by Marc Morial
<TriceEdneyWire.com> — “Though not tall in stature, Sybil Haydel Morial was a tower of grace, kindness, dignity and strength who inspired generations of servant leaders. For the past three decades, she was the matriarch of New Orleans politics. Sybil was just as tenacious and just as fearless, but in a quiet yet iron-willed way—the epitome of a Steel Magnolia” — Clancy DuBos.
New Orleans has lost its matriarch.
America has lost one of the last soldiers in that battle of the 1950s and 1960s that opened doors so we could walk through them.
My family has lost its mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, Sybil Haydel Morial. But our grief is tempered by our gratitude, and the knowledge that her wisdom, passions, tenacity and love will live on for generations.
My father, Ernest ‘Dutch’ Morial, was a trailblazer: the first Black graduate of Louisiana State University School of Law, the first in Louisiana to be elected or appointed to his many public offices, including Mayor of New Orleans, and a major force in the Civil Rights Movement.
But he’d have been nothing without Sybil.
One of the enduring memories from my early childhood was a serious car accident in one of the most stringently segregated areas of the Jim Crow South, Columbia, Mississippi. My parents, my sister Julie, and I escaped injury, but the brand-new Cadillac my parents had borrowed from Sybil’s father was totaled.
My parents had to decide whether we would continue our journey to the NAACP meeting in Chicago, where they would continue planning for the March on Washington. It was Sybil who urged my father to forge ahead. It was Sybil who made arrangements for us to ride a Trailways bus to a Greyhound bus to a train that would take us to Chicago.
When my father ran for mayor in 1977, his campaign was planning a huge fundraising concert at the Rivergate Convention Center. But as the date of the concert approached, he found that the people he had entrusted to organize it has sold no tickets, booked no musicians, and failed to lock down the venue. Once again, it was Sybil to the rescue. Headlined by the late jazz legend Lionel Hampton, the concert she organized raised the then-significant sum of $25,000, and saved my father’s campaign.
The House of Sybil was a no-nonsense place. In the House of Sybil, you were going to school. You were going to church. You did your chores. She was a diplomatic drill sergeant.
I see my mother’s many attributes in my siblings, our children, and our children’s children: her keen intelligence; her ease of making friends; and her drill-sergeant-like ability to take charge. What I think I inherited was her ability to multi-task. She could cook dinner, talk on the phone, and help us with homework, all at the same time, without missing a beat, without a hair out of place.
Now she has gone to join her husband, her parents, her siblings. But she also has gone to join her fellow ‘sheroes’ of the movement like Mary McLeod Bethune, Rosa Parks, Coretta Scott King and Fanny Lou Hamer. They’ve gathered beyond the Pearly Gates for a strategy session, and they’re going to send a message back down here to the men of the movement.
That message is this: “You all have been running things, and we’ve been standing by you. You did some great things, and you made some mistakes. Now it’s time for us to lead, and we expect you to stand by us as we stood by you.”
