Sybil Haydel Morial, New Orleans Civil Rights Matriarch, Dies at 91

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.