Organization
Backstreet Cultural Museum
Small neighborhood museum in the Tremé documenting Mardi Gras Indian, Skull and Bones, baby doll, and second-line social-aid-and-pleasure-club traditions of African-American New Orleans — founded 1999 by Sylvester Francis (1946–2020), a lifelong Tremé resident and unofficial photographer of the city's Black-tradition parades and funerals from the 1980s onward. The museum occupies the former Blandin's Funeral Home on Henriette Delille Street, immediately adjacent to St. Augustine Catholic Church (founded 1842; the oldest Black Catholic parish in the United States). The collection is the principal continuing public archive of African-American New Orleans street-and-neighborhood-tradition material culture; Francis spent four decades photographing every second line, jazz funeral, Indian parade, and baby-doll Mardi Gras outing he could reach, and assembled the suits, banners, and parade artifacts that make up the museum's holdings.
What's happening now
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Practical
Address: 1531 St. Philip Street, [[french-quarter|New Orleans]], LA 70116. Open Tuesday–Saturday 10 a.m.–4 p.m.; admission $10 (cash preferred). Tours typically led by a docent who knew Sylvester Francis personally; the visit is an oral-history conversation as much as a museum walkthrough.
The collection includes ~50 Mardi Gras Indian suits (representing a wide range of gangs and decades), Skull and Bones gang costumes (the all-Black neighborhood gangs that wake [[san-francisco|the city]] before dawn on Mardi Gras Day with skull-and-bone-painted costumes and grim chants — We Come To Tell You / How You Gonna Die), baby-doll suits (the all-women masking tradition begun in the early 20th century by Black women working in Storyville), social-aid-and-pleasure-club banners, [[second-line|second-line parade]] umbrellas, and Francis’s photographic archive (~25,000 images from 1980 onward).
The museum’s location next to St. Augustine Catholic Church places it at the symbolic-and-literal heart of the Tremé — the historic free-people-of-color neighborhood that is, by most measures, the oldest continuously-inhabited African-American neighborhood in the United States. The St. Augustine slave-and-free-people-of-color memorial (the Tomb of the Unknown Slave, on the church grounds) is a few feet away and is part of any thoughtful Tremé visit.
See also
Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.
- Shares approach with: [[house-of-dance-and-feathers]]
- Contains: [[mardi-gras-indians]] · [[second-line]]
- Member of: [[organization]]
- Contained by: [[new-orleans]]
What links here, and how
Inbound connections from across the wiki, grouped by lens and by relationship. These appear automatically — every entity page declares what it links to, and that data populates here on the targets.
Cultural
contains
- New Orleans Tremé museum founded by Sylvester Francis; principal continuing public archive of African-American street-tradition material culture
parallels
- The hand as tool Sylvester Francis's archive documents Mardi Gras Indian and second-line tradition; the collection makes the practice visible but the practice itself is hand-work
2 inbound links · 5 outbound