurity.

Simmons makes use of oral histories, the black and white press, social workers' reports, police reports, girls' fiction writing, and photography to tell the stories of individual girls: some from poor, working-class families; some from middle-class, “respectable” families; and some caught in the Jim Crow judicial system. These voices come together to create a group biography of ordinary girls living in an extraordinary time, girls who did not intend to make history but whose stories transform our understanding of both segregation and childhood.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781469622804
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	07/20/2015
Series:	Gender and American Culture
Pages:	282
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

LaKisha Michelle Simmons is assistant professor of history and women’s studies at the University of Michigan.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Crescent City Girls is a provocative, insightful, and important perspective on the complexities of black female childhood in the Jim Crow South. Simmons not only fills an important gap in the scholarship regarding how we might understand the interiority of black girls' lives; her work also raises new questions and insights about the different ways that black communities navigated the South’s racialized and gendered violence.”—Cheryl D. Hicks, author of Talk with You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1930–1935

“This book is like a quilt as it pieces together many fragments to tell a rich and fascinating story. I see it as part of a new scholarship that looks at historical questions from a different angle, making a significant contribution.”—Elizabeth Higginbotham, University of Delaware

Cheryl D. Hicks

Crescent City Girls is a provocative, insightful, and important perspective on the complexities of black female childhood in the Jim Crow South. Simmons not only fills an important gap in the scholarship regarding how we might understand the interiority of black girls' lives; her work also raises new questions and insights about the different ways that black communities navigated the South's racialized and gendered violence.

Editorial Reviews

“Breaks meaningful new ground and serves as a model for future studies in African American and gender history.”—Journal of American History

“Highly recommended, as it intelligently includes voices entirely lost in most academic literature and . . . will be vital to those studying gender, youth, and urban histories.”—American Historical Review

“Gives its readers the opportunity to explore New Orleans as black girls may have experienced it. . . . Demonstrate[s] the ways that consideration of black girls’ experience provides richer and more nuanced historical narratives. . . . Provide[s] important context and foundation for the conceptions of black girlhood that we have inherited.”—Public Books

“An excellent contribution to the study of children’s geographies. The author explores the racial, sexual, violent, affective, classed, gendered and imagined geographies of New Orleans from the vantage point of black girls. As such it will be of interest not only to historians, but also to scholars interested in past and present spatializations of sexual and racial violence.”—“Childrens Geographies”

“Readers are introduced to the interior lives of black girls in a city shaped by complex color lines, racial identities, and demands on what girlhood was supposed to mean.”—Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth

“A significant new contribution to southern history, African American history, and gender studies that belongs in every academic library and should receive serious consideration by public libraries.”—CHOICE

“Addresses many of the themes scholars and others consider when they think of New Orleans. Entertainment districts, Mardi Gras balls and parades, the power of Catholicism, the importance of schools, the complexity of definitions of race and the power of racial segregation are all crucial to Crescent City Girls.”—Reading the South

“Crescent City Girls is a provocative, insightful, and important perspective on the complexities of black female childhood in the Jim Crow South. Simmons not only fills an important gap in the scholarship regarding how we might understand the interiority of black girls' lives; her work also raises new questions and insights about the different ways that black communities navigated the South’s racialized and gendered violence.”—Cheryl D. Hicks, author of Talk with You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1930–1935

“This book is like a quilt as it pieces together many fragments to tell a rich and fascinating story. I see it as part of a new scholarship that looks at historical questions from a different angle, making a significant contribution.”—Elizabeth Higginbotham, University of Delaware

From the Publisher