Backstreet Cultural Museum
1202 Barracks St, New Orleans, LA
New Orleans, LA
A small neighborhood museum holding the beaded, feathered heart of Black New Orleans street culture, from Mardi Gras Indian suits to jazz funerals.
The Backstreet Cultural Museum is a small but extraordinary museum in the Treme neighborhood devoted to the African American street traditions that shaped New Orleans culture. Housed in a former funeral home, it holds one of the finest collections anywhere of Mardi Gras Indian suits, along with artifacts and photographs documenting second lines, jazz funerals, and the social aid and pleasure clubs that sustain them.
What sets the museum apart is how close it is to the living culture it honors. It grew directly from the community and is deeply woven into the neighborhood's ongoing traditions. For visitors, it opens a window onto a side of New Orleans that most tourists never see, the beaded, feathered, brass-band world of the city's Black neighborhoods.
What Guests Love
- Standing among the intricate, hand-sewn beadwork of Mardi Gras Indian suits up close
- Learning the traditions of second lines, social aid and pleasure clubs, and jazz funerals
- The intimate, community-rooted feeling of a museum run by and for the neighborhood
- Being in Treme, the historic heart of Black New Orleans culture
Worth Knowing
- The museum is small and personal, so it rewards an unhurried, attentive visit
- It is a short walk from the French Quarter across Rampart Street into Treme
- The culture on display is living tradition, not a costume shop, so approach it with respect
- Nearby Louis Armstrong Park and St. Augustine Church round out a Treme visit
Details
New Orleans, LA
Learn about Backstreet Cultural Museum
Treme, an ancestral neighborhood
Treme, just across Rampart Street from the French Quarter, is one of the oldest neighborhoods of free people of color in the United States. In the era of slavery and after, it became a place where free Black residents, refugees, and formerly enslaved people built homes, churches, and a rich cultural life.
Out of this neighborhood came much of the brass-band and second-line tradition that helped give birth to jazz. Congo Square, at the edge of Treme in what is now Louis Armstrong Park, was a gathering place where enslaved and free Africans kept their music and dance alive, and its rhythms echo through New Orleans music to this day.
Mardi Gras Indians
The Mardi Gras Indians are Black New Orleanians who, over generations, have masked in spectacular hand-sewn suits of beads and feathers, honoring a tradition said to reflect historic bonds between African Americans and Native people who sheltered escaped slaves. Each suit can take a year of nightly sewing and represents thousands of hours of work.
The Backstreet Cultural Museum holds a remarkable collection of these suits, letting visitors study the intricate beadwork and towering feathered crowns up close. On Mardi Gras and on St. Joseph's night the tribes parade through the streets, chanting and competing to be the prettiest, and the museum preserves and explains a tradition that is fiercely guarded and passed down within the community.
Second lines and jazz funerals
The museum also documents the second-line parades organized by social aid and pleasure clubs, neighborhood organizations that grew from mutual-aid societies formed when Black residents were excluded from insurance and other services. Their Sunday parades, led by brass bands, are among the most joyful public traditions in America.
Closely related is the jazz funeral, in which a brass band leads mourners with slow, mournful hymns on the way to the cemetery and then breaks into upbeat music on the return, celebrating a life even in grief. Housed in a former funeral home, the museum is a fitting keeper of this tradition, showing how New Orleans turns even death into music and community.
A living culture
What makes the Backstreet special is that it is not a distant, glass-case museum but a keeper of living traditions still practiced in the surrounding streets. It was built from within the community, and its collections come from the very people who mask, march, and mourn in these neighborhoods.
A visit rewards curiosity and respect. The traditions on display are sources of deep pride and identity, and understanding them adds immeasurably to any visit to New Orleans. Paired with a walk through Treme, past its historic church and Congo Square, the museum reveals the cultural bedrock beneath the city's famous music and celebration.
Closest Boutels
The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.
Things to Do Near New Orleans
Louis Armstrong Park and Congo Square
About half a mile southwest
A park honoring the New Orleans jazz legend, containing Congo Square, a historic gathering place for African music and dance.
St. Augustine Church
A few blocks away
One of the oldest African American Catholic parishes in the country, with a memorial to the enslaved.
French Quarter
About 1 mile south
The historic core of New Orleans, just across Rampart Street from Treme.