Ernest Nathan "Dutch" Morial

Born in the Seventh Ward in 1929 to a Creole family, Ernest Morial was a cigar maker's son who took his nickname, Dutch, from a paint label. He graduated from Xavier in 1951 and in 1954 became the first African American to finish LSU Law School. In 1967 he won a seat in the state House, the first Black legislator there since Reconstruction. As mayor he canceled Mardi Gras in 1979 during police and sanitation strikes. He died on Christmas Eve 1989 and was buried from St. Louis Cathedral after a jazz funeral.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — steps away
  New Orleans' oldest surviving city of the dead, opened in 1789 after the fire of 1788 and the burial place of Homer Plessy, reachable only on a guided tour since March 2015.
• Congo Square — 0.2 mi
  The 2.35-acre corner of Louis Armstrong Park where, from 1817, New Orleans confined Sunday dancing by enslaved people to one place, and where crowds of hundreds gathered to drum, dance and trade.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 0.4 mi
  A French Quarter museum and research center founded in 1966, whose 2015 Purchased Lives exhibition took on New Orleans' place as the largest slave market in antebellum America.
• The Cabildo — 0.5 mi
  The Spanish town hall on Jackson Square, finished in 1799, where Louisiana changed flags in 1803 and where the state Supreme Court sat in the same room until 1910, Plessy v. Ferguson among its cases.

More markers nearby

• Marie Laveau — steps away
• Barthélémy Lafon — steps away
• General Humbert — steps away
• Louis Moreau-Lislet — steps away