Ernest Nathan "Dutch" Morial (October 9, 1929 – December 24, 1989), was an American politician and a leading civil rights advocate.

He followed in the cautious style of his mentor A. P. Tureaud in preferring to fight for Civil and political rights in courtroom battles, rather than through sit-ins and demonstrations.

After unsuccessful electoral races in 1959 and 1963, he became the first black member of the Louisiana State Legislature since Reconstruction when he was elected in 1967 to represent a district in New Orleans' Uptown neighborhood.

He built a powerful patronage machine using unclassified city employees and used it to defeat opponents in the state legislature—including Hank Braden, Louis Charbonnet, and Nick Connor—by personally sponsoring little-known challengers.

Emblematic of Morial's hard-line stance toward the police strikers was the Napoleonic gesture he made by placing his arm inside his coat and striking a characteristically pugnacious pose at the announcement that he was canceling Mardi Gras [citation needed].

Downtown New Orleans underwent an impressive building boom, with multiple office towers constructed to house the headquarters, or large regional offices, for companies such as Freeport-McMoRan, Pan American Life Insurance, Exxon, Chevron, Gulf Oil, Amoco, Mobil, Murphy Oil and Texaco.

Due to a multitude of factors, including the Oil Bust (1986), inexorable corporate mergers and downsizings, and less-than-effective support from subsequent administrations' economic development departments, none of these firms, or their successors, maintain a large presence in New Orleans today—apart from Shell and Pan American Life Insurance.

The 1984 World's Fair, which transpired midway through Morial's second term, was an embarrassing financial debacle that was negatively remarked upon nationally.

The World's Fair declared bankruptcy while still operating and failed to pay many contractors, mortally wounding numerous New Orleans–based design and construction companies.

More generally, the financial failure of the World's Fair severely undermined the community's morale and ominously presaged the hard times of 1986's Oil Bust.

The facility is Louisiana's first comprehensive center for the education, prevention, treatment and research of asthma and other respiratory diseases.

[5] In 1993, Morial was named one of the first thirteen inductees into the Louisiana Political Museum and Hall of Fame in Winnfield, the first African American so honored.