The West Indian American Day Parade 2024 kick off this Monday in New York City, with thousands of revelers dancing and marching along Brooklyn’s Eastern Parkway in one of the world’s largest celebrations of Caribbean culture.
Now in its 57th year, the annual Labor Day event turns the borough’s Eastern Parkway into a kaleidoscope of feather-covered costumes and colorful flags as participants make their way down the thoroughfare alongside floats stacked high with speakers playing soca and reggae music.
The event has its roots in more traditionally timed, pre-Lent Carnival celebrations started by a Trinidadian immigrant in Manhattan around a century ago, according to the organizers. The festivities were moved to the warmer time of year in the 1940s.
The Labor Day parade is now the culmination of days of carnival events in the city, which includes a steel pan band competition and J’Ouvert, a separate street party commemorating freedom from slavery.
The parade was started in the 1930s by Jessie Waddle, a Trinidadian immigrant, and a few friends, originally as an indoor costumed Carnival gathering in Harlem. Carnival celebrations usually precede the religious observance of Lent and so are held outdoors in February.
Today, the parade attracts millions of spectators from around the world, hosts roughly 100,000 participants and streams online. It has also expanded to a weeklong celebration that includes a children’s carnival, the international music-filled Brass Fest, Panorama Steelpan Competition and Mas, short for masquerade. That event has its roots in slavery when African people, prohibited from participating in masquerade balls, formed their own ancestral celebrations mocking their enslavers.
