Carnival Memphis

In the 1870s, Memphis was looking to regain its economic vitality and prosperity. Along with much of the South and the nation as a whole, Memphis was suffering from the devastation of the Civil War and Reconstruction. In 1872, the city of Memphis celebrated Mardi Gras, keeping with the traditional Christian liturgical calendar just before the season of Lent, similar to what was practiced in New Orleans, Louisiana, and other cities. The celebration was the brainchild of local businessmen such as David P. Hadden and former Confederate soldier Colton Greene, who in 1871 proposed the idea in response to the Memphis Daily Appeal's call for ideas and plans to boost the city's economy and business community.[4] The celebration rivaled those of New Orleans. Greene—best remembered as the founder of the Memphis Mardi Gras—also founded the Mystic Society of Memphi that funded and organized the social events of the carnival. With the help of Hadden and others, “Greene persuaded railroad companies to lower fares during the celebrations, hired fashionable artists and costumers and succeeded in attracting huge crowds for the grand parades.”[5] Over the course of the years, more secret societies, or “krewe” systems formed and were instrumental in planning and staging the big parade and elaborate balls and parties to celebrate and serve as the face of the festive season.

The carnival featured colorful costumes, inspired by the cultures of classical antiquity: Greece, Rome, and Egypt. Playing on the Egyptian roots of its name, Memphis artists and designers used imagery in floats, invitations, and flyers to give the party a mystical feeling. The festival had its own inventive origin story, created by artists such as Memphis artist Carl Gutherz. Gutherz was commissioned to create elaborate invitations to society parties and balls, which created interest and envy.[6] Sketches of floats and events by Gutherz appeared in national magazines and publications and were essential the success of Memphis Mardi Gras. A Memphis Daily Appeal account of the first Memphis Mardi Gras estimated 20,000 people attended in a city of slightly more than 40,000.[4]

The 1872 Memphis Mardi Gras featured a Ku Klux Klan float. This float, as reported in the Memphis Daily Appeal and the pro-Klan Memphis Avalanche, was the Klans response liberal sensitive of Northern Whites who thought of the Klan as a violently racist organization.[7] The Memphis Avalanches description of the float:

Those mythical terrors to negroes, the Ku-Klux were well represented. . . In every instance they were in black, with high hats of a conical shape. Each hat bore the skull and cross bones and the terrible letters K. K. K. in white. As they marched along, the Negroes [moved] back. Many of the K. K.s had rope lassos, and it was a favorite bit of pleasantry to lasso a Negro. No violence was offered, but the contortions and grimaces of the captives were highly amusing.[8]

The float was an attempt by the Klansmen to poke fun at the medias depiction of the Klan. Historian Elaine Parsons says the float depicted outrages by the Klan to ridicule the newspapers that reported outrages by the Klan.[7] An article excerpt from the Memphis Daily Appeal notes a white man on the float impersonating a “spade,” a derogatory term for African Americans.[9] The float, occurring a mere six years after the 1866 Memphis Massacre, re-emphasized that the celebrations were for White citizens only.

1878 Memphis Mardi Gras invitation to pageants occurring on March 3, 1878 and March 4, 1878. [7]

Though the celebration of Memphis Mardi Gras saw great success, the massive Yellow Fever outbreak and the decline of the city in the 1880s cause the gradual decline of Mardi Gras. By roughly the turn of the century, the party was over. The legacy lived on in other Memphis events with a revival during the Great Depression. Mardi Gras was reincarnated in 1931 as the Cotton Carnival, and the new celebration became one of the biggest parties of the South, remaining a culturally significant event that Memphis celebrates to this day.[10]

During the early twentieth century, great interest developed in creating a citywide event like Carnival, and re-establishing the Mystic Memphi. As more and more influential Memphians became actively interested, Memphi and the Memphis Cotton Carnival Association were established in the early 1930s. The efforts were conducted to bring a sense of excitement and life back to the city of Memphis and its people. However, rather than following the Lenten calendar and being held strictly to celebrate Mardi Gras, designers decided that this festival would promote something else, Memphis' primary asset at the time-cotton. During this time, Memphis and the Mid-South region, like the rest of the United States, were in the throes of the Great Depression. Many were out of work and the region's cotton was selling for pennies a pound. The prosperity of the Mid-South was dependent on cotton and measures had to be taken to increase the use of this precious commodity. At the same time, the Memphis Chamber of Commerce was having trouble raising money to compete with other cities in the South, such as Atlanta and New Orleans. A. Arthur Halle and a group of businessmen called on Herbert Jennings, a downtown theatre manager for a donation. Jennings agreed to contribute and shared an idea that he believed would help promote business and draw attention to cotton. To help publicize an upcoming movie, Jennings offered local retailers the opportunity to display cotton goods in his theatre and planned to encourage them to use their own store windows to promote cotton clothing. Halle was intrigued by the idea and envisioned a larger citywide promotion and called upon Everett R. Cook, who was President of the Memphis Cotton Exchange at this time. Cook was invited to come to the theatre to hear the ideas. Those ideas quickly grew into a plan for a grand celebration with a King, Queen and Royal Court that would involve people from all over the Mid-South. The idea was to promote the use and wearing of cotton products which would lead to increased demand and stimulate sales. It worked, as people began to demand more cotton products from socks to ball gowns.

Cook expressed his vision this way: "Carnival is to promote business for everybody and should not be used by any one group. It is for all of the stores and all of the people, for all kinds of professions and businesses, for the city as a whole regardless of the size of the business, the social standing, wealth, prestige, family background or anything else that would tend to make anyone feel that he or she would not be invited to participate in Carnival."

The fanfare and excitement that centered around the Cotton Carnival climaxed throughout the mid-to-late twentieth century. During this time, the event stretched several weeks during the months of May and June, and had incorporated much more than it had originally set out to do. The Memphis Cotton Carnival Association had become a very centralized governing body, which along with the participating krewes, was becoming a festival that could not be rivaled anywhere in the South except New Orleans' Mardi Gras (in which it brought in as many numbers). While the series of street parades in downtown Memphis continued to be held, in addition to the numerous parties at many of the city's most elite social clubs continued, the event started to form a new face of entertainment that dubbed it the "South's Greatest Party" for all to enjoy. The Carnival and its krewes held on to the traditional aspects of Carnival, but entertained onlookers with such musicians as Elvis Presley, Waylon Jennings, and Jerry Lee Lewis, welcoming guests from all over the United States, and from all over the world. By this time it had truly become the city's most important and celebrated event, participated by Memphians and Mid-Southerners from all socioeconomic backgrounds. In addition to the Music Festival, its most intriguing and popular event was the Arrival of the Royal Barge. This event was very much a "sight to see" in which the King, Queen, and Royal Court, along with the royal pages, guards, and other participants would all ride in on a beautifully decorated barge on the Mississippi River, docking in downtown Memphis for all onlookers to revel and awe over. With elaborately designed and well-lit backdrops, along with the night sky being lit up with an array of fireworks, this was truly a wonder for everyone present. The entire city, it seemed, gathered along the Mississippi riverbanks on a spring evening to attend the Royal Barge Landing, walk along the Carnival midway, and watch the Carnival parade. Many national publications and media covered the fanfare, and the Association even crowned a Maid of Cotton to tour the globe and promote cotton fashions.

The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. left Memphis devastated in many different ways, one aspect being the state of its downtown. As urban sprawl began to be more and more common, with businesses and residents moving away from the city's inner core, the public events that were once staged by the Cotton Carnival became few and far between. Parades slowly became a thing of the past, as did the arrival of the Royal Barge. The city of Memphis municipal government acquired the "float factory" once used to manufacture the elaborately decorated floats, and mainstream Memphians and Mid-Southerners grew less and less interested in staging this event. Also, other festivals began to form that took the place of Carnival, such as the Memphis in May International Festival, and its highly anticipated Beale Street Music Festival.

Over the years, however, Carnival's luster began to fade along with the declining role of cotton in the area. The national press gradually lost interest, and the Maid of Cotton Pageant was moved to Dallas, Texas, where it exists today. For various reasons, the 1980s saw the name of the Cotton Carnival be changed to the Great River Carnival, and because of even less approval changed again to Carnival Memphis. The organization sited this was done because the community had grown in such tremendous ways, and that the Memphis economy had become more diversified and no longer centered exclusively around cotton. The king was beginning to be chosen from leaders in other aspects of commerce other than the cotton industry, and was no longer referred to as "King Cotton," but as simply King, or Rex Carnivali.

For years, the Cotton Carnival was, though not officially, for all intents and purposes for whites only. When a Beale Street dentist named Dr. R.Q. Venson took his nephew downtown to see a Carnival parade in 1934, complete with the marching bands and floats (which were for a few years in its existence pulled by black men), and asked him how he liked it. He didn't, his nephew replied, because "all the negroes were horses." Venson enjoined other black Memphians to hold their own separate event. As a result, the Cotton Makers' Fiesta was organized in 1934. The name changed to Cotton Makers' Jubilee and, as a protest to establish dignity and respect for Negro men and women, the first celebration was held the third week of May 1936. The Jubilee enjoyed its most successful years from 1948 to 1958. There were only two occasions in the celebrations past when no activities took place. The first such time was during World War II and the second occasion in 1968 due to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.[11] The organization briefly merged with Carnival Memphis in 1982 when it became known as the krewe Kemet Jubilee.

The King was, and still is, an older man who had ties with the industry being saluted that year, while the Queen was, and still is, a young, unmarried woman from one of Memphis' "better" families. That's one tradition, at least, that hasn't changed over the years.

The elitist charge came about from all the supposedly secret activities of the Carnival royalty and especially the various Grand Krewes, whose membership — and parties, especially — were by invitation only. Year after year, many outsiders would read The Commercial Appeal (Memphis newspaper) stories of fancy-dress balls and dinners and dances held by mysterious-sounding, Egyptian-themed Krewes, and wonder, why they could not attend those parties or have their daughters debut in these certain circles; this sense of separation within the Memphis community led to charges of elitism.