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In New Orleans, Black Funeral Homes Help a City Grieve

The new PBS film “Death Is Our Business” reveals how Black-owned funeral homes kept the city’s unique celebratory traditions alive amid the pandemic’s deadly first wave.

A still from the PBS film “Death Is Our Business” shows the funeral for Elder Darrylon Lee at Franklin Ave. Baptist Church in New Orleans. 

A still from the PBS film “Death Is Our Business” shows the funeral for Elder Darrylon Lee at Franklin Ave. Baptist Church in New Orleans. 

Photographer: L. Kasimu Harris/FRONTLINE (PBS)

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When Ellis Marsalis, pianist and patriarch of a legendary family of New Orleans jazz musicians, died at 85 in April 2020 after being hospitalized with Covid symptoms, the city mourned in silence. In a normal year, Marsalis’s passing would have drawn thousands of people from every corner of New Orleans for a jazz funeral, featuring a brass band, and a second line procession. But as the city reckoned with the early stage of the coronavirus pandemic, no public gatherings were allowed; only ten people were able to gather and pay their respects. 

Death is Our Business, a new documentary that premiered in March on PBS’s “Frontline,” honors lives like Marsalis’s, taken by Covid, and the Black-owned funeral homes that have worked tirelessly to adapt to an onslaught of loss.