Dorothy Barnes Pelote was a member of the Georgia State House of Representatives.
Background
Born December 30, 1929, Lancaster, South Carolina. Daughter of Abraham Barnes and Ethel Green. Married Maceo R (deceased).
Children: Deborah Pelote Allen & Miriam Pelote HeywardPrior to entering politics, Barnes Pelote, who has African-American heritage and is African Methodist Episcopalian, was a school teacher.
Career
She died on January 18, 2015 surrounded by her family at her Savannah, Georgia home at the age of 85. A Democrat, she then served as Chatham County Commissioner. In 1992, she was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives for a two-year term and was re-elected four times.
She represented the Savannah-based 149th Representative District.
Barnes Pelote was noted for her efforts to promote public awareness of the dangers of ovarian cancer, as well as for proposing more unusual legislative proposals. She introduced a bill that would make it a crime for anyone to answer the door naked.
"Former Savannah Georgia, legislator Dorothy Pelote became a fierce advocate for black Florida and Georgia residents whose communities were visited by swarms of disease-carrying mosquitoes released by the Central Intelligence Agency during the 1950s and 1960s. Central Intelligence Agency documents suggest that scientists in the MK-ULTRA Project experimented with such biological exposures in black communities in order to determine whether such releases would be effective against foreign enemies." Reference-Medical Apartheid, by Harriet A. Washington, 2006.