Civil rights activist and long time black politician John L. Cashin, Jr. died from kidney failure Monday, 21 March at his home in Washington, D.C.  He was 82.

Born in Huntsville, Alabama on 16 April 1928, Cashin’s introduction to civil rights and politics came at an early age.  Born into a family long involved in the fight for social justice, both his father, a dentist, and mother, a junior high school principal, were active in civil rights work.  His grandfather, Herschel V. Cashin, was a member of the Alabama Legislature during Reconstruction.  Before running for mayor of Huntsville in 1964, Cashin earned a B.S. degree from Tennessee State University, a D.D.S. from the historically black Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, and served with the Army Dental Corp in France in the 1950s.

Called “one of the most ferocious civil rights lions in Alabama back in the day,” by the Huntsville Times, Cashin was the founder and sole chairman of the National Democratic Party of Alabama which helped change the face of local political offices throughout the state during its brief existence from 1968 to 1976.  Created to oppose the anti-integrationist stance of the state’s Democratic Party, the splinter group succeeded in getting elected 17 candidates to local offices throughout central and western Alabama known as the state’s Black Belt.  Six blacks won election that year in Greene County, Alabama, marking the first time since 1816 that the county’s government was not controlled by whites.  Cashin challenged the embodiment of the Alabama Democratic Party’s segregationist stance when he ran against George C. Wallace for governor in 1970.  Finishing a distance second behind Wallace with 14.68 percent of the vote, his campaign marked the first black candidacy for the state’s governorship since Reconstruction.

Partly due to his involvement in the civil rights struggle Cashin was pursued by local and federal authorities.  Among others, he was monitored by the FBI and the IRS chased him for years claiming he owned hundreds of thousands of dollars.  These and other run-ins with law enforcement, as well as the civil rights struggle of the Cashin family, dating back to Cashin’s grandfather Herschel, are recounted in his daughter Sheryll’s 2008 memoirs The Agitator’s Daughter.