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Crescent City Girls: The Lives of Young Black Women in Segregated New Orleans
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 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.
277 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 10, 2015
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
January 28, 2023
Loved this book. It provided a lot of new information and reinforced some thoughts about some of the things I already knew/felt as a person who lived a few minutes outside of New Orleans. It lost me around the last 2 chapters - not sure if it was because of fatigue, that I just lost interest, or if it was just the content, either way, i felt like I was trudging through the last part of it. Overall, definitely worth the read.
February 13, 2019
***Note: as a reminder, this is a long-form book review/reflection paper for my course, CPLN 624: Readings on Race, Poverty, and Place.
INTRODUCTION
LaKisha Michelle Simmons’ Crescent City Girls: The Lives of Young Black Women in Segregated New Orleans offers a much-needed focus on the particular experiences of black women and girls living in Jim Crow New Orleans. Instead of merely highlighting their experiences in relation of the men in their lives, Simmons’ excavation of interviews, reports, and other qualitative research on black girls living in the city during the twentieth century helps unearth their existence as more than just daughters, wives, or lovers of black (and white) men. Simmons explores these women’s lives under “the double bind of white supremacy and respectability”, which deeply shaped communal understandings of socioeconomic status and geographies of the city. As a student of urban planning and the various communities affected by it, these girls’ engagement, creation, and re-use of New Orleans spaces are deeply relevant for my goals to engage in compassionate and respectful work.
CLASS & NOTIONS OF RESPECTABILITY
The central focus of Crescent City Girls is the “two poles [of] racialized violence in the Jim Crow South and the social constraints imposed by the black community”, both of which stifled and/or supported the development of various black girls in 20th-century New Orleans (Simmons, 2015). These social constraints were perhaps most visible in black New Orleanians’ understandings of social class, a key theme in Simmons’ book.
Her research speaks at length about the black striving class, a group of working-class people (often domestics, if women) who attempted to reach distinction or near-middle-class status through adhering to social norms of respectability and moral conduct, if not through actually earning an higher income through the pursuit of a career. Simmons noted that despite the impossibility of black New Orleanians receiving access to the high-paying, quality jobs that would enable their actual membership in the middle class, many media and religious institutions such as the Louisiana Weekly continued to promulgate the idea that “nice” conduct could help raise the status of otherwise disrespected poor black people (Simmons, 2015).
These notions of niceness and striving had sharp impacts on the behavior and decisions of black girls in New Orleans. Simmons explains that being considered “nice”, a “polite euphemism for sexually and morally wholesome”, was a compliment that could be weaponized against or in favor of black women trying to establish their value in this society, similar to modern compliments of one coming from “good stock” (Simmons, 2015). Girls often attempted to use their own behavior to establish the niceness of their entire families or neighborhoods, often through the repression of their sexualities, or their participation in educational endeavors.
In the educational sphere, concepts of class and niceness often collided with girls’ geographic experiences of safety and street harassment. While “middle-class and striving-class blacks invested in ideologies of respectability [that] demanded that upright young women and girls stay away from the clubs on Rampart Street,” New Orleanian blacks boys were free to roam without the city, exposing another way notions of respectability particularly restricted black girls (Simmons, 2015). This Rampart Street protocol changed in the portions of Rampart Street near McDonogh #35 High School, where female students were set apart as “worthy” of not receiving street harassment, something only possible because of the surrounding communities’ deep respect for the institution. This intraracial understanding of the respectability of black high school students not only protected the girls from otherwise rampant street harassment, but also allowed them safe passage to school in the entertainment district, where they would otherwise be considered immoral for being seen. Simmons’ further exploration of the familial situations required for black girls to have access to high school educations explained how the “worthiness” awarded to black female students was by no means available to all:
This restriction of “worthy” academic pursuits rings true even in our modern society. When reading these sections, my experiences working with Philadelphia high schoolers in college access and application support programs were at the front of my mind. When observing the differences in how many black Philadelphians (including working-class ones) perceive girls’ attendance at elite city colleges like Penn or Drexel, versus more affordable options like the Community College of Philadelphia, it’s clear that internalized notions of respectability are present in times and cities outside of 20th-century New Orleans.
Similar harmful notions around the value of niceness, which is neither possible or positive for all black people, can be seen in historic and modern political advocacy. When black newspapers and political figures defended Hattie McCray after her 1930 death at the hand of a police officer, they focused on her respectability in hopes of countering the idea that black women couldn’t be raped or defiled, because they were without virtue (Simmons, 2015). While the reclamation of her honor was definitely an admirable goal, Simmons’ presentation of various poems, news clippings, and press releases discussing the case seemed to show that many New Orleanians would have felt no sympathy for McCray had she been engaged in sex work or unemployed during her death. In this way, her life became worth mourning only due to her status as a “nice” young woman, and not worth saving due to the inherent value of all black women. Similar patterns can be observed in some Black Lives Matter activists’ mourning of Mike Brown, which fixated on his status as a high school graduate and intended college student, as if his worth hinged on his pursuit of higher education (Lowery & Frankel, 2014). This historic black community’s value system, which assigned respectability based on education and employment, seems no further from our present actions and no fairer to today’s black girls.
GEOGRAPHY, MENTAL MAPPING, & OTHER CONSTRUCTIONS OF SPACE
My Economic Development, Equity, and Inclusion course’s readings include How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the NeighborhoodHow to Kill a City, Peter Moskowitz’s exploration of the historical and modern policy decisions that have led to the gentrification of many urban neighborhoods. When using New Orleans as one of his case studies, he discussed the topographic inequality between the city’s above-sea level highlands, and its lowland neighborhoods, the latter of which have been historically occupied by black and lower-income residents (Moskowitz, 2017). Simmons’ discussion of 20th-century New Orleanian geography, and the great divide between uptown and downtown black New Orleanians, brings even more historic nuance to this conversation (Simmons, 2015).
In her research of New Orleanians’ accounts of their city, Simmons focused on a specific interviewee who “noted that black New Orleanians ‘were very neighborhood-conscious, and unless you had relatives who were living in another section of the city, you were not likely to cross Canal Street, which was considered the boundary for downtown and uptown’” (Simmons, 2015). She explains residents’ definitions of the differences between Downtown residents, who were largely Creole, Catholic, and long-time residents of New Orleans; and Uptowners, who were seen as darker-skinned, less reputable or middle-class, and newer rural migrants to the city. This geographic distinction is reminiscent of the East Side vs. West Side divides in Detroit and other modern cities with large black populations, and ends with a discussion of displacement that seems even more common.
Simmons’ account of the adaptive reuse of the Orleans Ballroom to house the Sisters of the Holy Family convent suggested how previously debaucherous sites could be repurposed to serve as sites of respectability for black girls, by mapping them outside of the surrounding vice of their neighborhoods’ “sinful streets” and insisting on their status as “worthy” students and Christians. As Simmons explains on page 37, the black sisters forged upon the former site of the quadroon balls a new “history of black survival, pride, and religious fervor...The past haunted the present but also made way for a new black geography within the convent” (Simmons, 2015).
However, the most relevant examples of neighborhood change can be seen in the highway construction over the Claiborne Avenue Commercial Corridor and the post-Hurricane Betsy relocation of McDonogh #35 High School, historic events that decisively changed the reputation and viability of beloved, thriving black institutions (Simmons, 2015). Simmons discusses how the reputation of once-prominent black downtown neighborhoods like Treme and the Seventh Ward never recovered from the highway expansion, and modern reports indicate that the struggles of once-quality black schools like McDonogh #35 have come to the forefront of public education debates (Jewson, 2018). Today, many black New Orleanians are working to restore these losses, through residents’ embrace and re-use of the underpass of the Claiborne Avenue Highway and community planning for the revitalization of the Claiborne Avenue Corridor, as well as through the McDonogh 35 Alumni Association’s advocacy for the Orleans Parish School Board to provide the “necessary supports and financial resources for [the high school] to be successful.” (Haselle, 2018; Reckdahl, 2018).
CONCLUSION & MOVING FORWARD
Simmons’ work, as well as the various organizing efforts of New Orleans residents, flies in the face of many planners’ disdain for black (displaced) residents’ geographic nostalgia. This disgust with NIMBY-like “fear of change” often does not fully grapple with the specific ways black people have been taught to reuse space and establish themselves as members of a striving, worthy class through their participation in education and employment.
Similar to Natasha Trethewey’s thoughts about black nostalgia in the post-Katrina Gulf Coast, the aforementioned scenarios indicate that communities’ deep longings for once-established black spaces is not just about ignoring their modern-day problems, but moreso about addressing the fact that “the alternative hasn’t always benefited poor and low-income people equally and that reforms that should help all members of a society still privilege some over others” (Simmons, 2015). When black residents talk about preserving their once-vibrant commercial corridors and once-rigorous traditionally-run high schools, knowledge of the “stage zero” inequalities that led to these institutions’ modern declines is always at hand (Moskowitz, 2017).
Black residents understand that the blame for the decimation of their neighborhoods does not primarily lie with them, and they also understand that without necessary neighborhood institutions like well-serving schools and commercial centers, their communities will never be respected within the cultural confines of New Orleanian respectability. As black residents of New Orleans travel back and forth between “the segregated city and the flooded city”, planners must turn to the historical and first-hand accounts that can help us respect the importance of their geographic and socioeconomic experiences throughout time (Simmons, 2015).
WORKS CITED
Hasselle, D. (2018, December 20). After McDonogh 35 vote, New Orleans will be 1st in US without traditionally run public schools. The New Orleans Advocate (Online). Retrieved from https://www.theadvocate.com/new_orlea...
Jewson, M. (2018). With expected privatization of McDonogh 35, New Orleans is poised to become an all-charter city. The Louisiana Weekly (Online). Retrieved from http://www.louisianaweekly.com/with-e...
Moskowitz, P, author. (2017). How to kill a city : gentrification, inequality, and the fight for the neighborhood. New York, NY : Nation Books,.
Lowery, W., & Frankel, T. C. (2014, August 12). Mike Brown notched a hard-fought victory just days before he was shot: A diploma. The Washington Post (Online). Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/politi...
Reckdahl, K. (2018, August 20). A Divided Neighborhood Comes Together under an Elevated Expressway. NextCity (Online). Retrieved from https://nextcity.org/features/view/a-...
Simmons, L. M., author. (2015). Crescent City girls : the lives of young Black women in segregated New Orleans. Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina,.
INTRODUCTION
LaKisha Michelle Simmons’ Crescent City Girls: The Lives of Young Black Women in Segregated New Orleans offers a much-needed focus on the particular experiences of black women and girls living in Jim Crow New Orleans. Instead of merely highlighting their experiences in relation of the men in their lives, Simmons’ excavation of interviews, reports, and other qualitative research on black girls living in the city during the twentieth century helps unearth their existence as more than just daughters, wives, or lovers of black (and white) men. Simmons explores these women’s lives under “the double bind of white supremacy and respectability”, which deeply shaped communal understandings of socioeconomic status and geographies of the city. As a student of urban planning and the various communities affected by it, these girls’ engagement, creation, and re-use of New Orleans spaces are deeply relevant for my goals to engage in compassionate and respectful work.
CLASS & NOTIONS OF RESPECTABILITY
The central focus of Crescent City Girls is the “two poles [of] racialized violence in the Jim Crow South and the social constraints imposed by the black community”, both of which stifled and/or supported the development of various black girls in 20th-century New Orleans (Simmons, 2015). These social constraints were perhaps most visible in black New Orleanians’ understandings of social class, a key theme in Simmons’ book.
Her research speaks at length about the black striving class, a group of working-class people (often domestics, if women) who attempted to reach distinction or near-middle-class status through adhering to social norms of respectability and moral conduct, if not through actually earning an higher income through the pursuit of a career. Simmons noted that despite the impossibility of black New Orleanians receiving access to the high-paying, quality jobs that would enable their actual membership in the middle class, many media and religious institutions such as the Louisiana Weekly continued to promulgate the idea that “nice” conduct could help raise the status of otherwise disrespected poor black people (Simmons, 2015).
These notions of niceness and striving had sharp impacts on the behavior and decisions of black girls in New Orleans. Simmons explains that being considered “nice”, a “polite euphemism for sexually and morally wholesome”, was a compliment that could be weaponized against or in favor of black women trying to establish their value in this society, similar to modern compliments of one coming from “good stock” (Simmons, 2015). Girls often attempted to use their own behavior to establish the niceness of their entire families or neighborhoods, often through the repression of their sexualities, or their participation in educational endeavors.
In the educational sphere, concepts of class and niceness often collided with girls’ geographic experiences of safety and street harassment. While “middle-class and striving-class blacks invested in ideologies of respectability [that] demanded that upright young women and girls stay away from the clubs on Rampart Street,” New Orleanian blacks boys were free to roam without the city, exposing another way notions of respectability particularly restricted black girls (Simmons, 2015). This Rampart Street protocol changed in the portions of Rampart Street near McDonogh #35 High School, where female students were set apart as “worthy” of not receiving street harassment, something only possible because of the surrounding communities’ deep respect for the institution. This intraracial understanding of the respectability of black high school students not only protected the girls from otherwise rampant street harassment, but also allowed them safe passage to school in the entertainment district, where they would otherwise be considered immoral for being seen. Simmons’ further exploration of the familial situations required for black girls to have access to high school educations explained how the “worthiness” awarded to black female students was by no means available to all:
“Black girls’ movement along the entertainment district of Rampart Street illustrates the development of a gendered and classed sense of place. Furthermore, these girls’ mapping of Rampart Street related directly to class status in New Orleans’ black communities. Where a girl was headed as she walked along the street spoke directly to her class position. Especially in the 1930s, most black girls who could afford to attend high school rather than work to earn extra money for their families came from stable family backgrounds. They were able to go to school because someone in their family sacrificed their own hard work, money, or schooling to keep them at home” (Simmons, 2015).
This restriction of “worthy” academic pursuits rings true even in our modern society. When reading these sections, my experiences working with Philadelphia high schoolers in college access and application support programs were at the front of my mind. When observing the differences in how many black Philadelphians (including working-class ones) perceive girls’ attendance at elite city colleges like Penn or Drexel, versus more affordable options like the Community College of Philadelphia, it’s clear that internalized notions of respectability are present in times and cities outside of 20th-century New Orleans.
Similar harmful notions around the value of niceness, which is neither possible or positive for all black people, can be seen in historic and modern political advocacy. When black newspapers and political figures defended Hattie McCray after her 1930 death at the hand of a police officer, they focused on her respectability in hopes of countering the idea that black women couldn’t be raped or defiled, because they were without virtue (Simmons, 2015). While the reclamation of her honor was definitely an admirable goal, Simmons’ presentation of various poems, news clippings, and press releases discussing the case seemed to show that many New Orleanians would have felt no sympathy for McCray had she been engaged in sex work or unemployed during her death. In this way, her life became worth mourning only due to her status as a “nice” young woman, and not worth saving due to the inherent value of all black women. Similar patterns can be observed in some Black Lives Matter activists’ mourning of Mike Brown, which fixated on his status as a high school graduate and intended college student, as if his worth hinged on his pursuit of higher education (Lowery & Frankel, 2014). This historic black community’s value system, which assigned respectability based on education and employment, seems no further from our present actions and no fairer to today’s black girls.
GEOGRAPHY, MENTAL MAPPING, & OTHER CONSTRUCTIONS OF SPACE
My Economic Development, Equity, and Inclusion course’s readings include How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the NeighborhoodHow to Kill a City, Peter Moskowitz’s exploration of the historical and modern policy decisions that have led to the gentrification of many urban neighborhoods. When using New Orleans as one of his case studies, he discussed the topographic inequality between the city’s above-sea level highlands, and its lowland neighborhoods, the latter of which have been historically occupied by black and lower-income residents (Moskowitz, 2017). Simmons’ discussion of 20th-century New Orleanian geography, and the great divide between uptown and downtown black New Orleanians, brings even more historic nuance to this conversation (Simmons, 2015).
In her research of New Orleanians’ accounts of their city, Simmons focused on a specific interviewee who “noted that black New Orleanians ‘were very neighborhood-conscious, and unless you had relatives who were living in another section of the city, you were not likely to cross Canal Street, which was considered the boundary for downtown and uptown’” (Simmons, 2015). She explains residents’ definitions of the differences between Downtown residents, who were largely Creole, Catholic, and long-time residents of New Orleans; and Uptowners, who were seen as darker-skinned, less reputable or middle-class, and newer rural migrants to the city. This geographic distinction is reminiscent of the East Side vs. West Side divides in Detroit and other modern cities with large black populations, and ends with a discussion of displacement that seems even more common.
Simmons’ account of the adaptive reuse of the Orleans Ballroom to house the Sisters of the Holy Family convent suggested how previously debaucherous sites could be repurposed to serve as sites of respectability for black girls, by mapping them outside of the surrounding vice of their neighborhoods’ “sinful streets” and insisting on their status as “worthy” students and Christians. As Simmons explains on page 37, the black sisters forged upon the former site of the quadroon balls a new “history of black survival, pride, and religious fervor...The past haunted the present but also made way for a new black geography within the convent” (Simmons, 2015).
However, the most relevant examples of neighborhood change can be seen in the highway construction over the Claiborne Avenue Commercial Corridor and the post-Hurricane Betsy relocation of McDonogh #35 High School, historic events that decisively changed the reputation and viability of beloved, thriving black institutions (Simmons, 2015). Simmons discusses how the reputation of once-prominent black downtown neighborhoods like Treme and the Seventh Ward never recovered from the highway expansion, and modern reports indicate that the struggles of once-quality black schools like McDonogh #35 have come to the forefront of public education debates (Jewson, 2018). Today, many black New Orleanians are working to restore these losses, through residents’ embrace and re-use of the underpass of the Claiborne Avenue Highway and community planning for the revitalization of the Claiborne Avenue Corridor, as well as through the McDonogh 35 Alumni Association’s advocacy for the Orleans Parish School Board to provide the “necessary supports and financial resources for [the high school] to be successful.” (Haselle, 2018; Reckdahl, 2018).
CONCLUSION & MOVING FORWARD
Simmons’ work, as well as the various organizing efforts of New Orleans residents, flies in the face of many planners’ disdain for black (displaced) residents’ geographic nostalgia. This disgust with NIMBY-like “fear of change” often does not fully grapple with the specific ways black people have been taught to reuse space and establish themselves as members of a striving, worthy class through their participation in education and employment.
Similar to Natasha Trethewey’s thoughts about black nostalgia in the post-Katrina Gulf Coast, the aforementioned scenarios indicate that communities’ deep longings for once-established black spaces is not just about ignoring their modern-day problems, but moreso about addressing the fact that “the alternative hasn’t always benefited poor and low-income people equally and that reforms that should help all members of a society still privilege some over others” (Simmons, 2015). When black residents talk about preserving their once-vibrant commercial corridors and once-rigorous traditionally-run high schools, knowledge of the “stage zero” inequalities that led to these institutions’ modern declines is always at hand (Moskowitz, 2017).
Black residents understand that the blame for the decimation of their neighborhoods does not primarily lie with them, and they also understand that without necessary neighborhood institutions like well-serving schools and commercial centers, their communities will never be respected within the cultural confines of New Orleanian respectability. As black residents of New Orleans travel back and forth between “the segregated city and the flooded city”, planners must turn to the historical and first-hand accounts that can help us respect the importance of their geographic and socioeconomic experiences throughout time (Simmons, 2015).
WORKS CITED
Hasselle, D. (2018, December 20). After McDonogh 35 vote, New Orleans will be 1st in US without traditionally run public schools. The New Orleans Advocate (Online). Retrieved from https://www.theadvocate.com/new_orlea...
Jewson, M. (2018). With expected privatization of McDonogh 35, New Orleans is poised to become an all-charter city. The Louisiana Weekly (Online). Retrieved from http://www.louisianaweekly.com/with-e...
Moskowitz, P, author. (2017). How to kill a city : gentrification, inequality, and the fight for the neighborhood. New York, NY : Nation Books,.
Lowery, W., & Frankel, T. C. (2014, August 12). Mike Brown notched a hard-fought victory just days before he was shot: A diploma. The Washington Post (Online). Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/politi...
Reckdahl, K. (2018, August 20). A Divided Neighborhood Comes Together under an Elevated Expressway. NextCity (Online). Retrieved from https://nextcity.org/features/view/a-...
Simmons, L. M., author. (2015). Crescent City girls : the lives of young Black women in segregated New Orleans. Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina,.
September 7, 2025
Dense but good
It is an academic style book, therefore it is a little dense - I will warn you. But it is so interesting. As a New Orleans native it taught me so much more about the city I hold dear.
It is an academic style book, therefore it is a little dense - I will warn you. But it is so interesting. As a New Orleans native it taught me so much more about the city I hold dear.
August 29, 2024
LaKisha Simmons proves herself to be a brilliant mind and a master craftswoman. Not only does Simmons expertly marry a history of segregation to physical spatial history, she does it so expertly that the reader leaves wondering how any history of the Jim Crow south would not. Simmons wraps these academic concepts up in an intriguing narrative about the lives of young women who are attempting merely to survive in this environment. This book is both accessible and brilliant, I recommend this work to anybody.
February 16, 2016
Marvelous research. What makes this book outstanding is the way Simmons manages to find out more about young women's emotional lives than most research on African-American women has done (due to limited sources about their inner lives). She uses oral histories, interviews from early sociological studies, and schoolgirls' poems and essays to great effect. Powerful (and often terrible) stories of the oppressions of gender within the better-known story of racial oppression.
September 29, 2016
Simmons´s work provides a complex portrayal of what it meant to be a black woman growing up in segregated New Orleans. The author states in the epilogue: "In considering a wide range of archival sources, Crescent City Girls makes black female lives and suffering visible, engaging with the sight of memory. The links between sexuality, space, and the politics of segregation are thus made clear". Simmon succeed in showing all these multiple layers and connected them to the present.
December 6, 2016
I learned a lot about the history of segregation in New Orleans. This book is a great example of what intersectional research might look like. Still, it's hard to study what people thought of sexuality at different times, let alone know what their actual practices were. An interesting thought about how one goes about investigating such things.
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