Tom Stuart (Mississippi politician)

Tom Stuart (November 19, 1936 – November 16, 2001), was a pioneer in the development of the two-party system in the U.S. state of Mississippi. On June 5, 1973, he was elected as the first Republican mayor of Meridian, the county seat of Lauderdale County in eastern Mississippi.

Stuart was reared in Meridian and California, while his father served in the United States Navy in World War II. He attended high school in Meridian as well as Meridian Junior College and the Florida Institute of Technology, known as Florida Tech, in Melbourne in east Florida. Stuart was affiliated with Rotary International, the Shriners, and the Chamber of Commerce.^[1]

At the age of thirty-six, Stuart unseated Democratic Mayor Al Key, 4,606 (60 percent) to 3,070 (40 percent).^[2] Stuart listed his priorities as mayor as:

• Openness in municipal government
• Repairing streets,
• Resolving downtown traffic problems
• Raising employee salaries
• Developing a system of mass transit.^[1]

In the fall of 1974, Mayor Stuart greeted some 3,500 expatriate African Americans who returned to their former hometown of Meridian from all over the United States to celebrate "Meridian Picnic Day", an actual 72-hour homecoming. Some had been away for sixty years; many had left because of segregation, which was dismantled a decade earlier. One woman noted the irony: "When I was living here, they didn't even allow us in this park. We couldn't even walk through it. Now they're bending over backwards to be nice to us."^[3]

Stuart was a friend of another Meridian Republican pioneer, Gil Carmichael, the party's 1972 nominee for the United States Senate against James Eastland and its gubernatorial choice in 1975 opposite Cliff Finch and in 1979 against William F. Winter.^[1]

During the last years of his life, Stuart had resided in the capital city of Jackson, where he worked with the Jackson Redevelopment Authority to obtain funding for an amphitheater in the city historic district. He was active in beautifying downtown parks and making public facilities accessible to the disabled and the homeless. Carmichael said that he and Stuart had talked about an amphitheater for Meridian as well.^[1]

Stuart died in Philadelphia in Neshoba County at the home of his daughter, Betsy Stuart Allen (born c. 1957),^[1] a teacher at Philadelphia Elementary School.^[4] The news story of his death does not mention full name, occupation, spouse, church affiliation, name of high school, years of education, or burial site.

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