Social Aid & Pleasure Club

The Social Aid & Pleasure Club is a group of LA based promotors, performers, seasoned organizers, and artists working to create a space for art and activism, combining a good time with consciousness and giving.
Our name was derived from a century old New Orleans tradition from the African American community, in which public celebration and financial aid went hand in hand. Dues gathered every month served as a social safety net and guaranteed a funeral parade with style for any members who passed. Institutionalized racism excluded black people from attending Mardi Gras up until the late 1960s. Social Aid & Pleaseure Clubs created an opportunity for the black community to have their own fat Tuesday celebrations otherwise known as Black Mardi Gras.
"The transformation of New Orleans in the 1970s from a city with a majority white population to one with a majority black population, the rapid changes in the local economy caused by economic restructuring and de-industrialization, the raised expectations and bitter disillusionment that accompanied Black political mobilization in local politics, all functioned to impose renewed scrutiny on what it means to be poor and Black in the Big Easy. The long-term consequences of urban renewal rendered obsolete old rivalries between Black neighborhoods "uptown" and "downtown," while the fiscal crisis of the state undermined the ability of politics to solve local problems. By 1985, more than a quarter of the city's African-American workers were unemployed. New Orleans had become the third poorest large city in the country. Nearly half of local black families lived in poverty. Under those conditions, traditions of self-help and mutual aid became morer important, while narratives addressing and neutralizing the hegemony of white racism took on more urgency." - George Lipsitz