Parade Has Passed by One Carnival Tradition: Race-Based Clubs

Beau Bassich doesn’t want to sit in his antique parlor today. He wants to roll.

It’s Mardi Gras, the last day of the wild carnival season. And members of Bassich’s private social club--the Mystic Krewe of Comus--should be wearing masks, riding on floats and hurling a sky full of plastic beads to the thousands of people squeezed along the city’s boulevards.

But ever since New Orleans passed an ordinance in 1991 requiring float-sponsoring clubs to integrate, Bassich and his blue-blooded friends have sat the parade out.

“And it’s about time we came back,” said the 75-year-old Bassich. “Times have changed. Finding new members would be good for us.”

The fact that Comus--the oldest, whitest, most exclusive parading organization in the city and the last holdout--now is talking about accepting minorities and returning to the streets is a small but telling sign that attitudes have shifted.

Here and across the South, as blacks gain political power and old-line institutions lose their relevance, the white establishment’s genteel but iron grip on social life has slipped as well. In New Orleans, parading clubs had been the last refuge for white high society--the schools, the neighborhood enclaves and the public offices fell long ago.

Not that racial dynamics matter all that much to the million-plus Mardi Gras visitors fighting for beads or bobbing their heads in smoky Bourbon Street jazz joints until the sun comes up.

But today, formerly all-white krewes--as the parading organizations are known--have minority members (albeit rich ones), new multicultural groups have emerged and the uneasiness provoked by the 1991 controversy has begun to settle into some sort of black-white detente.

“There once was a time--and it wasn’t all that long ago--when the leaders of the elite krewes were an interlocking directorate of the city’s top boards and power players,” said New Orleans Mayor Marc H. Morial. “That’s not true anymore. We now have blacks in positions of power. And though not many really want to join the old krewes, the fact that they can is an important symbol for everyone.”

Mardi Gras always has been democratic in the sense that every strand of the city’s colorful ethnic tapestry--the French settlers, the American transplants, the free people of color, the slaves--figured out a way to join the party. Some of today’s most vibrant rituals, like the African American men who strut through the city’s roughest neighborhoods dressed in feathers and Native American costumes, are more than 100 years old.

Yet despite these traditions--and the considerable cultural power African Americans have enjoyed through the city’s love affair with jazz--blacks continued to be denied good parade routes and shunned from elite krewes. Desegregation didn’t mean much for Mardi Gras. Neither did the fact that by the 1980s, most of the long-standing white families were museum pieces more than anything else--their economic power supplanted by out-of-town corporations and a new tourism industry.

Their political power was evaporating too, with suburban flight reducing the number of white voters in the city and ushering in a new era of black mayors and majority black city councils. This is the story of many Southern cities.

All this factored into Councilwoman Dorothy Mae Taylor’s calculus nearly 10 years ago when she made a run at the city’s last real vestige of white power. Although many blacks begged Taylor, an African American, not to politicize the one event that really brought the community together, she demanded the integration of Mardi Gras krewes. An ordinance was passed requiring clubs to sign an affidavit saying that they didn’t discriminate based on race, color, creed, religion, sexual orientation or ancestry before being allowed to parade.

It drove a wedge between the black and white communities--and fractured many of the privileged organizations. The old krewes were run like super-exclusive fraternities: You had to be a descendant or a close friend of a member to get invited in. The clubs are the centerpiece of many people’s social lives.

“When that ordinance passed, a lot of suppressed feelings came to the surface and there was a real generation split,” said Gary Brewster, one of the leaders of the Proteus krewe, founded in 1882. “We had younger guys who wanted to take new members and keep parading. And then we had an old guard who didn’t want to give in to the city telling us what to do.”

Proteus and Comus pulled out. So did the Knights of Momus, another old-line krewe. Rex, considered the premier krewe of carnival, took in a handful of well-established black members. Or at least the club said it did. The older krewes keep their memberships secret and require float riders to be masked and costumed.

There were ugly incidents along parade routes. Some of the clubs that resented integration threw heavy bags of beads at city officials, said Morris F.X. Jeff Jr., a city social worker. Some people even mooned City Hall, Jeff added.

Yet many felt that once the action was taken, it was the only path the city could have followed.

“New Orleans is a city that survives on its tourism industry and its reputation for hospitality,” said Norman C. Francis, Xavier University president. “For people around the country to think we were living in isolation, that we were shunning diversity, that would have been our death notice.”

Francis, who is black, is an example of the problem trying to measure how integrated the old-line krewes really are. Several people interviewed were convinced he was a member of Rex. Francis said he didn’t belong to any krewe. “That’s not my style” was his explanation.

There is some consensus, however, that each of the older krewes now has several minority members, and the numbers are growing. Proteus returned to the streets last year with approximately $50,000 of plastic necklaces to toss out after the group went on an “affirmative action mission” to find minority and Jewish members.

The Knights of Momus came back this year, with a handful of black float riders and a new name, the Knights of Chaos.

Large “super krewes” with thousands of members also have emerged--like the multicultural Krewe of Orpheus founded by musician Harry Connick Jr. in 1993.

Little things have happened too. The king of Zulu, the oldest black krewe, and the king of Rex shared a toast for the first time two years ago on Fat Tuesday.

And Bassich, a third-generation New Orleanian whose house is straight out of “Gone With the Wind,” went to the Zulu ball. “Had us a wonderful time,” he said. “Hope to get invited back.”