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

in 1951 alleged crime. The author next compared a story of a young teenage black girl who was left nameless, who was raped by a white truck driver in New Orleans in 1949. In this case the truck driver was found guilty not of rape, but of the impureness of a minor knowingly and sentenced him to one year in prison. Historians were not able to find much about the young black girl and her story, but there were others who have been affected by the brutality of Jim Crow. Simmons’ purpose was to instill the idea of how white supremacy is validated and supported through the dual system of justice which insists on taking the life of black man for alleged rape crimes. Also Simmons’ showed how black women and girls lack the protection needed to keep themselves from not getting assaulted by white men during the Jim Crow Era. This comparison and analysis sets the tone for the book and its direction which focuses on black women and girls and the expectation of them as far as gender, sexuality, and racial oppression. Overall, Simmons’ details the lives of these women and girls surrounded by white supremacy and the outcomes of how their stories affected themselves and others. Simmons’ arguments has covers racism in relation to violence and how to navigate the social presumptions of the female purity and respectability in New Orleans during legalized segregation.
Imagine being born into a place of activity, where circumstances and status was not an option but just an evolution of life that we abstractedly adapt to.

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

mental maps. These insults had the possibility of being sexual or racial but surely remains an attack on women’s femininity and virtue.