Mardi Gras for Enslaved and Free People of Color in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans
The Carnival at New Orleans, a wood engraving drawn by John Durkin and published in Harper's Weekly, March 1885.
By Amy Katherine Medvick
Pre-Lenten festivals, such as the famous carnavale of Venice, Italy, the carnivals throughout Brazil, Latin America, and the Caribbean, and of course, New Orleans’ Mardi Gras, are often described—and idealized—as “festivals of inversion.” Historically, as moments in which the populace were invited to indulge themselves in the earthly pleasures they would soon give up for the forty-day period of Lent preceding Easter, Pre-Lenten carnivals also quickly became moments for “permissible” social transgression—men could dress as women, women as men, the rich masquerade as poor, and the poor crowned as kings and queens for a day. While this kind of role reversal—what scholars have termed “social inversion”—undoubtedly has been a central part of Pre-Lenten festivities throughout their long history, many historians recently have sought to bring more nuance to the discussion of Carnival. Particularly when so many of the most famous Pre-Lenten festivals take place in former slave-holding colonies of the Americas, it is likely that the participation of enslaved people and free people of color in these carnival celebrations differed considerably from the dominant narrative throughout the celebration’s centuries-long history.
Mardi Gras in New Orleans stands out among Pre-Lenten celebrations for featuring its local elites being crowned as Kings and Queens—unlike most other carnival celebrations, in which the poor or marginalized typically masquerade as royalty. This practice dates to the first formal Mardi Gras parades, first performed by the Krewe of Comus in 1857. Journalist James Gill, in his 1997 history of race and Mardi Gras, titled Lords of Misrule, recounts that Comus and the other krewes to follow were founded primarily by Anglo-American and a few wealthy, white Creole men, most of whom were loyal to the Confederacy in the looming Civil War.[1] (The Krewe of Comus also rather infamously quit parading after the city ordinance that required the desegregation of all Mardi Gras krewes in the early 1990s, while the other krewes—many of them founded in the late 1800s and early 1900s—at least officially opened their ranks to all races and continue to parade to this day.) In addition to the old-line Carnival krewes predominantly populated by upper-class white men, women and Black New Orleanians have established krewes, which will be discussed later in this post.
The narrative of Mardi Gras history is often rather misleadingly framed as a history of the Mardi Gras krewes—their public parades and exclusive, private masquerade balls. However, Mardi Gras has been celebrated in some form in Louisiana since it was first colonized by the French in the late 1600s—in fact, the two French Canadian explorers who first established a European colony in the area landed seventy miles south of New Orleans on Shrove Tuesday and named their new settlement the Pointe du Mardi Gras.[2] Early forms of Mardi Gras celebrated in Louisiana are not as well-documented as the krewes, with their parades and balls, from 1857 onwards. However, the accounts of international travellers and visiting journalists provide some excellent clues into the social geography of early New Orleans Mardi Gras, especially since these authors are more likely than locals to comment in detail on precisely those elements of local cultural practice that are unfamiliar to them. These sources require the modern historian to consider the cultural bias of the authors, who in this case are mostly from the northern United States or England. In addition to exhibiting racial bias against all people of color, they tend to racialize all white Creoles, using language steeped in notions of “racial purity” that suggests Louisiana Creoles might be concealing some partial African ancestry. They also cast the deeply Spanish and French-influenced culture of Louisiana as “backwards” and prone to “moral decadence.” Because they found the participation of enslaved and free people of color in Carnival celebrations so unusual, the same authors were more prone to remark upon them.
Before the formalization of Mardi Gras into the krewes, parades, and balls we know today, less formal Mardi Gras celebrations were practiced in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.[3] These celebrations included masquerade balls and street festivities, practices which were by no means limited to the Mardi Gras season. James Gill notes that the earliest mention of “Carnival” in New Orleans was in 1781, in a report to the Spanish colonial administration calling for stricter racial segregation.[4] This request was in response to claims that Black individuals had been wearing masks and sneaking into Carnival balls, resulting soon after in the banning of masks for Black residents of the city. It is likely that these masked individuals were free people of color, not enslaved people—and it appears that New Orleans’s white elites sought to exclude them from their Mardi Gras balls, if not always successfully.
The street festivities of New Orleans—whether at Mardi Gras or on other occasions—were another matter. Visitor to the city Louis Tasistro facetiously describes the general, constant air of carnival in New Orleans in the 1840s, noting that the city was “[n]ot a fool’s paradise of ladies and gentlemen, but a regular every-day jubilee, at which people squander their time away on happiness instead of seriously attending to their respective duties.”[5] Apparently, even in the early 1800s, New Orleans was known as a festive city. Masquerade balls were a regular feature of Creole life in New Orleans, occurring almost every Sunday for much of the year, and Sunday mass could attract a crowd to rival a modern-day Muses parade. The northern U.S. author J.H. Ingraham, in 1835, described a New Orleans Sunday in which “all the gay inhabitants, one would verily believe, had turned out as to a gala” on their way to the Cathedral for mass.[6] These inhabitants included enslaved individuals that Ingraham described as “gaudily dressed [...] who chattered incessantly with half-suppressed laughter to their acquaintances on the opposite trottoir.”[7] Though not referencing Mardi Gras specifically here, the event that Ingraham describes suggests that there was space for the participation of enslaved people and free people of color in public festivities generally.
The author’s description of these enslaved individuals as “gaudily dressed” needs to be qualified: while on the one hand, these individuals may have been dressed in the finest they could afford (or the best of what had been given to them by their enslavers) according to the fashions of the time, they may also have been dressed according to sartorial sensibilities that would not have been held by individuals like Ingraham, perhaps reflecting African influence or emerging African American styles of dress. However, during Mardi Gras itself, economically oppressed people—whether enslaved people, free people of color, or working-class whites—may also have dressed in deliberately “gaudy” imitations of elite dress as a form of mockery, a costuming practice common in many Pre-Lenten festivities.
Along similar lines, the British travel writer Sir Charles Lyell describes a genuine Mardi Gras celebration in his 1849 book A Second Visit to the United States of America, in which:
almost every one dressed in the most grotesque attire, troops of them on horseback, some in open carriages, with bands of music, and in a variety of costumes, — some as Indians, with feathers in their heads, and one, a jolly fat man, as Mardi Gras himself. All wore masks, and here and there in the crowd, or stationed in a balcony above, we saw persons armed with bags of flour, which they showered down copiously on any one who seemed particularly proud of his attire.[8]
Lyell does not indicate the identities of these flour-wielding assailants, nor that of their intended targets. But his comment does make clear that New Orleans’ early carnival celebrations included mockery and targeting of the upper classes by the lower—a common theme in carnival celebrations across the Americas that involved throwing not only flour but water, honey, eggs, perfume, or even urine, at one’s social superiors.[9]
Lyell also describes a street festivity in which the participation of people of African descent added to the “strangeness of the scene”—a social reality likely unfamiliar to this English visitor to the U.S.—and he also notes that “we were amused by observing the ludicrous surprise, mixed with contempt, of several unmasked, stiff, grave Anglo-Americans from the North, who were witnessing, for the first time, what seemed to them so much mummery and tom-foolery.”[10] Clearly, then, just a few years before the Krewe of Comus was founded by primarily Anglo-Americans, New Orleans Mardi Gras was viewed as a Creole festivity with links to the Caribbean and Latin American carnival cultures and was practiced by both white and Black people who had long-standing cultural roots in the city.
Lyell does not make clear whether the individuals he observed were enslaved or free people of color, yet it is entirely likely that these Mardi Gras revelers included enslaved people. Counter-intuitive though it seems, enslavers in the U.S. and elsewhere often permitted the enslaved certain moments of social license, such as at Christmas.[11] The gesture was a complex one—while giving the appearance of benevolence, these permitted moments of leisure and celebration could serve the enslaver’s interests by diffusing social tensions and siphoning off energy that might otherwise be put towards escapes and rebellions. Indeed, there are ample sources to show that in many slave-holding societies in the Americas, even if excluded from certain aspects, the enslaved were active participants in Pre-Lenten festivities and often developed their own complexes of music, dance, parade, and performance practices associated with the celebration.[12]
It is highly likely, however, that while many enslaved people joined the street festivities of New Orleans Mardi Gras (if not its elite masquerade balls), many others were required to work during the festival, or even as part of the festival. Here, again, the primary sources are frustratingly quiet on the matter, though descriptions of Mardi Gras in the decades after the Civil War give us some clues as to the possible tasks and duties of the enslaved during the Pre-Lenten celebration.
As noted above, the first Mardi Gras krewe, the Mistick Krewe of Comus, was founded in 1857, primarily by wealthy white Anglo-American men, with the somewhat limited participation of some white Creole men as well. In the following decades, other krewes would be established, some have since discontinued parading and others are still in operation today. Though white women, and as we will see, Black individuals, often appeared in the parades, they were excluded from membership in the traditional krewes, who paraded in masks to hide their identities (though they were something of an open secret). Likewise, krewes barred Jews as well as German and Italian immigrants from membership, and no one from these three social groups were invited to the exclusive balls that followed the parades. As Historian Jennifer Atkins notes, the formation of the krewes, with their emphasis on royal imagery otherwise out of favor in the United States at the time, was tied up with nostalgia and anxiety over the waning power of the Southern planter class in the years immediately preceding and following the Civil War and the abolition of slavery.[13] As such, the krewes were invested in reflecting the social hierarchy of Louisiana society throughout the structure of their organizations and parades: white, Anglo-American patriarchs presiding as captains and kings, white women denied membership and authority but shown off as ornaments, the enslaved and formerly enslaved working in the parades, and everyone else relegated to spectator.
The King of Comus Greets the Royal Family of Rex, from the WPA Guide to New Orleans (1938)
Contemporary sources from the early decades of the Mardi Gras Krewes make little mention of the labor of enslaved people in the parades before they paused during the Civil War starting in 1861. However, descriptions from the 1870s and 1880s provide information that allows us to make an educated guess as to how the labor of enslaved people had been employed in the early Mardi Gras parades. Many of these roles are ambiguous; the labor is embedded in the parade, therefore ostensibly a part of the visual display. One 1871 article describes “one of the most striking processions” as being that of a Black military regiment, about which the author wryly notes that “the local love of parade was far in advance of military knowledge.”[14] Another author in 1874 notes that the first Comus procession after the Civil War was “preceded by lantern bearers of the ‘freedmen’ persuasion.”[15] These lantern-bearers, known today as flambeaux, were likely enslaved people in the first few years of the parades, between 1857 and 1861, and recently freed individuals in the decades following the Civil War. They have remained a key part of the official Mardi Gras parades, in which the role is still filled mainly by Black male performers who make the laborious task their own by dancing while twirling the large, open-flame kerosene torches and catching tips thrown by onlookers.
Similarly, an 1885 source describes the Mardi Gras parade floats that would follow behind the contingent of flambeaux, noting that the floats were pulled by four mules that were each led by a Black man. The mule was covered in a decorative cloth known as a caparison, and the Black men were in costume.[16] Thus, the labor of Black individuals in the krewes’ parades was not only functional but made decorative, contributing to the broad allegory of social hierarchy that surrounded the much more literal allegory in the tableaus atop each parade float. We can surmise that in the first few years of the Comus parades, before the abolition of slavery in the United States, enslaved individuals likely filled many similar roles.
While laborious roles in executing the parades themselves were likely the domain of enslaved, and later free, Black men, Black women would be more likely to participate in the Mardi Gras celebrations as an extension of their domestic roles. An 1878 journalist, in a story that is likely fictitious but illustrates the role of Black women in the festivities, describes a Black woman working as the nurse of a young white boy watching the Comus parade from his family’s French Quarter balcony.[17] Another 1879 article includes an image of a Black woman on just such a French Quarter balcony, accompanying what appear to be three white children and two Black children.[18]
Yet other enslaved people, men and women alike, probably attended and served their adult enslavers during the masquerade balls. An 1899 article nostalgically describes the “Mardi Gras Festivities of Bygone Days”—likely those from before the first krewes and their parades, since the article notes of that time that “as for the street pageants, there were none. Men and women laughed and chatted in the narrow streets, and pelted each other with paper balls. It was revelry without system from a pure love of gayety.”[19] This sounds strikingly similar to the much more ribald early street parties, in which throwing items or substances at other revelers featured largely, than it does the organized parades that began in 1857. The article notes that:
On such evenings in the old days the town was given over to the laughing groups of stately gowned women who had brought over with them from Paris their silk frocks and their jeweled snuff-boxes [...] In front of each group of splendidly gowned women were African slaves holding lanterns by whose dim light the merry groups found their way. Behind the men slaves came the women slaves bearing the satin slippers of their mistresses in their hands.[20]
Just as their freed counterparts would do after the Civil War, it is likely that many enslaved women and some enslaved men continued their domestic duties during the Mardi Gras celebration, perhaps caring for children while they enjoyed the parades or serving their adult enslavers at exclusive masquerade balls.
The formalization of Mardi Gras by the old-line krewes, following the model established by the Mistick Krewe of Comus, ushered in a new era in Mardi Gras history. Previously, though the enslaved, and many free people of color, would have been excluded from the masquerade balls in early New Orleans Mardi Gras, the street festivities likely provided an opportunity for at least a certain amount of social transgression and licentiousness for all residents of the city. However, as the Carnival season came to be centered around the new social organizations of the krewes and their parades, the segregated nature of the celebrations would intensify through Reconstruction and into the Jim Crow era. The focal points were the large-scale parades organized, funded, and populated by wealthy white New Orleanians.
Yet the experience of New Orleans Mardi Gras for enslaved and free people of color cannot be reduced to participation solely on the terms of local white elites, either as laborers or spectators of the formal parades. Africans and their descendants in New Orleans also made the festival their own, drawing on the robust parading traditions of West and Central Africa, and developing their own ways of celebrating that have led to the rich traditions of today, such as Black Masking practices, the Skull and Bones Gang, the Original Illinois Club, and the Zulu parade.[21] These practices developed through the agency of enslaved and free Africans and people of color, who brought African practices with them to the Americas and adapted them to their lives in New Orleans—as they did in other cultural arenas.[22] Indeed, in 1885, one visitor to the city noted that Black New Orleanians, “particularly the children, are great maskers. I think I saw ten thousand black children in masks, in one place, during the Carnival just over.”[23] The author notes that “the usual dress” for Black Mardi Gras costumers was “red or yellow cotton stuff, drawn over the ordinary clothes, with a mask that completely hides the face. Some of these masks are very hideous. But, as a rule, they are only for the purpose of concealing the identity of the wearer, not of exciting fear or derision.”[24] Indeed, according to this author, Black individuals were “the most devoted revelers of the New Orleans Carnival”, and no Black domestic worker would stay home and work during the three days before Ash Wednesday.[25] The author archly comments that, “As a rule, the people who employ them have a dreary time of it. One lady informed me that Lent in New Orleans begins not at the end of the Carnival, but at the beginning of it.”[26] Whether this assessment is accurate or an exaggeration, we do know that both enslaved and free people of color in New Orleans found the resources to make the holiday their own, developing many of the iconic Mardi Gras performance practices that are still thriving today.
The twentieth and twenty-first centuries also have seen the foundation of Black krewes—the first and most famous of which, the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, was founded in 1909.[27] Featuring Black performers masquerading in grass skirts and feathers and made up in blackface, Zulu’s performances have long been criticized by Civil Rights leaders. However, other Black activists defend them, asserting that their performances have always been satirical—though the Zulu club itself has never claimed as much. The history of the Zulu parade demands a more nuanced understanding: their processions, which have changed little since their first parades in the early twentieth century, were based on the caricatured image of the Zulu ethnic group of South Africa that were common in U.S. popular culture at the time.[28] Similar to what scholar Kim Vaz-Deville notes of the Baby Dolls, another Black Mardi Gras tradition, the founders of organizations like the Zulu Club “were locked out of mainstream Mardi Gras events, other than being asked to work as servants for such events [...] They had to set up a way to enjoy themselves, and they did this by forming these clubs with specific themes that were grounded in the popular culture of the early 20th century.”[29] In addition to being the first Black Mardi Gras organization to throw parades on a scale to match the old-line krewes, as the Zulu Club’s own historians Clarence A. Becknell, Thomas Price, and Don Short recount, they were the first Black krewe to share the Canal Street route in the late 1960s (from which all Black Mardi Gras organizations had been banned), and the first to desegregate in 1973.[30] Just as early New Orleans Carnival celebrations provided some limited space for social transgression and license, modern Mardi Gras has allowed space for resistance and social activism.
Bibliography
Andrews, George Reid. Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Atkins, Jennifer. “‘Using the Bow and the Smile’: Old-Line Krewe Court Femininity in New Orleans Mardi Gras Balls, 1870-1920.” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana
Historical Association 54, no. 1 (2013): 5-46.
Barefield, Allana J. “Embracing Black Mardi Gras keeps the culture alive for the next generation.” The Undefeated, March 5, 2019. Accessed February 21, 2022.
Becknell, Clarence A., Thomas Price, and Don Short. “History of the Zulu Social Aid & Pleasure Club.” Accessed February 21, 2022.
Campbell, Susan. “Carnival, Calypso and Class Struggle in Nineteenth Century Trinidad.” History Workshop 26, no. 1 (1988): 1-27.
Catherwood, Mary Hartwell. “The American Mardi-Gras.” St. Nicholas; an Illustrated Magazine for Young Folks (1873-1907), March 1879.
Fromont, Cécile, and Michael Iyanaga, eds. Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas: Performance, Representation, and the Making of Black Atlantic Tradition. University
Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019.
Gill, James. Lords of Misrule: Mardi Gras and the Politics of Race in New Orleans. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1997.
Gill, Lyndon K. Erotic Islands: Art and Activism in the Queer Caribbean. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.
Guilbault, Jocelyne. Governing Sound: the cultural politics of Trinidad’s Carnival Musics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Hallmark, Harrydele. “Social Life in America’s French City.” The Ladies’ Home Journal, March 1899.
Ingraham, J.H. The South West by a Yankee. New York: Harper & Bros., 1835.
Keeler, Ralph, and Waud, A. R. “New Orleans: 1. The Heart of the City.” Every Saturday: A Journal of Choice Reading. Jul 1, 1871.
Kraay, Hendrik. “The ‘Barbarous Game’: Entrudo and Its Critics in Rio de Janeiro, 1810s-1850s.” Hispanic Americans Historical Review 95, no. 3 (2015): 427-458. doi
10.1215/00182168-3088584
Lyell, Sir Charles. A Second Visit to the United States of North America. London: J. Murray, 1849.
“Mardi Gras in New Orleans.: [From Our Own Correspondent.].” Christian Union (1870-1893), Mar 5, 1885.
McQueeney, Kevin. “Zulu: a transnational history of a New Orleans Mardi Gras krewe.” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 19, no. 2 (2018): 139-163.
DOI: 10.1080/17533171.2018.1407083
Melancon, Trimiko. “The Complicated History of Race and Mardi Gras.” Black Perspectives, February 9, 2018. Accessed February 21, 2022.
Miller, Joaquim. “The Three Merry Days of New Orleans.” The Independent... Devoted to the Consideration of Politics, Social and Economic Tendencies, History, Literature, and the
Arts (1848-1921), March 5, 1885.
Njoku, Raphael Chijioke. West African Masking Traditions and Diaspora Masquerade Carnivals: History, Memory, and Transnationalism. Rochester, NY: University of
Rochester Press, 2020.
Tasistro, Louis. Random Shots and Southern Breezes. New York: Harper & Bros., 1842.
University of North Carolina (Documenting the American South). “Highlights: The Slave Experience of the Holidays.” Accessed February 14, 2022.
Williams, M. B. “An Incident of Mardi Gras. For the Companion.” The Youth’s Companion, April 11, 1878.
Wrenn, B. W. Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Its Ancient and Modern Observance; History of the Mystick Krewe of Comus, the Twelfth-Night Revelers, and Knights of Momus, with
scenes, sketches and incidents of the reign of His Majesty, the King of the Carnival. Atlanta, GA: Barrow, 1874.
[1] James Gill, Lords of Misrule: Mardi Gras and the Politics of Race in New Orleans, Kindle Edition (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), location 437-787.
[2] Gill, Lords of Misrule, location 243-247.
[3] Gill, Lords of Misrule, location 243-591.
[4] Gill, Lords of Misrule, location 276-279.
[5] Louis Tasistro, Random Shots and Southern Breezes (New York: Harper & Bros., 1842), 95.
[6] J.H. Ingraham, The South West by a Yankee (New York: Harper & Bros, 1835), 208.
[7] Ingraham, The South West by a Yankee, 209.
[8] Sir Charles Lyell, A Second Visit to the United States of North America. (London: J. Murray, 1849), 112-113.
[9] George Reid Andrews, Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 123.
[10] Lyell, A Second Visit to the United States of North America, 113.
[11] On Christmas for the enslaved in the United States, see “Highlights: The Slave Experience of the Holidays,” University of North Carolina (Documenting the American South), accessed February 14, 2022, https://docsouth.unc.edu/highlights/holidays.html.
[12] Indeed, in Trinidad for example, enslaved people turned this permissiveness to their advantage, using carnival performance groups called convois, in which they would masquerade as European-style kings and queens, as fronts for planning revolts to take place over the Christmas or Carnival season. See Susan Campbell, “Carnival, Calypso and Class Struggle in Nineteenth Century Trinidad,” History Workshop 26, no. 1 (1988): 1-27; Lyndon K. Gill, Erotic Islands: Art and Activism in the Queer Caribbean (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 31-49; on post-emancipation black carnival practices in 19th-century Trinidad, see Jocelyne Guilbault, Governing Sound: the cultural politics of Trinidad’s Carnival Musics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 21-38. On the participation of the enslaved in Brazilian carnaval and the development of their own distinct practices during the holiday, see Hendrik Kraay, “The ‘Barbarous Game’: Entrudo and Its Critics in Rio de Janeiro, 1810s-1850s,” Hispanic Americans Historical Review 95, no. 3 (2015): 427-458. On African-descended carnival practices throughout the Americas, see Andrews, Afro-Latin America, 123; Cécile Fromont and Michael Iyanaga, eds., Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas: Performance, Representation, and the Making of Black Atlantic Tradition (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019); Raphael Chijioke Njoku, West African Masking Traditions and Diaspora Masquerade Carnivals: History, Memory, and Transnationalism (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2020).
[13] Jennifer Atkins, “‘Using the Bow and the Smile’: Old-Line Krewe Court Femininity in New Orleans Mardi Gras Balls, 1870-1920,” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 54, no. 1 (2013): 8.
[14] Ralph Keeler and A. R. Waud, “New Orleans: 1. The Heart of the City,” Every Saturday: A Journal of Choice Reading, July 1, 1871, 6.
[15] B. W. Wrenn, Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Its Ancient and Modern Observance; History of the Mystick Krewe of Comus, the Twelfth-Night Revelers, and Knights of Momus, with scenes, sketches and incidents of the reign of His Majesty, the King of the Carnival (Atlanta, GA: Barrow, 1874), 18.
[16] “Mardi Gras in New Orleans.: [From Our Own Correspondent.],” Christian Union (1870-1893), Mar 5, 1885, 9.
[17] M. B. Williams, “An Incident of Mardi Gras. For the Companion,” The Youth’s Companion, April 11, 1878, 116.
[18] Mary Hartwell Catherwood, “The American Mardi-Gras,” St. Nicholas; an Illustrated Magazine for Young Folks (1873-1907), March 1879, 338.
[19] Harrydele Hallmark, “Social Life in America’s French City,” The Ladies’ Home Journal, March 1899, 4.
[20] Hallmark, “Social Life,” 4.
[21] Kevin McQueeney, “Zulu: a transnational history of a New Orleans Mardi Gras krewe,” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 19, no. 2 (2018): 139-160, DOI: 10.1080/17533171.2018.1407083.
[22] Njoku, West African Masking Traditions and Diaspora Masquerade Carnivals.
[23] Joaquim Miller, “The Three Merry Days of New Orleans,” The Independent... Devoted to the Consideration of Politics, Social and Economic Tendencies, History, Literature, and the Arts (1848-1921), March 5, 1885, 2.
[24] Miller, “The Three Merry Days,” 2.
[25] Miller, “The Three Merry Days,” 2.
[26] Miller, “The Three Merry Days,” 2.
[27] Kevin McQueeney, “Zulu,” 139.
[28] McQueeney, “Zulu,” 139-163.
[29] Kim Vaz-Deville on the Baby Dolls, cited in Allana J. Barefield, “Embracing Black Mardi Gras keeps the culture alive for the next generation,” The Undefeated, March 5, 2019. https://theundefeated.com/features/embracing-black-mardi-gras-keeps-the-culture-alive-for-the-next-generation/.
[30] Clarence A. Becknell, Thomas Price, and Don Short, “History of the Zulu Social Aid & Pleasure Club,” http://www.kreweofzulu.com/history; see also McQueeney, “Zulu,” 155; and Trimiko Melancon, “The Complicated History of Race and Mardi Gras,” Black Perspectives, February 9, 2018. https://www.aaihs.org/the-complicated-history-of-race-and-mardi-gras/.