New Orleans in Two Eras of Change and Prejudice: Prelude or Portent?

For more than a decade, historical scholarship on New Orleans has moved in invigorating new directions. Dozens of books and essay collections have deepened our knowledge about specific eras or standpoint events in the Crescent City’s history. Many of those studies have also forced us to rethink much of what we thought we knew about the city’s often mythologized and romanticized past. The three books in this review essay certainly deepen our knowledge about two specific eras in New Orleans. Just as importantly, they compel readers to think about the city in larger geographic, subjective, and comparative contexts, allowing for domestic, international, and temporal comparisons that push historians to be more explicit about the balance between the city’s distinctiveness versus its typicality. These three studies also reexamine how cities are experienced as they and their inhabitants move through passages of rapid change and its distressingly common companion, rampant oppression.

Nathalie Dessens is a professor of American history at the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaures and author of Myths of the Plantation Society: Slavery in the American South and the West Indies. ¹ In Creole City: A Chronicle of Early American New Orleans, Dessens relies upon 158 letters written from New Orleans between 1818 and 1839. Marseille-native and Caribbean adventurer Jean Boze wrote all of these letters to his friend and patron Henri de Ste-Gême, “a French nobleman, whose birth and death occurred at his family’s castle of Bagen, not far from Toulouse. . . in southwestern France” (p. 12). The precise origins of the relationship between the two native-born Frenchmen is obscure. Each migrated to the Caribbean at different times and performed military service, in Boze’s case not only for France, but also for the Netherlands and Denmark. Boze and Ste-Gême definitely met by 1803 when they escaped St. Domingue in the waning days of its slave uprising. Like thousands of other francophone refugees, the two resettled in Cuba for several years before being ejected in 1809, “when the Spanish authorities declared all non-naturalized French people living in Cuba personae non gratae in response to Napoleon’s imperialistic views regarding Spain” (p. 1). They then became part of the sea of refugees who swamped New Orleans, doubling the city’s population in a single year. Within a decade, Ste-Gême returned to France, though he retained economic interests in Louisiana. In Ste-Gême’s absence, Boze served as a “designated writer. . . an organ of transmission indispensable to the good management of financial assets from a distance” (p. 18). This description might lead a reader to expect that the letters would be limited to accounting and financial reportage, but nothing was further from the case. Boze was an entertaining and opinionated correspondent who was often critical of the transformations he observed taking place in a rapidly changing city. Despite his sometimes dour tone, the breadth and density of information he conveyed allows Dessens, who also translated the letters, to combine it with her impressive command of the extant scholarship about New Orleans and many other American and Atlantic World cities to explore New Orleans in the twenty years in which “the city went from being a small colonial frontier town to third-largest city in the United States” (p. 27). She also makes extensive comparisons about the timing and rate of urban development in many other Caribbean and American cities, especially those of the coastal Northeast.

The fascinating first chapter outlines the adventures that drew Boze and Ste-Gême together before, once again, setting them on different courses, all reconstructed with an emphasis on understanding their mobility in an Atlantic World context. Five additional chapters cover a variety of topics that readers from a vast number of urban history subfields will find useful. In the second chapter, Dessens combines observations extracted from Boze’s letters with her own research in primary and secondary sources to explore the “Extremes” antebellum New Orleanians experienced. Given the vast array of dangers the city presented, New Orleans was “in many respects, still very much the eighteenth-century city” whose “residents could fall victim to disease, fire, crime, duels, and many accidents,” helping to explain why “mortality and morbidity rates were extremely high” (p. 69). Yet, she challenges the often-emphasized exceptional dangerousness of New Orleans by noting that “all the cities of the Atlantic world experienced such unfortunate situations, spurred by their extremely rapid development” (p. 69).

The third chapter, titled “Progress,” may, along with second, be the ones that urban historians most utilize. Dessens examines how the city became an American economic engine and, simultaneously, an “Urban Enclave in the Rural South.” New Orleans was “relatively exceptional in the young American republic,” Dessens argues, due to its location as “the only Southern town rapidly becoming a leading city, the only modern city in the West. . . connected to its economic choices” (pp. 85, 86). She also traces the city’s growth into a capitalist entrepôt and draws a conclusion that departs from the commonly held belief that the cultural and social competition between American immigrants and the Creole descendants of the European-era colonists stifled economic growth, especially in the francophone community. In contrast, Dessens argues convincingly that the very real resentment and competition between the two groups actually generated “competition, thereby stimulating development in the Carré,” now known as the French Quarter, “and in the city as a whole, definitely making for its modernization, improvement, and embellishment” (p. 103).

Dessens’s conclusions, like the book as a whole, must be tempered by the fact that they are driven by the commentary drawn from the letters of a single individual, who even the author describes as a cranky old man who “saw urban growth as a plague.” Yet, she argues that “his testimony. . . once cleared of its negative judgmental opinions reveals the permanent evolutions of the city” in its first three decades as an American state (p. 104). Dessens is the skilled agent who transforms Boze’s lengthy, meandering letters into an important work on the social, cultural, and economic development of New Orleans. By incorporating new insights, challenging old arguments, and constantly changing the comparative lenses she employs, Dessens offers her readers a nuanced “reassessment of New Orleans’s distinctiveness” from which Early National, Southern, Urban, Caribbean, and Atlantic World scholars can all benefit (p. 188).

Two other books focus on the lived experiences of African Americans in New Orleans during the period of Jim Crow’s ascendance and domination. Donald E. DeVore’s Defying Jim Crow: African American Community Development and the Struggle for Racial Equality in New Orleans, 1900-1960 is well- and succinctly described by its title. In short, DeVore explores how “African Americans achieved group and individual goals and made progress in New Orleans during the Jim Crow period” (p. viii). This study is a deeply researched reconstruction of the myriad ways in which African Americans in the city experienced, endured, and doggedly challenged the strictures of Jim Crow. A graceful introductory chapter titled “The Rise and Decline of Black Equality” includes coverage of events during the Civil War and concludes at the turn of the twentieth century, just after Louisiana adopted its 1898 Constitution, which was replete with Jim Crow mandates and mechanisms that facilitated the almost-complete disfranchisement of African Americans for the six decades that followed.

DeVore’s research is deep and detailed, his prose direct, and his conclusions restrained. DeVore condemns the sometimes individual but always collective damage done by segregation and the decades-long denial of social justice it entailed, but his tone is nearly dispassionate. His writing is effective, not because it engages in polemics, but because DeVore offers plenty of evidence that is leavened with a historian’s objectivity, and integrated into a narrative that focuses not only on reiterating the injustice African Americans experienced, but, critically, how they challenged it, always in the face of nearly overwhelming odds, for the decades it took to make meaningful change.

Chapters 2 through 7 focus closely on groups, institutions, and individuals who formed a variety of communities. Whether they worked in churches, in professions in which African Americans claimed a niche, or in secular organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), they demanded justice from a system that was stingy with its apportionment. Both DeVore and Lakisha Simmons, whose book is considered below, provide extensive reexamination of the 1930 murder of Hattie McCray, a 14-year-old African American waitress who was killed in the very restaurant where she worked by an off-duty white policeman named Charles Guerand, who claimed that McCray had a knife and that he shot her in self-defense. No knife was found on or near McCray and those familiar with the actual events provided convincing testimony that Guerand shot McCray because she resisted his sexual advances. The facts of the case were outrageous enough to lead African Americans to organize and demand a trial. Most astonishing, an all-white jury convicted Guerand of capital murder. Yet, the system that made momentary space for convicting Guerand, ultimately worked in his favor. Guerand’s lawyers appealed the conviction on the grounds of insanity, and he was moved to a mental institution. After a subsequent retrial, Guerand was convicted only of manslaughter and sentenced to three years in prison. DeVore notes that despite their ultimate legal defeat, the men and women who worked together in pursuit of justice for McCray provide an example of community development that, though ultimately thwarted, generated the recognition that justice denied was an unacceptable state of affairs, no matter how high the odds against achieving it.

DeVore also observes that such instances of flagrant violence practiced against the bodies of people of color would not have been so easily perpetrated had it not been for the prior disfranchisement of African Americans, leaving them no option but to beg white officials for protection, because they had no vote with which to barter. The linkage DeVore draws between the importance of the franchise, its vigorous exercise, and the limitation of violence on the part of white authorities is, unfortunately, more timely than we might wish. In that respect, however, DeVore’s careful and important study can be seen as more than a history. It is also a reminder that hard-won liberties can, subsequently, be withdrawn. In that respect, Defying Jim Crow provides a sobering recitation about the decades-long fight that was needed to regain rights, which had once been apportioned but cynically traded away for political gain at the highest levels of national politics. In its historiographical context, one might consider the purpose and scope of Defying Jim Crow as providing a supplement to and chronological extension of John Blassingame’s 1973 classic Black New Orleans, 1860-1880. ² Like that study, Defying Jim Crow is sometimes understated, but it is built on a similarly strong foundation and promises to have staying power as this generation’s most comprehensive New Orleans-focused study of its type. Those interested in civil rights in Louisiana more broadly should read Defying Jim Crow alongside two other recent civil rights studies of note: Shannon Frystak’s Our Minds on Freedom: Women and the Struggle for Black Equality in Louisiana, 1924-1967 and Tom Aiello’s important Jim Crow’s Last Stand: Nonunanimous Jury Verdicts in Louisiana. ³

LaKisha Michelle Simmons’s Crescent City Girls: The Lives of Young Black Women in Segregated New Orleans focuses on girls aged nine to twenty years, specifically on the “ways in which black girls negotiated the two poles—of racialized violence in the Jim Crow South and the social constraints imposed by the black community” (p. 5). She argues that the boundaries and restrictions that emanated from these sources were “the two lenses through which girls came to understand themselves and their place in the world” (p. 5).

Simmons is at least as focused on methodological innovations as she is on her subjects’ lives per se. In fact, the author suggests that her “book demonstrates a methodology for social history that gets at the emotional inner worlds that historians often assume are inaccessible in the archive” (p. 10). By “linking methods from social history. . . and from cultural studies, Crescent City Girls argues that discovering information about the inner lives of marginalized and sometimes invisible citizens is indeed possible” (p. 10). In pursuing her innovative, but occasionally didactically explicated methodology, Simmons is inspired by the insights of feminist theorists, is sensitive to cultural geography and the place of bodies within it, and, for the most part, makes compelling arguments about the interior and physical terrain of second-class citizenship as experienced by a demographic group that has received very little attention from historians.

In attempting to understand how her subjects came of age and to self-awareness in a time and place where their social inferiority was a given, the author has constructed her study with a broad array of sources including contemporary oral histories, reporting from the black and white press, reports generated by police, educators, social workers, and by the findings and research materials generated by sociologists who did research in New Orleans during the Jim Crow era. She also analyzes fiction written by girls and later autobiographical works that reflect back on black girlhoods. She also uses photography to good analytical effect, not just as illustration but as historical evidence. Simmons weaves these disparate strands of evidence together by deploying the historian Paula Fass’s concept of “disciplined imagination” (p. 10).

While the introduction is heavily focused on argument and method, the six remaining chapters are organized topically. The first, “Suppose They Don’t Want Us Here? Mental Mapping of Jim Crow New Orleans” argues that black “girls in New Orleans developed mental maps that helped them understand themselves and their racialized city” (p. 27).

Simmons effectively recreates and explains the social geography of the city as seen through the experiences of her subjects, providing ample evidence that girls were taught by parents and educators where they could and could not go. Even so, girls and women who undertook the most careful attempts to stay within the boundaries of respectability and Jim Crow segregation still routinely endured humiliating harassment. In chapter 2, Simmons reminds her readers that even very young girls faced physical danger while engaging in the most innocent of tasks, such as walking other children to catechism at a nearby church. Simmons’ brief retelling of the attack a white grocer made on 13-year-old on Hattie Louise Williams in his anger at some younger children accidentally stepping on still-wet asphalt is a searing reminder of how Jim Crow empowered those who would unashamedly take out their anger on the bodies of African Americans, even when they were completely defenseless females just out of childhood.

For those interested in the histories of sexuality and delinquency among girls, the fifth chapter, “Delinquent Girls at the House of Good Shepherd,” will be particularly useful, especially since the institution was “one of the very few biracial reform homes in the South” (p. 142). Girls could be remanded to the House of Good Shepherd by their families but also by the state. Often the offenses that led girls to being placed in Catholic custody were associated with engagement in illicit physical activities with boys or men. Once confined, the nuns in charge attempted to retrain the girls in proper deportment, domesticity, and virtue. Good Shepherd inmates were required to attend Mass and encouraged to confess their sins to a priest. Some were even converted to Catholicism, adopting new names as part of their transformative process from troubled girls to Christian subjects, all while living in separate wings of the walled but also racially segregated facility.

The final chapter focuses on locating “Pleasure in Black Girls’ Lives,” and Simmons is right to insist that it is important to include an exploration of how young girls sought and found happiness within and despite an oppressive environment. Otherwise, their subjective experiences “are narrated only by the trauma of Jim Crow” (p. 175). This chapter, like the book itself, is at its best when Simmons interprets the world from the perspective of her subjects rather than engaging in unnecessary reminders about the importance of her methodological project. Her subjects—in New Orleans as well as the nation—have never been studied in quite the same way by anyone else. Yet, the methodology of combining wide-ranging archival research with the insights of social historians and cultural studies is hardly new, as Eric Lott’s twenty-one-year-old Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelcy and the American Working Class reminds us. ⁴

As a result of the close, careful, and sometimes creative efforts of Dessens, DeVore, and Simmons, a reader learns many new things about life in nineteenth- and twentieth-century cities, including but not limited to New Orleans. Dessens reinterprets antebellum New Orleans not just as a polyglot place of cultural syncretism, but also as an economic engine in an (already) rapidly globalizing world. In this respect alone, Creole City might be read in combination with Scott Marler’s excellent The Merchants Capital: New Orleans and the Political Economy of the Nineteenth-Century South. ⁵ Devore and Simmons remind readers, if the raft loads of increasingly visible contemporary injustice somehow fail to do the job, that the post-Civil War history of New Orleans is replete with individual and collective tragedies and injustice driven by white supremacist thinking.

In our own reactionary historical moment, rethinking Jim Crow and the recipes for resistance to it are as useful to readers in Boston as they are to those in Baton Rouge. That is especially the case as we face down the troubling reality that an angry but victorious minority of our fellow citizens—virtually all of them white and most of them heavily concentrated outside urban areas—elected an antiimmigrant, antihistorical, antiintellectual, but, puzzlingly, self-avowed cosmopolitan as our forty-fifth president. As we enter this uncertain age, we can benefit from the perspectives offered by the energetic and insightful Dessens, the careful, thorough and timely work of DeVore, and the creativity and imaginative ambition displayed by LaKisha Simmons. All three scholars help urban historians rethink the past—whether it be as prelude or as portent.