Backstreet Cultural Museum

Sylvester Francis spent decades collecting what others threw away after the parades ended. The hand-beaded Mardi Gras Indian suits — each taking a full year to make, weighing up to 100 pounds, worn once — weren't museum pieces to him. They were proof that Tremé's Black parade traditions weren't footnotes to the city's culture. They were the culture. Francis founded the Backstreet Cultural Museum in 1999. The collection documents second lines, Mardi Gras Indians, jazz funerals, and Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs — the street traditions that survived when so much else didn't. The museum holds rare photographs of Mardi Gras Indian gangs from the 1940s and elaborate suits from years past, artifacts that would have disappeared without Francis deciding they mattered enough to save. Originally housed in a former Tremé funeral home, the museum moved to a larger space in 2023. It's become a clearing house for information about upcoming Mardi Gras Indian and second-line events, and hosts ceremonies including the annual White Buffalo Day procession to Congo Square. Photography is allowed; video isn't. You go because this is where the beadwork and the photographs and the actual costumes make clear what a century of erasure tried to bury: that New Orleans street culture was built here, by these hands, in these neighborhoods, and it never stopped.