In 1950s New Orleans, a young woman steps into her white tulle gown and glides down the long hallway of her parents’ house into the front garden. Her father, a respected surgeon, drives her downtown, where she will make her debut into Negro society. Though mesmerized by the rituals, Sybil Haydel, 17, cannot help but note their irony in a world where she daily faces the barriers and insults of Jim Crow.

Thirteen years later, Sybil lies sleepless in bed next to her husband, Dutch Morial. Medgar Evers, the NAACP’s national leader, has just been murdered in Mississippi. Dutch, the organization’s New Orleans’ president, has just received another chilling death threat. In whispers, the couple discusses how to protect their three young children.

The Morials first become legal, then political, activists. Testing Brown v Board of Education, Sybil attempts to enroll at Tulane and Loyola. She and Dutch challenge a statute restricting political activities of public school teachers. Barred from the League of Women Voters, Sybil forms an organization to help register Negroes held back from voting. After serving as judge and Louisiana legislator, Dutch is elected New Orleans’ first black mayor.

Sybil’s memoir reveals a woman whose intelligence overrides the clichés of racial division. In its pages, we catch glimpses of black professionals in an earlier New Orleans, when races, though socially isolated, lived side by side; when social connections helped to circumvent Jim Crow; when African-American culture forged New Orleans—and American—identity.

The daughter of a physician in New Orleans, Morial grew up in a middle-class, integrated neighborhood in New Orleans during the 1940s and 50s. After graduating from Boston University, where she met fellow student Martin Luther King Jr., Morial became the first African American to teach in the Newton, Massachusetts, public-school system. Upon returning to New Orleans, she participated in some of the first tests for integration attempting to enroll at both Tulane and Loyola. In 1962, she was the lone plaintiff in a successful challenge to a statute prohibiting public-school teachers from being involved in any organization advocating civil rights. She also formed the Louisiana League of Good Government to help African-American citizens register to vote. Her late husband, Ernest “Dutch” Morial, was the first African-American to serve in the Louisiana state legislature and became the first black mayor of New Orleans in 1978. In 1994, Sybil’s oldest son, Marc, who is now president of the National Urban League, began the first of two terms as mayor.