Crescent City Girls Summary

Lakisha Michelle Simmons’s Crescent City Girls: The Lives of Young Black Women in Segregated New Orleans focuses on African American women in New Orleans, Louisiana during the Jim Crow era; from 1930 to 1954. She argues the adaptation and expectations of middle class black girls, their respectability and purity, and many violent encounters, which entailed sexual harassment, interracial sexual invasion, and realities of Jim Crow terrorism. Simmons introduces her book about black girls ages nine to twenty, in New Orleans while Jim Crow is legal and active by telling a story about African American male, Willie McGee, who was accused of raping a white woman allegedly in Laurel, and six years later put to death by the electric chair in Mississippi

This is the normality of life. In Chapter 1: Suppose They Don’t Want Us Here, Simmons contends this of black girls’ survival during this era which depended upon the development of mental maps of their environments, and the ways in which they needed to maneuver in certain neighborhoods while differentiating what was associated with them and what was not. Anyone born into this world enters with no choice of habitat or footing in which they will live their lives, Simmons demonstrates this through exploring black girls’ public and private realities described as the “double bind” of being black and female. “During Jim Crow, mental maps provided “imaginative order” to black girls’ worlds and helped them form a growing “awareness of racialized space” (p.55). These mental maps helped declare the racial and gender distinction in New Orleans as well as force young black girls to really comprehend their surroundings and themselves within this rigid space. The girls’ sense of individuality, role, and capability was constantly changing in reflection of their substantial position in the city at a given time. “Before I was ten I knew what it was to stay off the sidewalk to let a white man pass; otherwise he might knock me off” (p.57) Black girls had to foster resilience and elasticity in their role in order to not be harassed or reach conflict. This was expected of black girls to adjust their behavior as planned based on the interactions and people they cross paths with. “She learned where her body belonged in relationship to whites, whether they were men or boys” (p.58) This chapter shows how physical space has constructed women/girls mental maps and analyzes the perspective of space in which they were functioning in. Black women would suffer insults from both white and black men which lead to further arrangements of their