Zulu Krewe at 100: Still Marching to Its Own Beat
“At 8 a.m. on Feb. 24, give or take an hour or so, the raucous Zulu parade will roll down Jackson Avenue from Claiborne Avenue, then make a left on St. Charles Avenue and head toward Canal Street. The parade consists of about two dozen colorful floats, each with up to 50 riders. But the raucousness isn’t what alarms visitors — this is, after all, New Orleans, and this is, after all, Mardi Gras.
Rather, it’s this: Many of those on the floats and marching with them are in blackface. What’s more, many also wear fright wigs and grass skirts and are handing coconuts to clamoring parade watchers.
The scene looks like something from an old social studies filmstrip about stereotypes and how to avoid them, the kind of thing that crops up today mostly in news accounts involving students being expelled from school.
Complicating matters, most of those in the parade are black.
The Zulus provide what’s easily one of the less explicable sights in a city where much is hard to explain. This year, though, the explication may be slightly easier. That is because the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, one of the earliest and still the most prominent of the African-American social clubs, is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year.”
Also, President Obama’s social secretary (the first black White House social secretary), Desirée Glapion Rogers, is a two-time Zulu Queen. See her costume from 2000 here.