Segregation Is Still Alive in Mardi Gras’s Birthplace
Decades after the end of Jim Crow, cities like Mobile, Alabama, are still shot through with racial segregation. That segregation is reflected in the city’s Mardi Gras culture, where some social societies still maintain white-only membership.
Members of the Bay City Brass Band perform in Mobile’s Mardi Gras parade. (Carol M. Highsmith / Buyenlarge via Getty Images)
After a year in which COVID killed Mardi Gras, some are predicting that social contact–starved crowds could make the 2022 revival of Carnival the “biggest in a generation.” Here in Mobile, Alabama — the original birthplace of American Mardi Gras — more than 92,000 revelers lined the streets to watch the Conde Cavalier parade, and many more are expected to crowd downtown for this week’s seemingly endless parades, culminating with Fat Tuesday. But all of the bead-tossing revelry and bejeweled masks can sometimes conceal an ugly truth: there are still two distinct Mardi Gras celebrations in Mobile, one white and one black.
Mardi Gras season is a stark reminder that segregation still permeates all aspects of life in this Southern city. The annual pre-Lent festival is a microcosm of the city as a whole. Black people, especially of the working class, make up almost 60 percent of the population, but have less access to jobs, capital, good schools, and housing — and Mardi Gras societies.
The Dark Side of Mardi Gras History
The first significant Carnival celebration in the United States goes back to 1711, a time when Mobile still served as the capital of France’s Louisiana Territory. That New Year’s Day, a group of French colonists happily marched down Dauphin Street with a giant bull’s head mounted on wheels in honor of the fatted ox once used in medieval Carnival celebrations. Mobile’s sister city New Orleans later adopted the traditions of this “Boeuf Gras,” rechristened it Mardi Gras, and moved the date to Fat Tuesday, yet Mobile clings to the debated claim that it held America’s first true Mardi Gras celebration.
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