TUSCALOOSA Deacon Ernest Palmore, age 92, of Tuscaloosa, died March 2, 2010, at home. Services will be 11 a.m. Monday at First Baptist Church in Northport with Dr. J.C. Carter officiating. Burial will follow in Cedar Oak Memorial Park with Van Hoose & Steele Funeral Home directing. Visitation will be today from 3:30 to 7:30 p.m. at the funeral home. The body will lie in state Monday from 9 to 11 a.m. prior to services at the church.
The family requests flowers to be sent to the funeral home or donations may be made to the Ernest Palmore Scholarship Fund at the Kiwanis Club.
Published in Tuscaloosa News on Mar. 7, 2010
Ernest Palmore was a longtime agriculture educator in Tuscaloosa County. He was born Oct. 2, 1917, in Richland, Georgia and was raised by his mother, who cleaned homes for white families, and his grandmother, who was a former slave. His father left the family when Palmore was young.
In the late 1930s, Palmore left home to attend Tuskegee University, graduating in 1941 with a bachelor’s degree in agriculture and, two years later, a master’s degree in agribusiness.
In 1941, he moved to Northport to teach agriculture at Tuscaloosa County Training School for Negroes, where he taught for 14 years before becoming an agriculture teacher at the blacks-only Riverside High School. After 14 years, public schools were desegregated and Palmore was transferred to Tuscaloosa County High School. He retired in 1982, after 38 years in agriculture education.
In 1973, he built a house with his own hands on Lake Tuscaloosa, becoming one of the first blacks to own a home in that area. He was one of the first members of Tuscaloosa’s Delta Phi Lambda chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Inc., a 33rd-degree Freemason, a former chair of the deacon board at First Baptist Church in Northport, a former chair of the board of directors at Maude L. Whatley Health Center, and a member of the Kiwanis Club where the Ernest Palmore Academic Scholarship was created in his honor in 2008, the same year he was named Kiwanis Club Man of the Year. The Ernest Palmore Crusaders Choir at First Baptist Church is also named for him.
Published in The Tuscaloosa News March 4, 2010
