Elzie Odom
American politician and community activist
Elzie Delano Odom (May 10, 1929 – November 17, 2025) was an American politician, community activist and postal worker who served as mayor of Arlington, Texas, from 1997 to 2003, and as an Arlington city councilman, from 1990 to 1997. He was born in Newton County, Texas, in 1929, and raised in the freedom colony of Shankleville, Texas. He attended Prairie View College before becoming a letter carrier with the United States Postal Service (USPS) in 1950 in Orange, Texas. He also became the first African American elected as a city official when he served on the Orange school district board starting in May 1965.
Odom became one of the first African American postal inspectors in the country in 1967, the same year he was transferred to Los Angeles. He was transferred to San Antonio by the USPS in 1970 and finally to Arlington in 1979. He retired from the USPS in 1987.
He first ran for city council in Arlington in 1989 and was first elected in 1990. During his tenure, he made the city's boards and commissions more diverse and representative of the city's population. As president of the Arlington Sport Facilities Development Authority, he oversaw construction of The Ballpark in Arlington and together with the rest of the city council successfully kept General Motors' Arlington Assembly and the Texas Rangers in Arlington.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Elzie Odom” is american politician and community activist. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Elzie, Odom and American, not as a finished interpretation.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 22, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q88756607. VIAF identifies the subject as 22162115783802110734. The Library of Congress control number is no2021055979. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1929, 2025, 1997 and 2003.
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This entry incorporates text from “Elzie Odom” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.