Lobbying and Government Relations 2020

Tyree Irving is the current chairman of the Mississippi Democratic Party, elected to the post in the summer of 2020. All eyes in the party are now on him to try to bring Democrats in Mississippi back to competitiveness statewide.

Irving graduated from the University of Mississippi School of Law in 1974, and in 1975, he became the first African American to clerk for the Mississippi Supreme Court when he became the law clerk for the late Chief Justice Robert G. Gillespie.  In 1976, Irving served as an Earl Warren Fellow Intern with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in New York.  In 1978, he became the first African American assistant United States Attorney in Mississippi since Reconstruction when he was hired by the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Mississippi.  Later, he became the first African American to serve as the attorney for a Mississippi county when the Board of Supervisors of Humphreys County hired him in 1988 to serve as its attorney.

In 1996, Irving was elected to both the Mississippi Democratic Executive Committee and one of Mississippi’s four representatives to the Democratic National Committee.  He served in those positions until he qualified to run for the Court of Appeals of the State of Mississippi.  Judge Irving served as a presiding judge on the Court of Appeals from March of 2011 until his retirement in December 2018.