“Did I Do Right?”: The Black Girl Citizen

Chapter 4 ponders the ways in which black girls were considered citizens during the Migration period. The chapter first considers black participation in the Camp Fire Girls, a national camping organization founded to prepare girls to be good citizens and strong mothers. Black women adapted the program to allow for black girls to participate in Camp Fire, and they found creative ways to circumvent racial segregation in children’s camp facilities. The chapter also examines sociologist E. Franklin Frazier’s interviews with teenage mothers and posits that by speaking about their experiences with sex, authority figures, and community, the mothers asserted their identity as citizens.