Next Wednesday at noon, the Center for the Study for the American South invites faculty, staff, and graduate students to Tell About the South, the Center’s series of lunchtime presentations of works in progress by faculty and senior graduate students. LaKisha Michelle Simmons’s talk is entitled “’Defending Her Honor’: Black Girlhood and Interracial Sexual Violence in Jim Crow New Orleans.”
On February 10, 1930, a white police officer, Charles Guerand, attempted to rape fourteen-year-old Hattie McCray in the New Orleans restaurant where she worked. Prevented from attacking her, Guerand proceeded to shoot and kill the black teenager. McCray’s death disrupted Jim Crow discourses of race, justice and black women’s sexuality. This talk uses Hattie McCray’s death to discuss the double bind of growing up a black girl in Jim Crow New Orleans during the 1930s.
LaKisha Michelle Simmons received her Ph.D. in the Joint Program in History and Women’s Studies from the University of Michigan. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of the American South. Dr. Simmons is the author of ’Justice Mocked’: Violence and Accountability in New Orleans published in the Fall 2009 special issue of American Quarterly, and author of To Lay Aside All Morals:’ Sexuality, Respectability and Black College Students in the 1930s forthcoming in Gender & History. Her current book project is titled, Within the Double Bind: Sexuality and Segregation in New Orleans.
Lunch is provided, however, RSVP is required. Please call 962-5665 or email csas@unc.edu. For any questions, please contact Lisa Beavers, 962-0503