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First Black person on Lafayette Parish Police Jury was WWII Tuskegee veteran

The Advocate - 6/4/2023

Jun. 2—Mervin Harmon, born in 1927 in the Lafayette Parish farming community of Ridge where he worked on the family farm and attended segregated schools, would go on to serve in World War II, fight for civil rights and become the first Black person elected to the Lafayette Parish Police Jury since reconstruction.

Drafted during WWII, Harmon served in the U.S. Army Air Corps at Tuskegee Airbase in Tuskegee, Alabama, from 1945-47, where he was an aircraft engine mechanic.

Read more: Celebrating the people, places, history and heritage of Lafayette Parish

Harmon studied upholstery and carpentry when he returned home after the war. He and his wife owned and operated Harmon's Bargain Food Store from 1955-61 and Harmon's Upholstery Shop from 1957-74. He also was employed by the Lafayette Parish School Board as a bus driver for more than 30 years until he retired.

As a child, Harmon lived through segregation, only attending school through seventh grade because he wasn't allowed to ride the whites-only school bus into Lafayette to attend the black high school. Even in the U.S. Army during war time and after he returned home Harmon, his friends, relatives and neighbors were discriminated against.

Harmon became involved in the community and in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, helping register Blacks to vote.

He served as chairman of the Negro Business League in Lafayette in the early 1960s when the group sued to integrate public schools.

Harmon became a member of the Lafayette Human Relations Council, which prompted him to run for a statewide office, that of Commissioner of Elections, in 1971 on the first statewide all-Black ticket. They were unsuccessful.

The next year Harmon ran for Lafayette Parish School Board but withdrew because he would have had to give up his school bus job. He later ran for Lafayette City Council, which he lost in a runoff.

A lawsuit by the Black Alliance for Progress over the way police jurors were elected prompted the Lafayette Parish Police Jury to create two majority-Black districts. Harmon was appointed to one of them. He and Kenneth Mouton were elected to the seats in the next election.

Harmon served on the police jury from 1974-88. Thirty-five years later, on Jan. 20, 2009, surrounded by family and friends at his family home in Lafayette, Harmon watched as the first Black man ever elected President of the United States was sworn in.

He died on Jan. 16, 2016.

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