Civil rights activist Sybil Morial, wife of New Orleans’ first black mayor, dies at 91

Sybil Haydel Morial, herself an influential figure in New Orleans, was also the mother of former Mayor Marc Morial.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Sybil Haydel Morial, a civil rights activist who was the widow of New Orleans’ first black mayor, Ernest “Dutch” Morial, and the mother of former Mayor Marc Morial, has died at age 91.

Her family announced her death Wednesday in a statement released by the National Urban League, of which Marc Morial is president and CEO. Details about the time and cause of death were not released.

“She faced the harsh realities of Jim Crow with unwavering courage and faith that she instilled not only in her children but in everyone she met,” the statement reads.

Morial was born on November 26, 1932, and raised in deeply segregated New Orleans, where her father was a doctor and her mother a teacher. She later met the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Boston and returned home inspired to play her part in the civil rights movement.

In her 2015 memoir, Witness to Change: From Jim Crow to Empowerment, Morial described how she and her friends, including future Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, were kicked out of a New Orleans city park by a police officer because of the color of their skin.

She attended Xavier University, one of the city’s historically black colleges, before transferring to Boston University, where King studied theology and guest-serried at churches.

Later, on the return trip, she and other black passengers had to transfer to the baggage car as the train passed over the Mason-Dixon line.

“The barricade that separated us from schools, work, restaurants, hotels and even toilets would have to be dismantled brick by brick, law by law,” she wrote.

In 1954, she was in Boston, where the Supreme Court issued a groundbreaking ruling overturning racial segregation in schools.

“We from the South… wanted to come home because we wanted to be part of the change. We knew the change was coming,” she told Louisiana Public Broadcasting in 2018.

That summer, she tried to integrate New Orleans’ other leading universities, Tulane and Loyola. She enrolled in summer sessions at both and attended classes for almost a week at Tulane while they waited for her transcript from Boston, but was ultimately told she couldn’t enroll because of her race.

At Loyola, she was told that “under state law, Negroes could not attend the same school as whites.”

Returning home in 1954 also brought her face to face with the man she had married: Ernest Nathan “Dutch” Morial. The two engaged in an intense discussion of the court’s recent desegregation decision during a summer book club.

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They married a year later, and she supported him from then on, raising five children and teaching school while he ran for state legislature in 1968 and mayor in 1978.

She often had to protect her children from racist threats by rushing to the phone to answer first.

During Morial’s first term as mayor, National Guard troops were stationed at his home to protect his family during a 1979 police strike that led to the cancellation of Carnival parades.

Sybil Morial also became a distinct personality in the town.

She founded the Louisiana League of Good Government, which helped blacks register to vote at a time when they still had to pass tests like memorizing the Preamble to the Constitution. She also was a plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging a Louisiana law that barred public school teachers from participating in anti-segregation groups, according to the LSU Women’s Center.

She has held various administrative positions at Xavier for over 28 years and served on numerous boards and advisory committees throughout the city.

“Few women have played such a huge role in New Orleans’ recent history,” former Mayor Mitch Landrieu said in a social media post. Current Mayor LaToya Cantrell called Morial a “treasure and pioneer of New Orleans” and said the city’s flag would be flown at half-staff in her honor.

At the 1984 New Orleans World’s Fair, she supported the construction of a pavilion dedicated to the contributions and experiences of African Americans in American history. In 1987, she was an executive producer of the documentary A House Divided, about desegregation in New Orleans.

After her husband died unexpectedly in 1989 at age 60, Morial wrote that she briefly thought about running for mayor in 1994. Instead, her son Marc, then 35, ran and won, launching a second generation of Morial mayors.

Funeral plans have not been announced. Sybil Morial is survived by five children, seven grandchildren and a great-granddaughter.