SHREVEPORT, La. | Funeral services will be held Thursday in Shreveport for one of 16 black demonstrators expelled from historically black Southern University after civil rights sit-ins in Baton Rouge.
Her brother Reginald Morris of Zachary says JoAnn Morris died Wednesday of complications from diabetes and two strokes. She was 74.
Morris was one of seven students booked with disturbing the peace after a department store lunch counter sit-in in March 1960. The following day, nine more students were arrested at a drugstore and a bus station.
Southern expelled all 16, and they were barred from other state colleges.
Thurgood Marshall, who later became the first black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, represented the students before that court, which overturned their convictions in 1961.