Mobile Mardi Gras and Mystic Societies

• 2011 Mardi Gras Schedule
• The 2007 Mardi Gras season was attended by an estimated 878,000 people, with a crowd of 105,600 along the streets for Fat Tuesday
• Mardi Gras festivities yield more than $227 million in direct spending in Mobile and Baldwin counties with an economic impact estimated at more than $408 million per year.

Mobile Mardi Gras History

• 1703 Mardi Gras in Mobile is the oldest traditional Carnival celebration in America, having begun in 1703. The masked ball, Masque de la Mobile, began in 1704, and the first known parade was in 1711, when Mobile’s “Boef Gras Society” (”fat beef society”) paraded with a cart carrying a large papier-mache cow’s head.
  • The Boeuf Gras procession on Mardi Gras was to continue until 1861 when it ceased due to the outbreak of the War Between the States
• The Spanish took rule of Mobile in 1780 and in 1793 the Spanish Mystic Society, attired in costumes of white and pushing a cart on which a statue of the Blessed Virgin sat, began its torch-lit procession on Twelfth Night.
• 1830 A group of young men led by Michael Krafft stayed awake all New Year’s Eve, making noise with cowbells, hoes, and rakes. The group became the first parading mystic society, using the name Cowbellion de Rakin Society (at first, the men were going to call themselves The Revelers, but then decided to change), with annual parades each New Year’s Eve. The Cowbellions dissolved in 1912, but re-formed in 1991.
  • Leaving the Old Southern Hotel with some of his friends after ringing in the New Year, this merry band came upon Partridge’s Hardware Store, scooped up hoes, rakes, cowbells, and gongs and proceeded to wander the streets making a fantastic amount of noise. Arriving at the home of the Mayor, they were invited in for refreshments.
  • After a few years as the “Midnight Revelers”, elected to call themselves the “Cowbellion de Rakin Society”
  • In 1840, they staged the very first display of its kind in the United States when they rolled forth a parade with a title and subject. Six horse drawn flats (floats) carried out the theme, “Heathen Gods and Goddesses”.
  • Circa 1835 the Cowbellion de Rakin Society took their parade into New Orleans. Joseph Ellison and 5 other men from Mobile formed the New Orleans Cowbellions in 1850, and in 1857, that Cowbellion society, renamed as the Mistick Krewe of Comus, held its first parade on Mardi Gras day.
• 1843 Some men who had been refused membership by the Cowbellions formed the Strikers Independent Society with their own New Year’s parade. The Strikers is America’s oldest Mystic Society.
  • The Strikers stopped parading in 1881 (except in 1884), but still hold an annual ball.
  • A life-size wooden goat stands in one corner of the Mardi Gras Museum as a reminder of the society. The goat, more than 100 years old, was used during Striker events around the beginning of the 20th century, although museum officials are unsure of the goat’s actual role.
• 1844 “The T.D.S.”, called “The Tea-Drinkers’ Society” but actually “The Determined Set”, was formed.
• New Year’s Day became an important social occasion in Mobile as the wealthy in formal dress made and received calls in their homes on Government Street.
• “The code of upper-class Mobile, on this and on most social occasions, encouraged liberal drinking but demanded controlled inebriation.” – Doyle
• 1866 Joe Cain revived the parades in Mobile on Mardi Gras day. While Mobile was still under Union occupation, Joe Cain paraded through the streets of Mobile, dressed in improvised costume depicting a fictional Chickasaw chief named Slacabamorinico. The choice was a backhanded insult to the Union forces in that the Chickasaw had never been defeated in war.
  • The following year (1867), Joe was joined by other Confederate veterans (including Thomas Burke, Rutledge Parham, John Payne, John Bohanan, Barney O’Rourke, and John Maguire), parading in a decorated coal wagon, playing drums and horns, and the group became the “Lost Cause Minstrels“.
  • Julian Lee “Judy” Rayford arranged to have Joe Cain exhumed from Odd Fellows Cemetary in Bayou la Batre and reburied in Mobile’s Church Street Graveyard in 1966. Rayford carried Joe Cain’s skull in the pocket of his coat. He established Joe Cain Day in 1967 by walking at the head of a jazz funeral down Government Street to the cemetery on the Sunday before Mardi Gras.  It was later discovered that Judy had re-buried Joe and Elizabeth in the wrong plot. So, once again, during 1967, the remains were exhumed and brought back across the graveyard and reinterred in the Cain family plot near his parents.
  • This has been called “The People’s Parade” due to the fact that it is performed by citizens without being run by a specific Mardi Gras krewe. Originally, anybody who showed up at the parade start on Sunday morning could join in with whatever makeshift float they could cobble together. Eventually, the sheer size and disorder forced the organizers to limit the participants to a preset limit. The parade is preceded with the visit of the “Cain’s Merry Widows” to the gravesite of their “departed husband”
  • The current incarnation of Joe Cain is Wayne Dean Sr.
• 1868 The Order of Myths, the oldest parading society in Mobile, is founded. Its Emblem consists of Folly chasing Death around the broken pillar of life.
• 1869 The H.H.S. (Heavy Samplers Society) is founded. The H.H.S. is said to have evolved from a young men’s baseball team that followed behind the Lost Cause Minstrels. The H.S.S. collapses in 1873 after a lavish and expensive ball puts them in debt, and the Infant Mystics is founded by H.S.S. members. Its balls are held (appropriately) in Temperance Hall.
• 1872-1897 The first Mobile Carnival Association (the De Leon Carnival Association) is founded by Thomas Cooper De Leon, a Jewish journalist from South Carolina, who manages carnival for 25 years. Daniel E. Huger is crowned Felix I. 
• 1874 The Comic Cowboys were founded by Dave Levi from New York City, with predominantly Jewish membership. They dress in cowboy jeans or street clothes on floats that display billboards with humorous jokes or caricatures.
  • The Cowboys are led by their Queen “Little Eva”, with a toilet plunger scepter. Some of the city’s best leaders have been selected to rule over the Cowboys and proudly wore the undergarments of Eva.
  • Samuel Eichold wrote the Without Malice history of the Comic Cowboys in 1984. 
  • Another Jewish organization, the Continental Mystic Krewe, is founded in 1891
• 1874 The Knights of Revelry (K.O.R.) is founded
• 1881 On “New Year’s Eve” of 1880– which was actually on January 6, 1881 owing to an arctic cold front over December 31st– there was the last great New Year’s Mystic Society parade in Mobile, as on the Fiftieth Anniversary of The Cowbellions, that group and The Strikers and the TDS paraded together and jointly celebrated “The Semi-Centennial of Mysticism” in Mobile with a reception in “Temperance Hall”. Beginning in the 1880s, Mystic Societies of Mardi Gras took over – David Bagwell, MBT
• 1881 The Infant Mystics take over management of Mardi Gras from the Mobile Carnival Association
• The Cowbellions began to die out entirely in about 1887 after the failure of an abortive attempt to merge with the OOMs as the “Michael Krafft Association (MKA)”, and after a final abortive parade of twenty floats in 1888; the Strikers thrived but quit parading, and the T.D.S. died out about then, only to be revived in the early 1970s by Max Rogers and his friends on Joe Cain Day. – Ibid
• 1898-1926 The second Mobile Carnival Association organizes Mardi Gras.  King is Felix II.
• 1922 The Crewe of Columbus has 6 trademark floats. Three depict the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria, then the Crew’s emblem float with a big globe rotating in the center, and that’s followed by the title float. It was originally a Catholic organization, but opened to other denominations in the 1930s
• Moon pies adopted were to replace the “banned” boxes of Cracker Jacks
• 1927 The third (and current) Mobile Carnival Association is founded
• 1956 the Incas have the Inca Sun God and all the riders with large feathered headdresses.
• 1977 The Conde Cavaliers is founded as a way for a workingman to join a Crewe that had no way to inherit a membership in any of the old groups. Now they have 13 themed floats and the three usual Emblem floats.
• The Conde Explorers, the first all black Mardi Gras Krewe to parade through downtown Mobile on Saturday night, was established by 20 people in May 2003.
• In 2008, Naomi Williams sued after Fairhope’s Le Crewe De Spaniards representative told her she couldn’t attend the Mardi Gras society’s toga party because she was black, according to Williams and her lawsuit. “‘This is nothing against you. It is just your color. We don’t accept black people at our parties,’” the representative said, according to the federal lawsuit.
• The Mobile Area Mardi Gras Association’s Mammoth Parade recently returned to The Avenue after a 12 year hiatus
• “The Wisdom of Chief Slacabamorinico”
• The Mobile Area Mardi Gras Association (MAMGA) was founded in 1939.
  • Each year, MAMGA presents King Elexis I and his queen, the Mammoth Parade, and the Grand Marshall’s Ball. Former Department of Labor Secretary Alexis M. Herman was the Mobile Area Mardi Gras Association Queen for 1974.
  • Dr. Wilborne L. Rossell, dentist and civic leader, was president of MAMGA for 50 years, from its very beginnings until 1987.
  • Mrs. Frederica G. Evans chose the title of King Elexis I to rule over Mardi Gras. Known as the “Mother of colored Carnival”, she died in 1967.
• Black mystic societies in Mobile include: Order of Doves, 1890-1914; Original Utopia Club, founded in 1814; Original Dragons; Comrades Social Club; Midnight Maskers; Dragons; Strikers Social Club; Krewe of Elks; Emerald Social Club; Sauvettes Social Club; Athenian Valentine Sweetheart Ball organization; Knights of Ebony; Sophisticated Ladies Social Club; Krewe of Don Q; Utopia Club
• The Mobile Carnival Association was founded by Thomas Cooper De Leon, a Jewish journalist and writer from South Carolina who managed Mobile Carnival for 25 years.

Mardi Gras Traditions, from the Press-Register, 2/17/2007, by Dan Murtaugh

• Vernadean: This giant fire-breathing, smoke-spewing dragon float has been the hit of Saturday night’s Mystics of Time parade since the organization first hit the streets in 1949. Originally 45 feet long, the dragon has since grown to its current 150-foot long incarnation. Along the way, it sired two offspring, smaller dragons named Verna and Dean, which also ride in the parade. A replica and full-size model of Vernadean sit in the Mobile Carnival Museum on Government Street.
• The Goat Man: The Saturday before Fat Tuesday each year is designated “Goat Day” in Prichard. The Krewe of Goats formed in 1995 and is based in Prichard but is not affiliated with the Prichard Mardi Gras Association. The society held its first parade in 1996. The Goat Man portrays a resident of the Bullshead area of Prichard who in the 1920s tended a small herd of goats.  At the time, when Mardi Gras was mostly for the rich, he began hitching goats to a homemade cart and traveling up and down the narrow dirt roads, singing and tossing homemade trinkets, such as cookies, wooden whistles, marbles and popguns, to the crowd.
• Joe Cain: Joseph Stillwell Cain is widely credited as the father of Mobile’s modern Mardi Gras. Mobile denizens had taken part in Mardi Gras festivities as early as 1704, when the city was the capital of the French colony in America. But the Civil War put an end to the celebrations. In 1866, while Mobile was still occupied by Union troops, Cain, who was a town clerk, dressed up as a Chickasaw Indian chief and drove a coal wagon through the city streets. The costume had a rebellious symbolism, as the Chickasaw tribe had never been defeated in battle. Cain took part in Mardi Gras until his death in 1904. In 1966, Cain’s body was removed from a Bayou La Batre grave and reinterred in the Church Street Graveyard, where Joe Cain Day celebrations begin every Sunday before Fat Tuesday. The celebration is known as “The People’s Parade,” because originally anyone was allowed to join the procession. Police have since capped the number of participants.
• Chief Slacabamorinico: The fictional Chickasaw chief that Joe Cain invented for that 1866 procession. Only four men have played Old Slac throughout Mobile’s Mardi Gras history. Cain dressed as the chief until 1879, then Old Slac went dormant for nearly 90 years. The chief was reincarnated in 1967, when Julian Lee “Judy” Rayford — a Mardi Gras historian, enthusiast and folklorist who had arranged to have Cain reburied at the Church Street Graveyard — donned the headdress while leading the first Joe Cain Day procession. Rayford turned over the role to J.B. “Red” Foster, chief inspector for the Mobile Fire Department, in 1969. Foster stepped down in 1985 and was replaced by the Rev. Bennett Wayne Dean Sr., pastor of the Excel and Megargel United Methodist Churches in Monroe County, who will lead the parade Sunday.
• The Merry Widows: Old Slac leads the procession, but it’s the Merry Widows who kick off Joe Cain Day. Starting in 1974, every Joe Cain Day, the “widows” don black gowns, hats and veils and gather to go to the entrance of Church Street Graveyard early Sunday to weep and moan near the grave of their departed “husband,” Joe Cain. After the mourning, they start dancing and partying, and then move on to Cain’s former home, at 906 Augusta St., to toast and eulogize the man. During the actual Joe Cain Day procession, the widows — there are between 10 and 20, and their true identities are kept secret — ride in a trolley-like vehicle tossing cups, beads and black roses to the crowd.
• Comic Cowboys: Every Fat Tuesday, the Comic Cowboys forsake fancy floats and costumes and instead parade through Mobile on flatbed trucks festooned with satiric handmade signs mocking newsmakers of the previous year. The Cowboys were founded in 1884 under the slogan “Without Malice” and take pot shots at everyone from local football heroes to national politicians.
• Mardi Gras Royalty: Every year, the Mobile Carnival Association (a traditionally white organization) and the Mobile Area Mardi Gras Association (MAMGA, a traditionally black organization) anoint kings and queens to rule over their Fat Tuesday parades and other festivities. The Carnival Association chooses King Felix III. The two are chosen nearly a year before Mardi Gras, crowned Saturday night, given the key to the city on Monday and lead the King Felix parade on Fat Tuesday. MAMGA chooses its King Elexis I and queen. The pair are crowned Sunday evening, have a Royal Feast on Monday and lead the MAMGA Mammoth Parade on Tuesday. Both sets of royalty have courts of knights and ladies, or maidens, who accompany them. King Felix III and King Elexis I both arrive in Mobile on royal yachts each year from the Isle of Joy after crossing the Sea of Lemonade. Both monarchs rule until midnight on Fat Tuesday.
• Folly chasing Death: The Order of Myths always has one float that features a jester named Folly, armed with inflated pig bladders, chasing the skeletal figure of Death around the broken column of life. Most agree the scene symbolizes that laughter is the only way to deal with the imminence of mortality, although some say Folly and Death — who debuted shortly after the Civil War — also represent the South and the North, respectively.  Whenever Folly hits Death with a pig bladder, it’s a strike against the Union army, some claim.  In the Knights of Revelry parade earlier on Fat Tuesday, Folly is also played by someone on a float, and he vigorously beats his inflated pig bladders against the float.
• Mardi Gras parades are also known as “boomalatta” or “boom boom”
• 2007 Videos: Pharoahs, Mystic Stripers, MOT,  MOT (2),  Joe Cain Procession,  MOM,  Neptune’ Daughters,  KOR
• Local Legacies – History of Mardi Gras Originated in Mobile Alabama
  Mardi Gras Ball Schedule
  Mardi Gras History Museum
  Toomey’s Mardi Gras
  Mobile Popcorn
  The Mother of All Mardi Gras
  Mobile Carnival Museum, a Museum full of Mardi Gras history
  Mobile & Alabama Mystic Societies & Organizations
  South Coast USA
  University of South Alabama Links
• Official Moonpie Website