Ed Smith (mayor)

The Politics of Marshall, Texas is centered on the city commission chaired by Eric Neal; 7 district commissioners, and City Manager Lisa Agnor. The current district commissioners are:

Notable former commissioners include:

Organizational leaders such as Connie Ware, President of the Marshall Chamber of Commerce and Mrs. Charles Wilson, President of the Harrison County NAACP and school board member, also play a major role in the city's politics and are as well known as the commissioners.

The city has historically had a greater influence on Texas history than cities of a comparable size, in part because much of the city's growth came early, so that in the past it was relatively more important. Marshall was one of the leading centers advocating Texas' secession before the American Civil War, a major Confederate stronghold during the Civil War as the seat of the Trans-Mississippi Postal Department and Confederate capital of Missouri, and was the seat of the first county to fall to a Jim Crow regime after Reconstruction.

In the twentieth century the United States Supreme Court struck down the city's censorship law which banned showing interracial couples, and the city became the site of the first sit ins in Texas. At some point in their respective educations, James L. Farmer, Jr., Jesse Jackson, and Martin Luther King, Jr. attended school in Marshall. Political conflicts which have gained national attention include former police chief Charles W. ("Chuck") Williams denying that the use of racial slurs was offensive, and a brief spar between Marshall News Messenger editor Phil Latham and Rush Limbaugh, over Limbaugh's on-the-air reading of a gag newspaper article falsely attributed to the News Messenger.

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Wikipedia