08/22/2026
Very powerful history. Thank you for this Black History Archives.
An eighty-two-year-old man died at a City Hall microphone in the middle of his own testimony. Allison "Tootie" Montana was Big Chief of the Yellow Pocahontas, and he had come downtown to describe fifty years of police harassment of Black Mardi Gras Indians. Somebody in that room told him to go ahead, Chief, and take his time. He did not have any. The hearing he died trying to get was never rescheduled, and twenty-one years later the feathers are still the only part of it anybody shows you. What is underneath them starts at a kitchen table.
A man sat at that kitchen table in the Seventh Ward and cut up the carton the eggs came in.
He was a baker named Alfred Montana, and the boy watching him work was his son Allison, who everybody called Tootie.
Alfred was not making anything a stranger would have called art. He was making a lift, a small raised bed of cardboard to sew a beaded patch onto, so the picture would stand off the cloth instead of lying flat against it.
What he was building is called a suit, and it is the single most photographed thing in New Orleans that almost no tourist has ever actually stood next to.
Suits are hand sewn, bead by bead, onto canvas. Big Chief Demond Melancon and Big Chief Darryl Montana, Tootie's son, told an audience at Princeton in 2018 that a suit can weigh over a hundred pounds and take as much as five thousand hours to build.
Then it comes out only a handful of times that season, on Mardi Gras Day, on the Feast of St. Joseph three weeks later, and on Super Sunday. Tradition calls for a new suit by the next Carnival, so the morning after Mardi Gras you start sewing again.
None of that work is done for a grandstand. There is no published route, no ticket, no float, no throw, and for most of its history no invitation to anybody who did not already live on the block.
The invitation had never run the other way either. Black New Orleanians were shut out of the white Carnival organizations, so they built something those organizations could not join.
The first tribe anybody can document is the Creole Wild West, founded around 1885 by Becate Batiste, a Seventh Ward Creole of African American, French and Choctaw descent. Tootie Montana is described in the literature as his grand nephew.
You have probably heard a different beginning, the one that gets shared every February. Native people in Louisiana sheltered those running from slavery, and the masking is a hundred and forty years of thank you.
That version is the tradition's own account and there is real history underneath it, but nothing written runs back past Batiste. Scholars point instead toward Congo Square, toward Kongo warrior dance, toward Choctaw family lines like his own, and toward a Wild West show that wintered in the city in 1884 and put roughly sixty Plains Indians on New Orleans streets in their own dress.
Bryan Wagner of Berkeley has put it plainly, that the prehistory of these organizations is still an open question. The honest answer is that nobody knows for certain, which has never once stopped a meme from telling you it does.
The Montanas' own history is smaller than any of that and better documented. Alfred made a crown with a star on it, and the feathers on that crown did not flop.
They stayed sewn down tight and they held their shape, and no other man in the city could get his feathers to do it. Tootie wanted to know how.
He asked his father directly. He said he remembered that star crown from years back, and he wanted to make one, but how do you get it to move the way you want it to move.
Alfred put his hand on his chin. He looked at his son and he smiled and he shook his head, the way you shake your head at something that cannot be done.
He never told him. Not that day and not any day after.
Tootie figured it out on his own, eventually, the way everything in this tradition gets figured out, which is alone and late and by ruining a lot of material first. By the time he built that crown his father was dead, and he said afterward that being sorry about the timing was the part that stayed with him.
He had been masking on his own account since 1947, and he liked to point out that Jackie Robinson started the same year. Robinson did not play ball for fifty years, but Tootie masked for fifty-two, and the only Carnival he sat out was 1986.
The rest of the year he made his living as a lather, nailing up the wood and metal frames that plaster gets built onto. A man who spent his working hours giving flat walls a skeleton to stand out from went home and did the same thing to beadwork.
He said it himself, that everybody was flat, and that he was flat too until he decided he wanted to be different, and then he simply started raising his pieces up. His daddy had done a little of it, he said, with the carton the eggs came in.
Raising the beadwork was the smaller of the two things he did. He took a tradition that had settled its arguments on Carnival morning with weapons and turned the argument into a contest over who was prettiest, and he said flatly that he was the one who changed it from fighting with guns to fighting with suits.
The National Endowment for the Arts gave him a National Heritage Fellowship in 1987. The city he lived in had a different way of recognizing the tradition, and it had been consistent about that since he was a young man.
It had not changed its mind by the spring of 2005.
On Saturday, March 19 of that year, the feast of St. Joseph, Justin Harris was seventeen years old and standing in a parking lot in Central City in purple feathers.
He was spyboy for the Wild Tchoupitoulas, which meant he walked out ahead of his tribe. He had beaded his own apron, doing his homework first and then sitting with the needle for hours, and the picture he had put on it was an Indian riding a bear.
Boys had walked out ahead in those feathers before. Forty years earlier two of Tootie's own sons went out in their first suits and joined the crowds in the French Quarter.
Darryl Montana, who was nine that day, has described what happened when his thirteen-year-old brother tried an Indian move on the street. A white officer swung a billy club at his head and missed.
So Justin Harris was standing in a tradition that already knew exactly what this was. Across the street from him, in A.L. Davis Park, squad cars were driving in circles fast enough that the smoke was coming up off the tires.
Watching the same cars from the same lot was an eleven-year-old named Bryian Fluker. She was spygirl for the same tribe, and the Pocahontas beaded on her apron had been sewn there by her grandfather, John Ellis, who had made her whole suit.
By seven o'clock that evening she was crying, and her grandfather said later that the word for what she was, was heartbroken.
The order that put her there came down, according to Indians young and old who were on that street, to a choice between removing their feathers and going to jail, and the word the officers used in the middle of that order is not one this page will print. Hundreds of people were told it.
Take off the thing you spent a year of nights making, in the street, in front of your neighbors, and put it in the trunk of the car. That was the choice, and there was no third thing in it.
Justin could not do it. When Big Chief Keith Gibson came past with the Comanche Hunters, the boy threw his suit back on and went with them, and his mother went after him and got stopped by two officers and lost sight of him entirely.
At some point that night Justin asked the two adults standing with him why he was being punished for doing something right. Neither his mother nor Bryian's grandfather had an answer for him.
The police had one. They said the crackdown started with a call about someone in pink regalia carrying a weapon.
Department spokesman Marlon Defillo confirmed that a caller had reported someone dressed in pink regalia. Officers never found that person, and they found no weapons at all.
The final arrest tally in and around A.L. Davis Park was two. One young woman for damage to public property, and one other person for public intoxication.
Bertrand Butler, who was sixty and had represented the Indians for years, walked up to the captain on the scene to ask what the reason for all of this was, and left with a summons. Witnesses said officers handled him roughly, the department said he kicked the captain, and the two accounts have never been reconciled.
Butler and others pushed until the New Orleans City Council agreed to open a special session on how the police treated the Indians. It was set for Monday, June 27, 2005, and Tootie Montana intended to speak.
He was eighty-two years old. He had been dealing with this particular subject since the 1940s, and he stood up at the public microphone to lay out half a century of it.
He got out the shape of it. Police cars coming from all directions, and him asking what this was, and being told to get out of the street and onto the sidewalk, and him saying, for what, we weren't doing nothing.
He said he hoped it would get straightened out. Somewhere in the room a voice told him to go ahead, Chief, and take his time.
He did not have any. His last words in that chamber were that he wanted this to stop, and then he went down.
The chiefs in the room did the only thing there was to do, which was to raise Indian Red. It is the prayer of this tradition, and Tootie had said of it that he sang it the way his daddy sang it, and that it is a hymn, like a spiritual.
The paramedics carried him out through a room full of grown men singing it. The Indians went out behind the ambulance and walked it all the way to Charity Hospital, singing the entire way, and at Charity they were told he was gone.
The session he died in was going to reconvene in September.
Sixty-three days after he went down, the levees failed. Charity Hospital, where they walked him, never opened its doors again.
The hearing was never rescheduled. Not that September, not the year after, not ever.
Seven years later, on January 6, 2012, the first day of Carnival, the city made the date Big Chief Tootie Montana Day. His son Darryl stood at his father's bronze statue in Louis Armstrong Park that afternoon and sang Indian Red over a wreath.
The statue is by the New Orleans sculptor Sheleen Jones-Adenle and it stands a short walk from Congo Square. The plaque gives his name, his dates, his tribe, and the words Chief of Chiefs.
It does not mention the microphone. Visitors have complained that there is no information board there at all, so a stranger can stand in front of a full-size bronze Black Indian in a public park in the middle of New Orleans and learn absolutely nothing about how the man in front of them died or what he was in the middle of saying.
So carry the part the statue leaves off. The next time one of those photographs comes across your feed, all feathers and light and somebody's caption about magic, tell whoever sent it what the picture costs, who has been ordered to take it off in the street, and what an eighty-two-year-old man was still trying to explain when he ran out of time.
The city has his name on a day and his face on a bronze. It never did give his people the hearing.
And under the beadwork, holding the whole shining thing up off the flat where somebody might finally see it, there is a piece of cardboard from a carton of eggs.
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