Alabama: Joe Mallisham, RIP
The Tuscaloosa News reports: Joe Mallisham, a pioneering civil rights leader and former Tuscaloosa County commissioner, died Tuesday. He was 79.
Raised by his father, the Rev. L.S. Mallisham, on the Bible, Shakespeare and history books, and as a member of the U.S. Army and a participant in the Korean War, Mallisham was never one to accept injustice where he saw it, his friends and relatives said Tuesday. ...
Mallisham returned from Korea in the early 1950s, and, facing the racism in Tuscaloosa that he had almost forgotten, he helped form the county’s chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, founded by young Montgomery preacher Martin Luther King Jr., Williams said. ...
For years, Mallisham was also the local president of the Alabama Democratic Conference. When the Alabama Legislature changed the manner in which county commissioners were elected, from an at-large, countywide basis, to a district system, he became the first black to serve on the commission — and only the second black to be elected to any office in the county — since Reconstruction. -- Pioneering civic leader Joe Mallisham dead at 79 | TuscaloosaNews.com