Sybil Haydel Morial, an activist who was also the matriarch of New Orleans’s most prominent civil rights family, died on Sept. 3
in New Orleans. She was 91.
Her son Jacques confirmed the death, in a hospital.
Ms. Morial was the wife of Ernest N. Morial, known as Dutch, who as the city’s first Black mayor broke down numerous racial barriers. Their son Marc Morial, currently president of the National Urban League, was also mayor, from 1994 to 2002.
But she was a crusader in her own right, taking up the fight for equal rights at a critical time of change and resistance in the city where she was born and raised.
Excluded from the League of Women Voters in New Orleans in 1961 because of her race, she formed her own voting rights group, the Louisiana League of Good Government. “That shut door was an epiphany for me,” she wrote in her memoir, “Witness to Change” (2015).
Along with other women in the group, Ms. Morial went into the city’s Black neighborhoods to educate citizens about how to confront the absurd requirements, including literacy and citizenship tests, that Jim Crow laws had imposed on them. The impediments “were formidable and sometimes unpredictable,” Ms. Morial wrote in her book, detailing the patience required in working with ill-educated residents to overcome these challenges.
Her efforts — aided by the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 — contributed to a number of pioneering electoral triumphs for her husband. In 1967, he became the first Black person since Reconstruction to be elected to the Louisiana State Legislature, where he was met not with congratulations for his groundbreaking victory but with racist epithets. Ten years later, he was elected mayor. Mr. Morial was “himself a civil rights revolution,” the historian Arnold R. Hirsch wrote of his legacy.
Like her husband, Ms. Morial came from a distinctive class of New Orleans Creoles that had confronted white supremacy 70 years before the civil rights movement of the 1960s. That heritage, unique in the United States, remained strong, a “particular racial vision that survived in the Creole radicalism embodied by Morial that remained at odds with the prevailing American social order,” Mr. Hirsch wrote in a celebrated essay about race and politics in New Orleans.
Ms. Morial’s own memoir documents how that vision came into being in New Orleans in the 1930s and ’40s. Though she was the daughter of a successful doctor, she faced a series of racial exclusions that marked her, molding the family’s middle-class lifestyle.
“Because there were few places for Negroes to go out to dinner, my parents often hosted parties at home,” she wrote. While white wartime movie audiences at the old Circle Theater laughed at “Negroes” playing “buffoons,” she wrote, “I found myself looking down and moving uncomfortably in my seat.” She also wrote of being kicked out of City Park, along with Andrew Young, the future mayor of Atlanta, who lived nearby, by a billy club-wielding policeman.
“It was a complex task to maintain our dignity,” she wrote of her years growing up in a segregated Deep South metropolis.
At Boston University, where she studied for both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education, she met the young Martin Luther King Jr., who was studying for his doctorate. She recalled being inspired by his powerful oratory. When she returned to New Orleans, hoping to study for the master’s she would eventually obtain in Boston, a dean at Tulane University told her, “We cannot accept you because Tulane does not admit Negroes.”
She and Mr. Morial, whom she met in 1954, engaged in intense discussions about the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. He had just become the first Black graduate of the Louisiana State University Law School.
From there, her career aspirations were subordinated to his, as he pulled off a series of firsts after leading the N.A.A.C.P. chapter in New Orleans: first Black assistant U.S. attorney in New Orleans, first Black juvenile court judge, first Black judge on the state’s fourth circuit court of appeals, and then, finally, mayor of New Orleans.
“You’re dreaming,” she recalled telling him when he confided his ambition to run. But he won, receiving 20 percent of the white vote on top of the now substantial Black vote in 1978.
Once in office, however, Mr. Morial had to confront a number of challenges. The city’s established Black political organizations had not been enthusiastic about him, and they were even less so when, as mayor, he showed himself to be “a fiscal conservative who preached the gospel of self-reliance,” according to Mr. Hirsch. White residents, on the other hand, were irritated by Mr. Morial’s intolerance for “entrenched bastions of white privilege and power,” Mr. Hirsch wrote. A police strike that led to the cancellation of Mardi Gras in 1978 did not help his popularity.
Through it all, Ms. Morial remained calm, “an inspiration to us all,” Mr. Morial’s executive assistant at City Hall, Anthony Mumphrey, said in an interview. “She was like a wise sister to me. She would speak and you knew wisdom was coming from her mouth.”
After two terms in office, Mr. Morial died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 1989. Four years later, Ms. Morial was herself urged to run for mayor; pollsters assured her that she would win. Instead, she deferred to her son Marc, then a Louisiana state senator, who went on to serve two terms as mayor.
Sybil Gayle Haydel was born in New Orleans on Nov. 26, 1932, the second of four children of Dr. Clarence Haydel and Eudora (Arnaud) Haydel. Her father was a descendant of Victor Haydel, an enslaved person on the Haydel (now Whitney) Plantation outside New Orleans. Her mother was a schoolteacher.
Sybil attended parochial schools, Xavier University Preparatory School and Xavier University before transferring to Boston University, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in 1952 and her master’s in 1955. She taught school first in Newton, Mass., and then in Orleans Parish, where she worked from 1959 to 1971. In 1977, she became an administrator at Xavier University. She retired from the university in 2005.
Along with her sons, Marc and Jacques, she is survived by her daughters, Julie Morial, Monique Morial and Cheri Morial Ausberry; seven grandchildren; and one great-granddaughter.
“She was a teacher,” Mr. Mumphrey said, recalling the impact Ms. Morial had on him. “She taught me about class and race relations, and politics, and how to get along in a city that was not always calm. She was an elegant lady, physically and socially.”
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