By Julie Shwartzwald

The city’s social aid and pleasure clubs are more than parade groups. The secondline defines New Orleans, it gives the city a cultural continuity in a time when tradition has fallen by the wayside in many American cities. Parading brings a community, a neighborhood, together by giving that “spontaneous joy of life that you can only get once the music starts, and the people start jumping,” as Prince of Wales financial Secretary Joe Stern said.
Stern has lived in New Orleans since 1980, and has been parading with the Prince of Wales in the dirty dozen (the 12th ward) for nearly two decades. To the best of his knowledge, he integrated the secondline.

“But, you know, people are really accepting of it. You know, it’s like if you like their culture, if you love their culture, the people—especially the people who are part of the culture—that’s what they care about.”

New Orleans’ social aid and pleasure clubs were born after the Civil War when black people struggled to obtain insurance from racist companies. The clubs stepped up to help pay a family’s rent, for example, if someone was in the hospital. The clubs would sometimes be organized by profession, or by neighborhood. While their impetus was social aid, the clubs never neglected the cultural importance of pleasure. Not only did the clubs host annual parades—a tradition that still stands proudly—but they also regularly hosted baseball games, picnics, and dances.

Today, the clubs continue to provide a kind of social aid, though it appears much less frequently in a monetary form, due to the rising costs of hosting the annual parades. While club money gets filtered toward costumes and bands for the annual secondlines and Mardi Gras, the club spirit is what truly contributes to the community.

“I mean, [the decline of the neighborhood] is one of the worst aspects of Katrina,” Stern explained. “And even before Katrina. I mean, ever since crack-cocaine, the whole neighborhood thing is really [changing]. And you have your gentrification in your neighborhoods. I mean, it’s a whole long, involved process. There really aren’t too many neighborhoods left in New Orleans, so this is one of the few social fabrics left. The Mardi Gras Indians and the secondline clubs at least hold people together in a kind of culture, an identification and a culture. And I think that’s important for the kids, you know. My little cousin parades with us. It’s an important option for kids. It gives them a sense of community that, that is harder to find than ever.”

Not only the club members feel the importance of uniting the neighborhood and celebrating community. A man frying catfish outside Rock Bottom Grill before the most recent Prince of Wales parade explained that he was “just here helping out, a friend helping out friends.”

Families were out dancing in the streets, some with small children, some with old men. Native New Orleanians and recent migrants to the city partied together. Many people out in the streets of the dirty dozen that overcast day were maintaining a generation-spanning family tradition.

“It’s what I live for,” one woman said while dancing by. “My father was an original Prince of Wales, and my grandfather was an original Prince of Wales. Pass it on down. My mother was a queen for the Prince of Wales, the Lady Wales. It’s all in our blood, it’s what we live for, it’s the music.”

The crowd was speckled with people from diverse backgrounds and heritages, socio-economic statuses and ages.

A man named Ralph simply called it “wonderful.”

“The secondline is a beautiful thing,” he said, “a beautiful tradition for everybody, black or white; no crime, no fussing, no fighting, everybody just having fun. I know a lot of people, I know everybody out here. It’s a good environment, everybody just having fun and doing their thing.”

The secondline exemplifies the New Orleans cultural embrace of true diversity at its best, not just of different groups, but of different individuals. Stern’s whiteness and Jewish background went almost unnoticed by club members, even in the early 90s, when other than “a photographer or two,” Stern was the only white man in sight at Prince of Wales secondline. His passion for the music, his concern for his community, his social embrace of the city was matched by the Prince of Wales’ open acceptance of him.

Social aid and pleasure clubs across the city are known for similar attitudes, Stern explained.

“You know, we have a woman who dresses like a man. There are other clubs who might have somebody who’s gay in them. As long as you love the culture, you know.”

In this, the secondline has stayed most true to its roots: Social aid and pleasure clubs were conceived to strengthen and build up the community. Still today, the clubs are “doing stuff in the community all the time, trying to get the city up,” said Garfield, a member of The Stooges, the band who played at the most recent Prince of Wales parade. “It’s not going as fast as we want to, but we are trying. And these people, they play a big part of the city’s growth, because this is the city’s tradition. Sometimes it rains, sometimes it showers,” he said, “but we won’t stop. We’ll always keep going.”

This sense of unbreakable spirit seems to draw young people to the secondline, both the teens out to people-watch and the toddlers figuring out how to stay on their feet with all those people around.

A white family watching the most recent Prince of Wales parade from their porch was waiting for the secondline to pass.

“It’s a good diversity experience for the kids,” the mother said.

“Mommy, can we go? Can we go?” her seven-year-old asked.

“We’re going to the movies, remember? If we can ever leave, we’re going to the movies...”

“We can follow them! We can follow them,” the boy said, pointing at the dance party taking place outside his home. He tugged at her shirt, while his mother laughed nervously and pulled her child closer to her, still mumbling something about the movies.

And while that mother may have felt that her family belonged outside of the secondline tradition, her child was right to recognize that he—as a New Orleanian—should be dancing too.

So this Mardi Gras, come out and be a part of the social cultural fabric that keeps this city alive. Dance with your neighbors and celebrate, because social aid and recovery are about much more than the money.