Sybil Haydel Morial, a civil rights activist, educator and wife of New Orleans’ first Black mayor, died Tuesday at University Medical Center. She was 91.
Morial, who grew up in New Orleans under the city’s exclusionary Jim Crow laws, earned an undergraduate and graduate degree at Boston University then returned home to push for change. After teaching at a school, she raised five children, worked for 28 years as a dean and administrator at Xavier University and became a beloved figure in New Orleans, known for her calm and dignified style.
“She had the elegance of a queen and the spirit of a warrior to fight for justice and inclusiveness," said Silas Lee, a pollster who knew her from their years at Xavier together.
Her husband, Ernest “Dutch” Morial, was elected as the city’s first Black mayor in 1977, took office in 1978 and held the position until 1986. Her son, Marc Morial, followed in his father's footsteps, serving as mayor from 1994 to 2002. He now serves as president and CEO of the National Urban League.
Morial's death prompted accolades from city leaders.
Mayor-elect Ernest N. "Dutch" Morial kisses his wife, Sybil, on the cheek during a news conference at the Hilton Hotel Sunday morning, but puts the squeeze on youngest daughter, Monique, 7. Morial took 51.5 percent of the 174,175 votes cast Saturday to defeat veteran Councilman-at-Large Joseph V. DiRosa for the mayor's office. Morial will be sworn in on May 1. (Staff photo by Burt Steel)
"Sybil Haydel Morial is a giant in New Orleans history, and I know the entire city mourns her passing," former Mayor Mitch Landrieu said in a statement Wednesday. "Few women have played such an outsized role in the recent history of New Orleans."
Said U.S. Rep. Troy Carter, D-New Orleans: "Mrs. Morial’s legacy as the matriarch of the iconic Morial family and her own contributions to civil rights and the city of New Orleans will forever be remembered with reverence and gratitude."
Anyone who met Sybil Morial quickly realized she was a force, even if she didn’t seek to call attention to herself. As a young woman, Morial pressed local authorities to give Black residents the same rights as Whites to visit City Park, join the League of Women Voters and attend Tulane University, among other things.
Morial credited her studies at Boston University in the early 1950s with showing her what a more racially inclusive world could be.?One of her friends there was a young Ph.D. student named Martin Luther King Jr.
Morial's father, Dr. C.C. Haydel, was a physician, and her mother, Eudora Haydel, had been a teacher. They made sure that their children were exposed to the finer things in life.
“We lived in a cocoon, safe and rich, until we stepped out,” Sybil Morial said in a 2015 interview. “Our parents went to great ends to be sure we weren’t damaged by the rejection out there.”
From left to right, Sybil Morial, Edgar Chase III, artist Ernest M. English and Stella Reese Chase, look at a historical marker after it was unveiled outside of Dooky Chase's Restaurant on Orleans Avenue that honors significant locations in the Civil Rights movement in New Orleans, La. Monday, May 3, 2021. (Photo by Max Becherer, NOLA.com, The Times-Picayune)
Because she was Black, she couldn’t go to City Park or Audubon Park. She and Andrew Young, a childhood playmate who went on to be elected mayor of Atlanta, were chased out of the Isaac Delgado Museum of Art (now the New Orleans Museum of Art) by a club-wielding policeman when the two youngsters stepped inside. And when she boarded a train to enroll at Boston University, she was directed to the section for Black passengers – half of the baggage car.
Amenities came at a price. Whenever Morial and her mother went to an opera at the Municipal Auditorium, they had to climb 103 steps to a lofty perch in what was called the "colored balcony."
Morial, who wrote about these experiences in her memoir, “Witness to Change: From Jim Crow to Political Empowerment,” had the gift of perspective.
“I guess my cocoon life helped me not to be bitter,” Morial said of growing up in a middle class household. “We couldn’t self-destruct. We couldn’t damage ourselves by being bitter because it would damage us. Living that life outside was what motivated me to get involved as an adult – not to be bitter and angry but to do things that would bring about change.”
Two men helped shape that desire to change things: King and the man she married.
When she was in graduate school, she and her friends would hear King preach after attending Mass.
In his sermons, King spoke with “so much emotion it seemed to shake the church benches,” Morial wrote. “He talked about our resourcefulness, our compassion and loyalty, our strength and our courage. It was something I had not heard before, and it made a strong impact on me.
The other influence was Dutch Morial, whom she got to know in 1954 when the book group they were in discussed the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Brown v. the Board of Education, which declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional.
Sybil Morial, US Rep. John Lewis, Verna and US Sen. Mary Landrieu talk as family, friends and well-known politicians say goodbye to former US Rep. Lindy Boggs during her funeral at St. Louis Cathedral, New Orleans, Aug. 1, 2013.?
At that time, she was trying to get graduate credits at Tulane University, but she was turned down because, at that time, Tulane didn’t admit Black students. She received the same reaction when she tried to get into Loyola University. It took nine years before Tulane was desegregated.
“It was perhaps na?ve to think that a century’s worth of Jim Crow laws, not to mention centuries of slavery, could be overturned in a moment, or a year,” she wrote. “We would need patience – as well as other skills – for the fight.”
Sybil Morial channeled her energy into organizations such as the Louisiana League of Good Government and the Civic, Cultural and Social Organization, which she and her friends formed because, at that time, African-American women in Louisiana could not join the League of Women Voters.
The league’s rejection “was an epiphany to me,” she wrote. “I decided that this was where I – along with my friends – could contribute to the civil rights movement. We should form our own organization and work to get our own people registered to vote.”
The Morial family, May 4, 1982.
Dutch Morial also burned with the ambition to change Louisiana's archaic racial laws. An attorney, he became the first Black person to be elected to the Legislature since the post-Civil War Reconstruction era and went on to serve two terms as mayor.
He died in 1989. Four years later, Sybil Morial considered running for mayor and was told by pollster Ed Renwick that she was so popular that she was a shoo-in. But she declined. She liked her job as the dean of communications and public affairs at Xavier and the time she had to enjoy living on Bayou St. John. Her son Marc Morial entered the race several weeks later and won.
After retiring from Xavier in 2005, Sybil Morial served on numerous local boards, including the Amistad Research Center and the Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong Summer Jazz Camp.
In recent years, Morial marveled after learning the full story of her great-grandfather, Victor Haydel, a slave born on the Whitney Plantation with a White father.
After the Civil War, Haydel became a successful farmer.
"He overcame that life," Morial told Michelle Miller, Marc Morial's wife and a CBS national correspondent, in a 2015 interview. "And then the next generation did better and the next generation did better. Then it's my generation -- educated and successful."
In addition to Marc, she is survived by son Jacques Morial and daughters Dr. Julie Morial, Judge Monique Morial and Cheri Morial Ausberry. She has seven grandchildren and one great grandchild.
Funeral arrangements are pending.
