Robert Clark, Mississippi's first Black lawmaker after Civil Rights era, dies at 96
LEXINGTON, Miss. (AP) — Robert G. Clark, who was elected in 1967 as Mississippi's first Black lawmaker of the 20th century and rose to the second-highest leadership role in the state House of Representatives, died Tuesday at age 96, his son said.
Rep. Bryant Clark, who succeeded Robert Clark, said his father died of natural causes at home in Holmes County, north of Jackson.
A teacher and descendant of slaves, Clark was ostracized during his first years at the state Capitol, relegated to sitting solo at a two-person desk in the House chamber and ignored by white colleagues at social events.
By the time he left office 36 years later, he had served as chairman of both the House Ethics Committee and the powerful Education Committee. In a state where nearly 40% of residents are Black, he saw more Black candidates win seats as voting rights were enforced and more majority-Black districts were drawn, sometimes under court order.
Clark also won the respect and support of colleagues, Black and white, who elected him in January 1992 to House speaker pro tempore, a position he retained until he retired in 2004.
Clark was among five activists and elected officials honored in February 2018 during a black-tie-optional gala at the newly opened Mississippi Civil Rights Museum.
The glitzy event was a lifetime away from Clark’s hardscrabble early days, when most of his relatives worked in cotton fields on family land in Holmes County. As a small child, he would sit by the side of the field with his elderly grandfather, William Clark, who was born a slave and shared vivid memories of deprivation.
“He had never owned a pair of pants or shoes until after slavery,” Robert Clark told The Associated Press in a 2018 interview. “Their feed was poured over to them in a trough just like we feed hogs, and they had to get down and eat the best way they could.”
That grandfather's wisdom, he said, helped give him the sense of self to become a leader.
“I’d throw a hand of corn over and the chickens would be eating. I’d throw another hand of corn over there, and chickens would leave that hand of corn and run to another hand,” Clark said. “And I asked him, ‘Grandpa, why them old crazy chickens got corn and just run to the other corn?’ He said, ‘Young man, they’re just following the crowd.’ And he said, ‘That’s something I never want you to do.‘
“And from feeding the chickens, that became a part of me — not just following the group.”
Clark went to Michigan to earn a master’s degree in education, and then fulfilled a promise he had made to older relatives by returning to the family land in Mississippi. As a teacher and coach, he often went into his athletes’ homes.
“I realized many of the parents could not help their children with the lessons,” Clark said. “And I went to the superintendent of education to ask him if he would implement an adult education program. And he told me, ‘No, I don’t think it’s in the best interest of the county to do that.’”
After the all-white local school board denied Clark's request to start the program that would primarily help Black adults, he announced his candidacy for that board. Maneuvering to keep a Black man off the board, the local state representative got a change in state law to make that school board appointed rather than elected. Rather than accept defeat, Clark ran against that representative, and made history by winning.
Because Black people were generally not accepted in the Democratic Party that controlled Mississippi, Clark’s family had belonged to what they called the “Black and Tan" segment of the Republican Party when he was a child. With allegiances flipping in the late 1960s, he ran his first legislative race as an independent. Only later would he run, and win, as a Democrat.
On inauguration day in January 1968, Clark didn’t know if he would be allowed to take his oath. The white candidate he defeated had filed a complaint claiming he didn't live in Holmes County, where his family had lived for generations.
Clark arrived at the Capitol with his attorney, Marian Wright, who later founded the Children’s Defense Fund, a national advocacy group for the poor. They were standing near a statue of the late Theodore Bilbo, an arch-segregationist who had served as Mississippi governor and U.S. senator, when they were told about 10 minutes before the ceremony that Clark would be sworn in.
The ornate House chamber, with marble walls and stained-glass windows, was filled with two-person oak desks where seatmates swapped gossip and often became fast friends. In January 1968, in deeply segregated Mississippi, the senior member of Clark’s local legislative delegation decreed that Clark would sit by himself.
The isolation extended to group dinners for legislators: “Nobody would sit with me,” Clark said.
Sitting alone at tables set for six or eight created a dilemma, he recalled: "I very shortly went up to 240 pounds. I didn’t intend to gain weight. I just wasn’t going to leave all that food on the table.”
Clark and his first wife, Essie, had two sons — Robert G. Clark III and Wandrick Bryant Clark. She died of cancer in 1977, and he raised their sons as a widower, homeschooling them and taking them to the state Capitol while the Legislature was in session.
About 19 years after her death, Clark married Jo Ann Ross. In 2003, he chose not to seek re-election, and the seat was won by his second son. Bryant Clark also continued to practice law. Robert G. Clark III, meanwhile, served as a chancery judge in four counties.
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Associated Press writer Jeff Amy contributed from Atlanta.
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