Ernest "Dutch" Morial

Ernest Nathan Morial was born on the ninth of October 1929 at New Orleans, the youngest of six children of Walter Morial — a cigar-roller of mixed African and Creole French descent — and Leonie Moore Morial. The family lived at the Tremé district of New Orleans. He attended the McDonough No. 35 Senior High School of New Orleans through 1948 and Xavier University of Louisiana — the historically Black Catholic university — through 1951. He completed the LL.B. at Louisiana State University Law School in 1954 — the first African American to receive a law degree from LSU.

He entered private legal practice at New Orleans in 1954 in partnership with the senior New Orleans civil-rights attorney A. P. Tureaud. The Morial-Tureaud practice across the next twelve years was the principal civil-rights litigation firm of Louisiana, conducting the desegregation of the New Orleans public schools, the Louisiana State University Law School, and the New Orleans public-transit and public-accommodation facilities.

He was appointed by President John Kennedy in 1965 as Assistant United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana — the first African American assistant United States attorney in the South since Reconstruction. He was elected to the Louisiana State House of Representatives in November 1967 from the New Orleans Ninety-Third Legislative District — the first African American Louisiana state legislator since Reconstruction.

He served from 1972 to 1974 as a Louisiana Juvenile Court judge and from 1974 to 1978 as a judge of the Louisiana Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal — at the latter, the first African American on any Louisiana state court of appeal since Reconstruction.

He stood for mayor of New Orleans in 1977 in the eight-candidate Democratic primary and won the run-off against Joseph DiRosa by under five thousand votes. He took office on the first of May 1978 as the first African American mayor of New Orleans. He served two consecutive four-year terms across eight years to 1986. His administration directed the founding of the New Orleans Office of Tourism — the institutional infrastructure of the city's twenty-billion-dollar contemporary tourism economy — and the 1984 Louisiana World Exposition.

He died of a heart attack at New Orleans on the twenty-fourth of December 1989, at sixty. His son Marc Morial would subsequently serve as mayor of New Orleans from 1994 to 2002.

He is honored here as the first African American mayor of New Orleans.