Reading maps, buildings, photographs, oral histories and black girls’ movements in tandem, I argue that the physical placement of buildings and their structures reveal black girls’ relationship to power in the city. How did black girls travel to and from these spaces? How did they interact with the geographies inside and outside of the buildings? Approaching the question of space in this way brings into view lived experiences of segregation through a street-by-street and neighborhood analysis. Understanding racialized geographies teaches us to note what space is “occupied by the colonized, the enslaved, the incarcerated, the disposable.”[i] The nature of segregated space differed in each area of New Orleans; black girls were aware of this as they crisscrossed the city streets. As children navigated the city, their subjectivities shifted with the changing nature of power and space. The methodological focus on urban space in this paper seeks to demonstrate how in southern cities, at Jim Crow’s very center, was a regulation of geography that relied on gendered and sexed notions of spatial power.
[i] Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods, Black Geographies and the Politics of Place (South End Press, 2007), 4.