Crescent City Girls: The Lives of Young Black Women in Segregated New Orleans by LaKisha Michelle Simmons (review)

In a time when academic activists like Kimbele Crenshaw are challenging the invisibility of girls of color in conversations about police brutality and educational disparities through the #SayHerName campaign, new work on the history of black girlhood demonstrates creative ways of disrupting these inaccurate, dominant narratives. In LaKisha Simmons’s recent book, Crescent City Girls: The Lives of Young Black Women in Segregated New Orleans, 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. From the streets of the Treme neighborhood to the House of the Good Shepherd, “an institution for wayward girls,” Simmons focuses on the places that black girls found themselves grappling with their imaginings of themselves and black womanhood. Simmons promises to “unveil the gendered violence of segregation” in early twentieth-century New Orleans, and in doing so she reveals the richness of girls’ experiences. Yet, this book does much more than unveil; Simmons theorizes the personal survival strategies of black girls in the Jim Crow South, where they navigated a treacherous—and often violent—terrain rife with segregation, rigid codes of conduct, and sexual violation. Simmons’s work is, of course, informed by the influential theoretical framing of African American women’s history as engaging black women’s physical, emotional, and rhetorical resistance strategies, as well as the demands of the history of childhood and youth to understand how age is a not a simple matter of years lived. What distinguishes Crescent City Girls from recent explorations of black girlhood is that Simmons uses cultural geography to consider how “the physical placement of buildings revealed black youth’s relationship to power in the city” (11).

Simmons joins geography with the analysis of “sexuality and affect” to overcome the archival dilemmas studying children—especially black children— engenders (11). By thinking about New Orleans’s neighborhoods and institutions from the vantage point of a girl walking to her home, school, or a local shop, Simmons privileges a micro-level view of how the color line operated. In the tradition of scholars of the South like Susan Cahn and Jennifer Ritterhouse, Simmons pays careful attention to how children positioned themselves in relationship to segregation. When girls traveled they noticed the “whites only” and “colored only” signs and the restricted parks and amusements, and they bristled when black and white men harassed and propositioned them. The questions that sexuality and affect raise in this study are deeply tied; Simmons links sexuality to girls’ search for “intimacy and pleasure,” and she employs affect in the service of “uncovering the trauma of racial violence” (18). These three frames are weaved through six chapters organized across the city, beginning with a helpful opening chapter that takes the reader on a tour of what Simmons calls the “mental mapping” of New Orleans (25). The maps in the book are made from the substance of social history—news accounts, school records, and deeply poignant oral histories—as well as critical assessments of classic sociological texts on black childhood. Of all the heartbreaking accounts of girls confined by social, familial, economic, and racialized bounds in Crescent City Girls, Simmons’s chapter “Defending Her Honor” is particularly relevant in its discussion of black girls and policing. The chapter opens with the 1930 case of black teenager Hattie McCray, who was shot and killed by her rapist, white patrolman Matt Piacum.

Uncharacteristically for the time and the region, Piacum was found guilty and given the death penalty by an all-white jury; Simmons argues that this moment allowed for a rupture in the silences that shrouded sexual violence in New Orleans. Simmons writes that a high school student felt moved to action after learning about the case. The girl wrote to W. E. B. DuBois, then at the NAACP, about McCray’s rape: “Far...