The Mummers Parade and the History It Carries

The Mummers Parade has marched down Broad Street in Philadelphia on January first every year since nineteen oh one. The tradition it grew from is older: Swedish and English settlers were processing through Philadelphia neighborhoods on New Year's Day in the seventeen hundreds, carrying instruments, wearing costumes, making noise to drive out the old year. The formal parade emerged from that informal tradition over two centuries, developing into string bands, fancy brigades, and comic divisions, each with their own clubs, their own costumes built over months, their own performance tradition.

It is the only American folk carnival tradition of that age still operating continuously. It is also a parade that excluded Black Philadelphians from participation for most of its history, that used blackface and minstrel-tradition costuming from its earliest formal years through the nineteen sixties, and that the city finally ordered to remove minstrel performance elements in nineteen sixty-four.

Violations continued after the ban. Blackface costumes were documented in parade coverage into the nineteen seventies and beyond. Black performers were denied membership in string band clubs through the mid-twentieth century by both formal policy and informal pressure.

Both things are true and neither cancels the other. The Mummers is a genuine working-class Philadelphia tradition, rooted in specific neighborhoods, maintained by families and clubs that have passed the music, the costumes, and the performance style from generation to generation for over a century. It is also a tradition that embedded racial exclusion as a cultural practice and defended that exclusion long after it had become indefensible.

The parade still happens. The string bands still play. The history of who was and was not allowed to participate is carried along with everything else.