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Witness to Change: From Jim Crow to Political Empowerment<\/em><\/h3>\n<\/div>\nThe author of a memoir titled Witness to Change: From Jim Crow to Political Empowerment<\/em> (John F. Blair, 2015), with a foreword written by Young, Morial (SED\u201952,\u201955), a retired educator and longtime community and civil rights activist, put pen to paper during her eight years of post-Katrina exile living with her daughter in Baton Rouge. It was poetic justice\u2014\u201ca kind of vindication\u201d\u2014that moved Morial to choose the art museum as the venue for her recent book party, which filled its auditorium to overflowing. Today, going on three years back in her rebuilt, modern home overlooking Bayou St. John, she\u2019s still sorting out her surviving possessions. \u201cThe house was under three feet of water and then it burned,\u201d says Morial, who is the first to say she was one of the lucky ones. She keeps up a busy schedule with book events and nonprofit board meetings, but loves to sit in her yard catching a breeze as the canal waters flow calmly by, the bayou\u2019s pre-Katrina wildlife replaced by tourists in rental kayaks.<\/p>\n![\"Baby](\"http:\/\/www.bu.edu\/bostonia\/files\/2016\/05\/photo1.jpg\")
<\/div>\nSybil<\/strong> (right), at age one, and her two-year-old sister Jean, in 1933. Photo courtesy of Sybil Haydel Morial.<\/em><\/p>\n\u201cI thought we\u2019d be gone three days, maybe three weeks,\u201d she says. \u201cAll those years of photos and memorabilia are mostly gone.\u201d The mother of five describes writing her stories, about growing up in the Seventh Ward in a bungalow built \u201cby a freeborn man of color\u201d and about her first long-distance train ride, when a curtain was drawn around the table where she and her sister were sitting \u201cso the white people didn\u2019t have to look at us,\u201d as merely cathartic initially. She writes about her forming a black women\u2019s voters group, and about journeying to Liberia for the inauguration of President William R. Tolbert, Jr. And she chronicles her late husband\u2019s political struggles as the very legality of his mayoral campaign is challenged.<\/p>\n
At the urging of friends and with a few creative writing courses under her belt, she refined those stories into a candid, absorbing book. \u201cIt is a book about heroes, written by one,\u201d says Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard\u2019s Alphonse Fletcher University Professor. And Donna Brazile, a television commentator and vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, reminds readers in her blurb on the book jacket that Morial was more than a \u201cwitness\u201d\u2014\u201cThis charming, gritty gentle-woman was on the front lines in challenging a segregated South.\u201d<\/p>\n
The petite Morial has the elegant bearing of someone who has led a public life, making the acquaintance of several sitting US presidents and speaking out for equality in and beyond this most unbuttoned, intimate, and racially complicated of Southern metropolises, where the colossal Ernest N. Morial Convention Center on the banks of the Mississippi bears the name of her late husband. A longtime member of the board of the Louis \u201cSatchmo\u201d Armstrong Summer Jazz Camp<\/a> and a founder of the Amistad Research Center<\/a> in New Orleans, Morial was 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.<\/p>\nHer face retains the wary intensity of her book\u2019s cover photo, salvaged from a moldy manila folder in an upstairs desk drawer. It was taken during her years at BU, where she transferred after two years at Xavier College and where she went on to earn a master\u2019s in education. From the time she was a child growing up in an educated, upper-middle-class family, a family that gave their children the rich cultural life denied them publicly in the Jim Crow South, her parents always assured her things would change. Morial hopes her book will help a new generation of both whites and blacks grasp how hard a road it was, and how high the stakes.<\/p>\n
<\/div>\nSybil<\/strong> (right), at age one, and her two-year-old sister Jean, in 1933. Photo courtesy of Sybil Haydel Morial.<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cI thought we\u2019d be gone three days, maybe three weeks,\u201d she says. \u201cAll those years of photos and memorabilia are mostly gone.\u201d The mother of five describes writing her stories, about growing up in the Seventh Ward in a bungalow built \u201cby a freeborn man of color\u201d and about her first long-distance train ride, when a curtain was drawn around the table where she and her sister were sitting \u201cso the white people didn\u2019t have to look at us,\u201d as merely cathartic initially. She writes about her forming a black women\u2019s voters group, and about journeying to Liberia for the inauguration of President William R. Tolbert, Jr. And she chronicles her late husband\u2019s political struggles as the very legality of his mayoral campaign is challenged.<\/p>\n At the urging of friends and with a few creative writing courses under her belt, she refined those stories into a candid, absorbing book. \u201cIt is a book about heroes, written by one,\u201d says Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard\u2019s Alphonse Fletcher University Professor. And Donna Brazile, a television commentator and vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, reminds readers in her blurb on the book jacket that Morial was more than a \u201cwitness\u201d\u2014\u201cThis charming, gritty gentle-woman was on the front lines in challenging a segregated South.\u201d<\/p>\n The petite Morial has the elegant bearing of someone who has led a public life, making the acquaintance of several sitting US presidents and speaking out for equality in and beyond this most unbuttoned, intimate, and racially complicated of Southern metropolises, where the colossal Ernest N. Morial Convention Center on the banks of the Mississippi bears the name of her late husband. A longtime member of the board of the Louis \u201cSatchmo\u201d Armstrong Summer Jazz Camp<\/a> and a founder of the Amistad Research Center<\/a> in New Orleans, Morial was 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.<\/p>\n Her face retains the wary intensity of her book\u2019s cover photo, salvaged from a moldy manila folder in an upstairs desk drawer. It was taken during her years at BU, where she transferred after two years at Xavier College and where she went on to earn a master\u2019s in education. From the time she was a child growing up in an educated, upper-middle-class family, a family that gave their children the rich cultural life denied them publicly in the Jim Crow South, her parents always assured her things would change. Morial hopes her book will help a new generation of both whites and blacks grasp how hard a road it was, and how high the stakes.<\/p>\n