Zulu organization, an integral part of New Orleans life and culture
24th February 2020 · 0 Comments
By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer
In the early 1900s, a close-knit, enthusiastic group of young Black men in New Orleans coalesced under the nickname “the Tramps” after taking in a musical comedy featuring the Smart Set at the famed Pythian Theater.
With the free-spirited, ebullient nature of the Smart Set firing the Tramps’ imaginations and aspirations, that night at the theater led to the creation of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, a benevolent society that pursued the goals of aiding its community and its members, and having one heck of a good time each year.
The Tramps had marched as a rag-tag unit in Mardi Gras stretching back to 1901, but the club made its first appearance as Zulu for Mardi Gras in 1909, and thus a proud, resilient, philanthropic organization was born.
The world knows about the pageantry of Zulu’s Mardi Gras celebration – the elaborate floats, the gala coronation of the Zulu King and Queen, the coconuts tossed to the crowd, the Professor Longhair songs, and the outfits of grass skirts and black face paint designed both out of material necessity and a desire to satirically mock white society’s lingering racist stereotypes of African Americans.
But while such regalia has gained tremendous recognition (and the occasional controversy) around America and across the globe, less seen is Zulu’s commitment to the community. Zulu’s current chairman of the board of directors Jay H. Banks, who also serves as a New Orleans City Councilman, told The Louisiana Weekly that the organization’s extended, formal name – the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club – is not just for show.
“Our commitment to our community is our biggest asset,” Banks said, “and it’s a driver for us into the future. The ‘social aid’ aspect is just as important as ‘pleasure.’ As much as we like to have fun, we like to provide aid to our community.”
The official Zulu club Web site describes how the origins of the club were steeped in communal support in times of need, such as illness or funerals.
“The earliest signs of organization came from the fact that the majority of these men belonged to a Benevolent Aid Society,” it states. “Benevolent Societies were the first forms of insurance in the Black community where, for a small amount of dues, members received financial help when sick or financial aid when burying deceased members.”
From this evolved Zulu’s century-plus tradition of enriching the community. Some of Zulu’s current charitable projects include an annual Christmas-time Toys for Tots drive and food-basket distribution; a College Expo that attracts the city’s best and brightest youth, especially from the Black community; a regular Night Out Against Crime; and fundraising programs benefiting local schools.
Perhaps Zulu’s biggest charitable enterprise is its annual golf tournament at the Joseph M. Bartholomew Sr. Golf Course in Pontchartrain Park. The selection of the tournament site itself reflects Zulu’s commitment to promoting the rich heritage of Black culture locally – the golf course is named after the course’s designer and the first African-American inductee into the Greater New Orleans Sports Hall of Fame, and its location, Pontchartrain Park, was founded as one of the country’s earliest planned, self-contained communities of middle-class African-American citizens.
The most recent Zulu golf tournament was held Sept. 21, 2019.
In an essay in the winter 2016 issue of the journal Southern Cultures, Leslie Parr cited Zulu as one of the most prominent examples of New Orleans’ traditions of charity, philanthropy and togetherness. While ensuing social and economic developments since the club’s founding in the early 20th century have largely caused the organization’s original mission of “social aid” as “mini-insurance associations” to fade somewhat into history, the spirit of the club’s founding remains potent and productive.
“Many do, however, donate to local charities and engage in other activities to improve their communities and help their members,” Parr wrote. “… [one] early social aid and pleasure club, Zulu, has long enjoyed a status all its own…the club routinely makes donations to schools and scholarship funds and other community organizations, among its other charitable activities. Zulu is the only social aid and pleasure club to act as both a benevolent association, providing sickness and burial assistance to its members, and as a Carnival krewe with its own parade, one of the highlights of Mardi Gras.”
One of Zulu’s most prominent and more recent achievements that transcended merely beads and throws came in 2006, when the group was one of the few Mardi Gras krewes to roll during the first Carnival season after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.
Banks said Zulu’s members knew that if the krewe could show its own resilience and determination to not just survive but thrive just months after a tragic catastrophe, the organization could represent New Orleans’ recovery as a whole.
In 2006, the group wanted to lead the way toward a determined future for all of the Crescent City. If Zulu could roll, the thousands of New Orleans residents who fled the city in the wake of Katrina’s devastation could see that hope still lived in their hometown.
“Zulu led the way back home,” Banks said. “We paraded the first year after Katrina to let people know that New Orleans was on its way back.”
Leon Miller, curator of Louisiana Research Collection at Tulane University, which has one of the world’s largest collections of Mardi Gras artifacts and ephemera, said Zulu is an integral part of New Orleans life and culture, especially when it comes to representing the people, and the communal commitment, of the city. He said Zulu also symbolizes the city’s rich tradition of social and political commentary.
“Carnival can serve multiple purposes,” Miller said. “If some use Carnival to strengthen an old-line social order, marginalized groups can use Carnival to mercilessly satirize, scorn and subvert that social order. Zulu has taken ownership of racial stereotypes, turned them into objects of ridicule, and thrown them back in the face of society in an act of empowerment, courage, inclusion and joy. In so doing, they enabled other marginalized groups to create their own Carnivals, further enriching Mardi Gras for all of us.”
Perhaps Zulu’s greatest contribution to the New Orleans community, to the pursuit of benevolent efforts, and to the goals of social justice and cultural education has been its development in relation to the traditionally white Mardi Gras krewes that have existed for centuries and for much of the 19th century as the city’s primary Carnival activity.
Zulu has emerged as both a complement to the festivities presented by krewes such as Rex, Comus, Proteus and Bacchus, and as a critical counter to the traditional racism and elitism of the oldest white clubs.
While today, to many outside observers, Zulu is simply one part of the rich tapestry of culture and celebration that is Mardi Gras in New Orleans, historically Zulu emerged in defiance of the oppressive white supremacy and segregation found in the Big Easy.
While white society attempted to suppress Black culture and traditions, Zulu showed that the Black community remained proud, united and determined to not let its own traditions be smothered. It was subversive, potent rebellion masked in festive activities and parades.
“The Zulu parade of New Orleans’ middle class and elite community, founded in 1909 as a reaction to white stereotypes of blacks as ‘savages,’ is a Carnival activity rivaled in scope and visibility only by the Rex parade on Mardi Gras day,” wrote several authors in the 2006 book, “Blues for New Orleans: Mardi Gras and America’s Creole Soul.”
The authors added that Zulu is the leading representative of Black New Orleans krewes that sprang out of the social aid and pleasure club tradition. The Zulu parades bring together several long-running musical and marching traditions, such as funeral second lines, brass bands, spontaneous musical celebrations in Congo Square, and elaborate throws that “lend themselves to political and social statements of resistance, especially within the commercial world so tied to valuing more permanent goods.”
They added that the parades of such Social Aid and Pleasure clubs, while having roots in the vibrant Black community along Claiborne Avenue that was destroyed and bisected by the construction of the I-10, “are less about establishing a sense of turf than they are about knitting together the neighborhoods against the interests of outsider politicians, social workers, police or drug dealers.”
In 1996, scholar Joseph Roach described the larger purpose and statement Zulu has always made in New Orleans. To start, he stated that “Mardi Gras krewes [like Zulu] and other New Orleanian social clubs operate along similar lines of self-perpetuating descent. Like carnival itself, they promote a sense of timelessness based on the apparently seamless repetition of traditional roles.”
However, Roach dove even deeper into the vital, intrinsic of satirical commentary provided by Zulu, and he especially contrasted Zulu with the historically white and racially exclusive Rex club.
Carnival and Mardi Gras day culminate, in the past as in the present, with the consecutive (and at times concurrent) rolling of Zulu and Rex, Roach wrote, and their parallel existence and procession aren’t necessarily just a friendly rival or competition.
Given Rex’s complex history of segregation and racism, there’s much more going on underneath that party facade, and there always has been. That undercurrent of sociopolitical struggle waged by Rex and Zulu in many ways embodies the complicated evolution of race relations in New Orleans, Roach wrote.
“… [B]ehind Rex stood more than a century of white supremacist entitlement, the residue of what I will be calling a genealogy of performance,” Roach wrote. “Behind King Zulu there stood something much more complicated: a deconstruction of that white genealogy and the veiled assertion of a clandestine countermemory in its stead.”
He added that “Zulu seizes on the annual occasion of the great festive holiday of Eurocentric tradition to make ribald fun of white folks and the stupidity of their jury-rigged constructions of race.”
Roach then asserted that Zulu’s close bonding and commitment to satirical commentary on New Orleans history and present has its roots in the coalescing of former slaves and Creole freemen around a need to use community to survive and thrive, including as a vehicle for charity and philanthropy.
“As whiteface minstrelsy,” he wrote, “however, Zulu has layers within layers, and behind the visible mask of carnivalesque satire there is a practice of disruptive humor that introduces another circum-Atlantic version of Africa. As a New Orleans social aid and pleasure club, Zulu participates in the tradition of Afrocentric mutual aid and burial societies dating from the colonial period, when people of African descent constituted the majority in New Orleans (as they do again today) and when, as slaves and free people of color, they had developed resilient solidarities within their own castes and kinship networks.”
With this as a backdrop, the Zulu Club was gestating and its profile in the community was blossoming through the first few decades of the 20th century, the organization gradually gained recognition beyond New Orleans.
Even before the founding of The Louisiana Weekly in 1925, the Associated Negro Press stationed a correspondent in the Big Easy during Carnival in 1924. The reporter noted the club’s importance in the local Black community.
“A note of valor was ejected in the annual Mardi Gras festivities when the Zulu King, surrounded by thousands of his subjects rode in state through the city,” the reporter wrote. “His attendants, attired in black swallow-tails, high hats and all the regalia that go to make up a festive occasion presented a handsome appearance. Colored residents are taking an active part in the Mardi Gras festivities.”
Five years later, a Pittsburgh Courier correspondent reported from New Orleans about author Lyle Saxon, whose latest book detailed many aspects of Black and Creole life in New Orleans. The reporter recounted the details as Saxon’s book regaled him with tales of voodoo, quadroon balls, fencing and, of course, Zulu and Mardi Gras.
“[Saxon] portrays at great length the Mardi Gras he saw as a boy 25 years ago,” the reporter wrote. “He pictures the Negro Mardi Gras in another part of town where the Zulu king presides. Then he goes way back to the dim past of three centuries ago and describes swiftly yet pointedly and effectively the foundation and growth of this, the most unique city in the United States.”
Such, then, is the role of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club in New Orleans during Mardi Gras, and in not only the consciousness of not just the Crescent City, but also the global zeitgeist. The history of Zulu is the history of Black New Orleans, and America at large. In many ways, Zulu is Black America in both celebration and community purpose.
As current Zulu chairman and City Councilmember Banks said, the Zulu Mardi Gras festivities aren’t the sum total of the impact the krewe has had. Zulu is about community and mutual support in the face of oppression and bigotry.
“From its inception,” Banks said, “Zulu has been focused on this community. We were an outlet for people of color to participate in Mardi Gras.”
This article originally published in the February 24, 2020 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
