Mobile Mardi Gras: Seventeen Oh Three, Older Than New Orleans

New Orleans gets the reputation. Mobile, Alabama, gets the history. French colonial settlers held the first Mardi Gras celebration on American soil in seventeen oh three, at a settlement called Fort Louis de la Mobile, fifteen years before New Orleans existed as a city. The tradition has continued almost without interruption for more than three hundred years, with a pause only during the Civil War years, making Mobile's carnival the oldest official one in the United States.

A mystic society called the Société de Saint Louise was established in seventeen oh four. The Masque de la Mobile followed the same year. These were the precursors to what would become the krewe structure that both Mobile and New Orleans later formalized.

Mobile's Black Mardi Gras tradition runs alongside and separately from the white celebration. When African American residents were excluded from the white parade circuit, they built their own. The Colored Carnival Association, founded in nineteen thirty-eight, was among the earliest formal African American krewe organizations in the country. The exact origins of the parallel tradition before that date are not fully documented in surviving primary sources, though oral histories and community records point to informal celebrations that predate the Association's founding. What is documented is that Mobile's African American community maintained an independent carnival tradition through decades when participation in the official celebration was legally denied to them, and that this tradition is still active.

The city that started Mardi Gras in America still throws a parade every year. It still mostly loses the marketing argument to New Orleans. It has stopped being bothered by this.