Carnival Memphis

[3] The Royal Court is made up of young women from Memphis (princesses), mostly around the age of nineteen, typically having completed their first-year of study in college, and their escorts.

However, the Grand Krewes (once known as secret societies) also stage their own festivities throughout the year, elect their own royalty, manage their own budget, and have their own membership requirements.

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.

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.

[6] Sketches of floats and events by Gutherz appeared in national magazines and publications and were essential the success of Memphis Mardi Gras.

[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.

[10] During the early twentieth century, great interest developed in creating a citywide event like Carnival, and re-establishing the Mystic Memphi.

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.

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.

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.

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 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).

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.

The national press gradually lost interest, and the Maid of Cotton Pageant was moved to Dallas, Texas, where it exists today.

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.

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.

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 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.

By the later twentieth century Carnival Memphis had the general reputation of having dwindled down to nothing but a series of formal debutante parties at the various private social and country clubs, consisting largely of the city's elite gathering together to promote an event that "was once, but no longer", and it was truly living out its twilight years.

Gone were the parades, the grand parties, the fireworks, the midway, and the hustle and bustle of an entire metropolitan area to promote itself and to gather together to take part in such a great event.

However, as Carnival officials grew more and more aware about certain negative issues surrounding the event and its severely declining reputation, they began actually implementing steps over the years to bring outsiders into their realm.

According to Jim Cole, who lived in Memphis from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s and attended numerous Cotton Carnivals, "Elvis Presley was a major headline entertainer during the mid 1950s".