Jan. 6, 2014
Remains of New Orleans’ First Black Mayor Moved
By Mason Harrison
National Urban League President Marc Morial, also former mayor of New Orleans, stands by the new tomb of his father.
Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from the Louisiana Weekly.
(TriceEdneyWire.com) - Two decades after the death of New Orleans’ first Black mayor, local civic, religious and political luminaries gathered December 29 to mark the reinterment of Ernest “Dutch” Morial at St. Louis Cemetery No. 3. The ceremony comes after the mayor’s original resting place, St. Louis No. 1, exhausted space to bury future generations of the Morial family and now allows members of the political dynasty to rest together. Pictures of the former mayor adorned the grounds of the cemetery first established in 1848.
Former New Orleans mayor and head of the National Urban League, Marc Morial, led the proceedings as more than 100 attendees encircled the former mayor’s new resting place. Local Muslim cleric Rafeeq Nu’Man offered prayers at the gathering and described the event as a “token of love and respect” for Morial. He also extended “salutations to those of the grave,” referring to the cemetery’s decedents.
St. Louis No. 3 is home to a number of religious leaders, including members of the Little Sisters of the Poor and the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart. Restaurateur families Tujage, Prudhomme and Galatoire also call the cemetery home, which sits on the edge of the Esplanade Ridge near Bayou St. John.
New Orleans archbishop, Gregory Aymond, whose archdiocese is charged with upkeep of the city’s St. Louis cemeteries, applied holy water to Morial’s tomb and offered a blessing in prayer of the site. The ceremony also featured a wreath laying at the tomb and the sound of taps as the event drew to a close.
Xavier University president, Norman Francis, called Morial “one of the finest mayors of any Southern city, and perhaps the nation.” Francis said “it’s not as if there weren’t other great mayors,” but Morial, he said, stood out as someone who was both “a public and private figure” in his kind approach to others.
Francis told the former mayor’s grandchildren who attended the ceremony, and who read portions of his resume, that the road ahead “will be no easier for you than it was for your grandfather,” citing ongoing civil rights debates on voting and police brutality. He called Morial a “mayor for everybody.”
“This event takes us back to a great man,” said Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin Gusman, when asked to share his thoughts about the ceremony. Morial, Gusman said, supported each constituent group throughout his career in public service. “It didn’t matter what your station in life was. I loved him.”
“Dutch redefined the city of New Orleans,” said Bishop Paul Morton, co-pastor of Greater St. Stephen Full Gospel Baptist Church in New Orleans East. “We are who we are today because of Dutch Morial.” Morton, who offered the event’s closing prayer, lauded Morial’s history-making career in politics.
Before becoming the city’s first Black mayor in 1977, Morial was the first Black graduate of the law school at Louisiana State University in 1954. More than a decade later, he became the first Black legislator in Louisiana’s statehouse since Reconstruction a century before. In 1970, Morial again made history when he was elected as the first Black juvenile court judge in Louisiana and followed that election four years later by becoming the first Black member of the state’s Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal.