Former Governor Allain Dies

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) – Former Mississippi Gov. Bill Allain, a Democrat who appointed significant numbers of women and minorities to government jobs and strengthened the executive branch by removing legislators from state boards, died Monday at St. Dominic Hospital in Jackson.

Tom Allain, a nephew, says the former governor was 85.

A law associate, Louis Clifford, says Allain had been hospitalized about two weeks with pneumonia.

Allain was governor from January 1984 to January 1988, after serving a term as attorney general from 1980 to 1984.

He was the first Mississippi governor in modern times who could’ve sought a second consecutive term after the ban on gubernatorial succession was lifted in 1986. He chose not to seek re-election.