Founded in 1999 by photographer, videographer, author, and historian Sylvester “Hawk” Francis (1946–2020), the Backstreet Cultural Museum has presented the history and culture of social aid and pleasure clubs and Black masking traditions for over two decades. A member of the Gentlemen of Leisure Social Aid and Pleasure Club, Francis’s interest in documenting the tradition began when a photographer offered to sell him a photo of himself in his parade outfit. He determined to photograph as many parades as he could, giving one copy of the photos to the subjects and keeping one for himself—a methodology he came to call cultural return. His first camera was a Brownie Hawkeye, hence the nickname “Hawk.” He subsequently purchased a Super 8 camera with which to document jazz funerals, second lines, and Black Carnival traditions.

In 1990 Francis began collecting physical items, starting with a mask worn that year by Victor Harris for his Spirit of Fi Yi Yi Mardi Gras Indian suit. It became the first acquisition for a museum housed in a two-car garage behind his Seventh Ward home. In 1999 Francis moved his collection into the former Blandin Funeral Home in Treme, which had been the starting point of many jazz funerals. The museum has become a treasured community center and cultural landmark. Francis would often give personal tours to visitors, and he distributed route sheets for upcoming second lines to anyone interested.

After a half century spent working to preserve Black history and culture, Francis passed away September 1, 2020. His legacy survives in the deep, lasting contributions he made to the city’s cultural fabric and in the museum, which continues under the stewardship of Francis’s daughter Dominique Dilling Francis.

www.backstreetmuseum.org

Ronald W. Lewis (1951–2020) of New Orleans’s Ninth Ward was a founder of the Original Big Nine Social and Pleasure Club, a Mardi Gras Indian with the Choctaw Hunters, a visual artist who made suits for both groups, a member of the North Side Skull and Bone Gang, and an author, historian, collector, and curator. In 2003 he founded the House of Dance and Feathers, a museum dedicated to Black parading culture and history located behind his Ninth Ward home on Tupelo Street. A close friend of Sylvester Francis, Lewis credited Francis and the Backstreet Cultural Museum with inspiring him to exhibit his own collection in his own neighborhood. “I thought cultural education was the missing part in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, and I’ve worked to help create a museum to fill in this blank,” he said in The House of Dance and Feathers: A Museum, cowritten with Rachel Breunlin of the Neighborhood Story Project and published in 2009.

Lewis died of complications from COVID-19 on March 20, 2020, but his passion for his work and community will live on, inspiring those who knew and admired him.

www.houseofdanceandfeathers.org

As museum directors, authors, and longtime parade participants, Francis and Lewis worked alongside their fellow culture bearers, building collections and telling the stories of those practicing and preserving Black parading traditions. The nonprofit publisher Neighborhood Story Project (NSP) collaborated with Lewis to create his book, The House of Dance and Feathers: A Museum (2009), and with Francis on the collaborative ethnography Fire in the Hole: The Spirit Work of Fi Yi Yi and the Mandingo Warriors (2018).

Following the examples of these partnerships, HNOC has built Dancing in the Streets in collaboration with the NSP and more than 30 club founders, presidents, longtime members, and others represented in the photographs on display. All of the quoted material used in the show, unless otherwise noted, comes from interviews conducted by NSP for HNOC. We are proud to carry the legacy of Lewis and Francis into this exhibition and beyond: at the end of the run of the show, HNOC and the NSP will make the full narratives from these interviews available through HNOC’s online catalog. Excerpts from the interviews also comprise the Second Line Community Voices audio guide, an online experience that can be enjoyed in the gallery or off-site.