Roselyn Lionhart, one half of the renowned French Quarter husband-and-wife busking team David & Roselyn, is being honored this Saturday, March 14, by the Mardi Gras Indian Hall of Fame for her work as a civil rights activist.

As Chairperson of the Congress of Racial Equality in California in the 1960s, Lionhart worked tirelessly to lobby for fair housing. She organized the first march on Sacramento in 1963 and a sit-in in support of the Rumford Bill AB 1240 housing bill.

She was later arrested, convicted, and acquitted after “sitting in” at a San Francisco hotel in protest of job discrimination.

She and her husband David Leonard organized various other sit-ins, protests, and fair housing campaigns in California, Michigan, and Louisiana. Their efforts helped Flint, Michigan, become the first city in country to pass a fair housing law by popular vote.

With the 1999 legal case Lionhart vs. Foster, Lionhart, Leonard, and other street musicians successfully sued the State of Louisiana for their First Amendment rights after the husband and wife were arrested for playing too loudly on Royal Street.

The court ruled in Lionhart’s favor, declaring that the street’s noise ordinance was unconstitutional and noting that “there is probably no more appropriate place for reasonably amplified speech than the streets and sidewalks of a downtown business district.”

Cherice Harrison-Nelson, the Big Queen of the Guardians of the Flame who invited Lionhart to be honored this weekend, was a fellow plaintiff in the case.

The ceremony will take place at 12:30 p.m. on Saturday at the McKenna Museum of African American Art (2003 Carondelet).