Split decision

Film explores racially exclusive festivals in Alabama | Meghan Keane

Separate but equal may have been thrown out of legal usage in 1954, when Brown v. Board of Education was decided, but in Margaret Brown's disturbing new documentary The Order of Myths, it seems the tradition is alive and well.

Brown's film follows the events leading up to last year's Mardi Gras festival in Mobile, Ala. Home to the country's first Carnival festival, it is also the seat of an embarrassing display of segregation. Barred from participating in the white festival, the black community decided to begin its own parade. Today, the two coexist, semi-harmoniously, leaving the city's residents to ponder whether the situation is voluntary.

Rarely is a place's bloody history so closely tied to its present. An ancestor from Mobile's wealthy Meaher family illegally helmed the last slave ship to land in America. Many of the city's black residents still live on the family's property. The 2007 queen is a Meaher.