Morial, Ernest N. (Ernest Nathan), 1929-1989

Ernest Nathan "Dutch" Morial (October 9, 1929 – December 24, 1989) was an American lawyer, jurist, civil rights advocate, and politician. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the first African-American mayor of New Orleans, Louisiana, serving from 1978 to 1986.

Born and raised in New Orleans, Morial graduated from the racially segregated McDonogh 35 Senior High School and Xavier University of Louisiana, where he received a degree in business administration in 1951. He became the first African American to graduate from the Louisiana State University School of Law in 1954 after taking an accelerated course load, including summer classes, to achieve the breakthrough milestone ahead of fellow black classmate Robert Collins. Morial devoted his first two years as a lawyer to working for the US Army intelligence group during and after the Korean War. He then returned to New Orleans, where he practiced law at a private firm. Morial rose quickly through the ranks of the NAACP chapter in New Orleans, serving as its president from 1962 to 1965. During this period, he campaigned for racial justice through the use of nonviolent tactics as the civil rights movement gained momentum across the South.

In 1967 Uptown New Orleans voters elected Morial to the state House of Representatives from the Eighth District, making him the first African American to serve in that body since Reconstruction. In 1970 he went on to become the first African American to serve as a state juvenile court judge, and as a state appeals court judge in 1972. Morial resigned from the appeals bench in 1977 to run for mayor of New Orleans. He won the race against city councilman Joseph V. Dirosa by a vote of 90,500 to 84,300, with ninety-five percent of the black vote and twenty percent of the white vote. As mayor, Morial continued the work he had begun early in his career. Building on the base established by his predecessor, Moon Landrieu, he helped expand the number of African Americans into city service, where racial barriers had once prohibited their employment. The proportion of the black workforce on the city payroll increased from forty to fifty-three percent from 1977 to 1985. Morial promoted what gradually became the city’s largest industry, tourism, while also encouraging businesses to invest in New Orleans. He was reelected in 1982, but ongoing squabbles with the city council limited his agenda. Prohibited by the city charter from seeking a third term, Morial failed to convince voters to rewrite the law, and his campaign for a seat on the city council was also unsuccessful.

After leaving office, Morial returned to private law practice and served on the Democratic National Committee in the late 1980s; there he was enlisted as a senior advisor for the 1988 Democratic national presidential candidate, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. Morial’s supporters urged him to run for mayor again in 1990, but he died of asthma-related complications on December 24, 1989. Morial was buried with the pageantry of a traditional jazz funeral in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, the oldest extant burial ground in New Orleans.