"Marcia Chatelain's South Side Girls is a singular contribution to our understanding of the Great Migration that reshaped black life in America. Chatelain approaches the historical archives with an entirely new question, "is there a girlhood for those who will grow into black women?" As simple as it seems, asking whether there is protected space of childhood for black girls utterly alters our understanding of African American life in the early 20th century. Myths of hyper sexuality, insistence on moral respectability, aspirations of full citizenship, and dreams of nuclear family conformity all shape the ways that black communities understand black girls and how those girls see themselves. Chatelain demonstrates how the anxieties about black girls vulnerability and degradation shaped public policy and community engagement and how the preciousness of 'our girls' stands in as a marker of collective progress and aspiration.  This is a perfect book for a moment when we struggle with the twin realities of the extraordinary girlhoods of the Obama daughters and violent brevity of the girlhood of Renisha McBride; as we watch a new generation of child migrants fleeing violence in central America and question our national response even as three generations of South Side Girls live in the White House.".