Photo from The Donn Young Photograph Collection, Louisiana Digital Library, Baton Rouge, La.
Ernest “Dutch” Morial (1929-1989) -- lawyer, judge, state legislator, and mayor
Dutch Morial was truly a history maker. He was the son of Creole parents. His father was a cigar maker and his mother was a seamstress. Morial grew up in the 7th Ward of New Orleans and graduated from McDonogh 35 Senior High School and Xavier University. In 1954, he was the first African American graduate of LSU Law School.
Morial gained prominence as a lawyer, becoming one of the nation's leading civil rights advocates. With support from his mentor A. P. Tureaud and his wife Sybil Haydel, he won a number of successful desegregation suits aimed at education, transportation, and public institutions.
In 1967, he was elected as the first black member of the state House of Representatives since Reconstruction. In 1970, he became the first black Juvenile Court judge in Louisiana. Then, in 1974, he was elected to the Louisiana Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal. He is perhaps best known for being the first black mayor of New Orleans, serving from 1978-1986.
In 1989, Ernest Morial died from an asthmatic attack. As a tribute, in 1997, LSU Health Sciences Center established the Ernest N. Morial Asthma, Allergy and Respiratory Disease Center to treat and study asthma. Among those at the dedication was the Olympian Jackie Joyner-Kersee, who also suffers from chronic asthma.
"Dutch became the standard by which all black elected officials are measured -- the standard after which other politicians tried to model themselves," longtime local pollster Silas Lee said about Morial's death. "He's always been his own man. A look back on his life shows a man who stood up against insurmountable odds. His life was punctuated by overcoming lots of challenges that others would not have attempted."
His eldest son, Marc, became mayor of New Orleans in 1994.
For more about Dutch Morial:
Witness to Change by
While exiled from her beloved hometown of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, Sybil Haydel Morial began to document her remarkable life. In this memoir, she focuses on the sweeping changes - desegregation, the end of Jim Crow, the fight for voting rights and political empowerment - that transformed the country during her lifetime. But this is also a personal story, an account of her own evolution as an African-American woman in the midst of tempests.By necessity and choice, Sybil, her late husband, Ernest Dutch" Morial, and their five children became legal, then political activists. After serving in the Louisiana state legislature as the first African American, her husband became the first black mayor of New Orleans in 1974. In 1994, Sybil's oldest son, Marc, who is now president of the National Urban League, would also begin two terms as mayor.The daughter of a well-respected physician in New Orleans, Sybil grew up in a middle-class, integrated neighborhood in New Orleans during the 1940s and 50s. After graduating from Boston University, where she met fellow student Martin Luther King Jr., Sybil became the first African American to teach in the Newton, Massachusetts, public-school system.Upon returning to New Orleans, Sybil participated in some of the first tests for integration attempting to enroll at both Tulane and Loyola. In 1962, she was the lone plaintiff in a successful challenge to a statute prohibiting public-school teachers from being involved in anyorganization advocating civil rights. She also formed the Louisiana League of Good Government to help African-American citizens register to vote.But her memoir is more than a civil rights chronicle. Through her story, we get a rare glimpse into the lives of the middle-class black society during Jim Crow and the battles with discrimination that they faced. We also see the evolution of their sons and daughters as they claimed their positions as leaders of the civil rights struggle and later becameleaders of their communities and nation. As Ambassador Andrew Young, a childhood friend and later Sybil's prom date, relates in his foreword: "It is doubtful that New Orleans could have produced two mayors with the dynamic, creative, and visionary leadership of "Dutch" and Marc without a wife and mother of Sybil's loving strength, intelligence, and moral courage. But the life she lived in the crucible times and her perception of the civil rights movement in New Orleans goes far beyond that.""
Black Rage in New Orleans by
In Black Rage in New Orleans, Leonard N. Moore traces the shocking history of police corruption in the Crescent City from World War II to Hurricane Katrina and the concurrent rise of a large and energized black opposition to it. In New Orleans, crime, drug abuse, and murder were commonplace, and an underpaid, inadequately staffed, and poorly trained police force frequently resorted to brutality against African Americans. Endemic corruption among police officers increased as the city's crime rate soared, generating anger and frustration among New Orleans's black community. Rather than remain passive, African Americans in the city formed antibrutality organizations, staged marches, held sit-ins, waged boycotts, vocalized their concerns at city council meetings, and demanded equitable treatment. Moore explores a staggering array of NOPD abuses -- police homicides, sexual violence against women, racial profiling, and complicity in drug deals, prostitution rings, burglaries, protection schemes, and gun smuggling -- and the increasingly vociferous calls for reform by the city's black community. Documenting the police harassment of civil rights workers in the 1950s and 1960s, Moore then examines the aggressive policing techniques of the 1970s, and the attempts of Ernest "Dutch" Morial -- the first black mayor of New Orleans -- to reform the force in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Even when the department hired more African American officers as part of that reform effort, Moore reveals, the corruption and brutality continued unabated in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Dramatic changes in departmental leadership, together with aid from federal grants, finally helped professionalize the force and achieved long-sought improvements within the New Orleans Police Department. Community policing practices, increased training, better pay, and a raft of other reform measures for a time seemed to signal real change in the department. The book's epilogue, "Policing Katrina," however, looks at how the NOPD's ineffectiveness compromised its ability to handle the greatest natural disaster in American history, suggesting that the fruits of reform may have been more temporary than lasting. The first book-length study of police brutality and African American protest in a major American city, Black Rage in New Orleans will prove essential for anyone interested in race relations in America's urban centers.
Creole New Orleans by
This collection of six original essays explores the peculiar ethnic composition and history of New Orleans, which the authors persuasively argue is unique among American cities. The focus of Creole New Orleans is on the development of a colonial Franco-African culture in the city, the ways that culture was influenced by the arrival of later immigrants, and the processes that led to the eventual dominance of the Anglo-American community. Essays in the book's first section focus not only on the formation of the curiously blended Franco-African culture but also on how that culture, once established, resisted change and allowed New Orleans to develop along French and African creole lines until the early nineteenth century. Jerah Johnson explores the motives and objectives of Louisiana's French founders, giving that issue the most searching analysis it has yet received. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, in her account of the origins of New Orleans' free black population, offers a new approach to the early historyof Africans in colonial Louisiana. The second part of the book focuses on the challenge of incorporating New Orleans into the United States. As Paul F. LaChance points out, the French immigrants who arrived after the Louisiana Purchase slowed the Americanization process by preserving the city's creole culture. Joseph Tregle then presents a clear, concise account of the clash that occurred between white creoles and the many white Americans who during the 1800s migrated to the city. His analysis demonstrates how race finally brought an accommodation between the white creole and American leaders. The third section centers on the evolution of the city's race relations during the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries. Joseph Logsdon and Caryn Cosse Bell begin by tracing the ethno-cultural fault line that divided black Americans and creoles through Reconstruction and the emergence of Jim Crow. Arnold R. Hirsch pursues the t