Gail Fisher was already a popular model in African American newspapers and magazines, as well as a theater actress when, in the late 1950s, she starred in The New Girl in the Office, a film about integrating a hitherto all-white office staff of a white-owned company. The film was inspired by new federal equal employment policies under President Dwight Eisenhower’s President’s Committee on Government Contracts, an agency he created to encourage nondiscrimination enforcement. In an advertisement for All laundry detergent in the early 1960s Fisher was the first black person to have speaking lines in a nationally televised commercial. One of the first black women to get substantive roles on television, Fisher was primarily known for playing “Peggy Fair” from 1968 through 1975 on the popular television show Mannix. Fisher was the second black actress, after Nichelle Nichols of Star Trek, to get a role in a dramatic hour-long network television series. The youngest of five children, Fisher was born on August 18, 1935 in Orange, New Jersey. Her father, a carpenter, died when Fisher was two years old.  Fisher’s mother, Ona Fisher, supported her children by operating a hair styling business out of their house in Edison Township, New … Continue reading Gail Fisher (1935-2000)