After earning two degrees from BU, Sybil Haydel Morial taught in Newton, Mass., before heading back home to Louisiana.

Tributes

An Educator Who Fought for Justice and Equality

Like many women of the civil rights era, alum Sybil Haydel Morial “was the steel in the movement’s spine,” her family says

The New York Times headline called her “New Orleans Civil Rights Matriarch.” The former mayor of New Orleans, Mitch Landrieu, described her on X as “a giant” in the city’s history. An editorial in nola.com said she possessed “graciousness, kindness,” and an “iron-willed sense of justice.”

All were paying tribute to Sybil Haydel Morial (Wheelock’52,’55), an educator who fought for equality and civil rights. Morial died on September 3, 2024. She was 91.

Morial grew up in the Seventh Ward of New Orleans; her father was a surgeon, her mother a teacher. Morial spoke to Bostonia in 2016, following the publication of her memoir, Witness to Change: From Jim Crow to Political Empowerment (John F. Blair, 2015). In it, she wrote about why she became a teacher (“There was honor in teaching”) and about arriving at BU as a transfer student from Xavier University.

“In Boston, I discovered for myself a whole new world, where everything public was available to everyone,” she wrote. “This new world provided fodder for my imaginings. My Southern guidebook on ‘What a Negro Woman Can Do’ began a process of revision. I can go to that restaurant and order my lunch. I can try on that dress at Bonwit Teller. I can sit wherever I want on the bus. I can go to the museum. I can get good seats at the opera. I can. I can.”

Morial earned a bachelor’s and a master’s in education, both at what was then the School of Education, now BU Wheelock College of Education & Human Development. She became a public school teacher in Newton, Mass., before heading back home to New Orleans.

“My friends and I, we loved the North and its freedoms, but we thought, change is coming, and we ventured to come back home,” she told Bostonia. “We wanted to be part of the change, and we knew we couldn’t go back to the past, which was too horrible.” 

She continued to teach school and later became an administrator at Xavier. She married trailblazer Ernest “Dutch” Morial, a lawyer who went on to become the first African American to serve in the Louisiana legislature since Reconstruction and the first Black juvenile court judge in the state. In 1977, he was elected New Orleans’ first Black mayor.

Morial was a pathbreaker in her own right. “Rejected from the League of Women Voters because of her race, she helped mobilize voter registration drives in heavily [Black] communities,” according to the Bostonia profile. “The women called themselves the Louisiana League of Good Government, and incorporated in 1963 with a commitment to be nonpartisan and racially integrated. The project went on until the passage of the US Voting Rights Act in 1965, but Morial’s activism would continue in many forms, from political campaigns to challenging political strictures on public school teachers.”

Morial was a member of the board of the Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong Summer Jazz Camp, a founder of the Amistad Research Center in New Orleans, and a creator of Symphony in Black, a five-year project to bring in Black musicians and conductors to attract Black audiences to the New Orleans Symphony.

Morial’s death was announced in a statement from the family on the National Urban League website: “Like many women of the Civil Rights era, she was the steel in the movement’s spine. From the moment she met our late father, Ernest “Dutch” Morial, they were joined in the fight for justice and equality. She confronted the hard realities of Jim Crow with unwavering courage and faith, which she instilled not only in her own children but in every life she touched.”