Zelma Wyche
Zelma Charles Wyche (January 24, 1918 – September 24, 1999) was an African-American veteran of World War II, civil rights activist, and later an elected politician in Tallulah, the parish seat of Madison Parish in northeastern Louisiana. In 1962 Wyche and other plaintiffs won a civil suit against the local registrar and state government, and were able to register to vote. He encouraged other blacks in town to register. Beginning in 1969, and following passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Wyche was elected to the local office of police chief of the city; he was reelected and served eleven years. In 1986 he was elected as mayor of Tallulah, serving one term until 1990. After decades as a grassroots organizer, Wyche began to receive national attention for his work to dismantle racial segregation. In January 1970, six months after he was elected as Tallulah police chief, Ebony Magazine featured him in the article, "Black Lawman in KKK Territory." This was a reference to the Tallulah branch of the Ku Klux Klan, whose numerous local chapters fought desegregation in the American South. Until Wyche became police chief, he had earned his living as a barber. Early life and education Wyche was born in 1918 and raised in Tallulah, Louisiana, where he attended segregated schools. Both the city and parish were majority black, the center of an agricultural area, but African Americans were largely disfranchised for decades into the mid-20th century, as they were throughout most of the Jim Crow South. Wyche studied and became a barber, which could offer a decent living. When he was in his 20s, he enlisted in the US Army and served during World War II. Even before he served in the war, Wyche began to work for African-American civil rights. Since 1942, Wyche had chaired the group "Equal Rights for Black People". (This organization may have originally used the word "Colored" or "Negro" originally because the term "black" was not widely used until after 1970.) Political activism and career After returning as a veteran of World War II, Wyche and other African-American men did not want to accept Jim Crow conditions in Louisiana and increased their activism for civil rights. In 1947 he joined seven other black men in filing a lawsuit against the Madison Parish registrar of voters and Governor Jimmie Davis to enforce the right of blacks to vote, as guaranteed by the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The state had raised barriers to voter registration in its constitution of 1898, through such devices as poll taxes and subjective literacy tests administered by white registrars. Decades into the 20th century, most African Americans in Louisiana were excluded from the political system Wyche and the plaintiffs prevailed in the lawsuit in 1962, and the court ordered that they be allowed to register. He became one of the first African Americans since Reconstruction in Tallulah to register to vote and subsequently run for office in the city. He also worked to get