Lewis McAllister

In 1963, at the age of thirty, McAllister, who then resided in Meridian, won a special election in Lauderdale County to fill a vacancy in the Mississippi House. He hence became the first member of his party to serve in the Mississippi legislature in the 20th century.

McAllister sought a full term in 1963 on the Republican ticket headed by gubernatorial nominee Rubel Phillips of Corinth and Jackson, Mississippi and the GOP candidate for lieutenant governor, Stanford Morse, an outgoing state senator and lawyer from Gulfport on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Democratic Governor Ross Barnett was term-limited in the 1963 election. Thirty Republicans ran for legislative seats, a record number for the fledgling party. Phillips and Morse, both former Democrats, were defeated by the Democrats Paul B. Johnson, Jr., and Carroll Gartin, respectively; McAllister won a full term in his state House race.[1]

In 1966, McAllister was the Republican nominee for Mississippi's 4th congressional district seat vacated after one term by Prentiss Walker, who instead challenged without success the reelection of U.S. Senator James O. Eastland. McAllister lost to Gillespie V. Montgomery, who held the Meridian-based House seat for thirty years.[1]

In 1967, Paul Johnson was ineligible to seek reelection as governor, a provision that has since been changed in the Mississippi state constitution. Rubel Phillips again carried the Republican nomination for governor, but he was handily defeated by the Democrat U.S. Representative John Bell Williams of Mississippi's 3rd congressional district. By this time, Clarke Reed of Greenville had replaced the original chairman of the Mississippi Republican Party, Wirt Yerger, an insurance agent in Jackson, under whose leadership McAllister had been first elected to the House. One Republican leader told Time magazine that the 1967 results had probably halted GOP inroads in Mississippi by perhaps fifteen years. Yet the party won two seats in the United States House of Representatives in 1972.[1]

McAllister was unseated though he carried the Meridian-section of his district prior to reapportionment. Two other freshmen Republican legislators were defeated, Representative Charles K. Pringle, a lawyer from Biloxi, and State Senator Seelig Wise, a cotton and soybean farmer who represented Coahoma, Tunica, and Quitman counties near Clarksdale in northwestern Mississippi.[1]

In 1971, McAlliser left Meridian and relocated to Tuscaloosa,[1] where in 1976 he opened Coral Industries, a manufacturer of bath enclosures. The McAllisters are benefactors of the private Tuscaloosa Academy.[2]