Robert G. Clark Jr. became the first black man to sit in the Mississippi Legislature since his reconstruction, endured insults and exile before becoming a force in national politics, and died Tuesday at his home in Ebenezer, Michigan.
His death was announced on Facebook by his son Bryant W. Clark. He took over his father in a seat at the Mississippi State Capitol, where Clark had been occupying for 36 years.
A modest yet kind politician, Clark was at the pinnacle of a revolution that changed the politics of Mississippi, the most toxic white resistance to racism in the 1960s. Over the years he fought alone.
When he first entered the state capitol in Jackson on a cold January day in 1968, former high school teacher and coach Clark was assigned a solo desk to the far end of the room. The other lawmakers were paired, but no one sat with a lonely black man in the Mississippi House of Representatives.
Previously, black people had difficulty hospitalizing the Chamber of Commerce as an audience.
Mr. Clark sat alone for eight years. Once upon a time he found a watermelon on his desk. He was cut off when he stood up to speak. “They cut me off and I couldn’t get the floor,” he told historian John Dittmer in the Library of Congress oral history in 2013.
One night, Mr. Clark had enough. Enraged, he cleaned the desk, walked out of his room, and intended to never return. “I was ready to leave!” he recalled. “I’m leaving!”
Veteran Mississippi journalist Bill Minor, a white man who spent his career fighting state separatists, ran to Capitol’s parking lot after Clark and along with a lawmaker named Butch Lambert. It was raining.
Miner appealed to the younger Clark: You’re doing what they want you to! ”
Clark recounted what happened next. “When he said that, I dropped my hand” – he was about to pass two men – “And then I came back.”
“And when I got back to the floor of the house they had them!” he remembered with a laugh. “They were blowing the wolves, clapping, doing everything! And when I came back they were as quiet as the mouse.”
It will take years for Clark to be easy. He would sometimes oppose the bills he supported — he said that was the only way to get white legislators to vote for them.
But things began to change when he helped push forward with the groundbreaking consumer protection bill in 1974. White lawmakers voted for it, despite it primarily benefiting black people. The following year, after the district change, he was joined by several other black representatives from Jackson. More black officials were elected in 1979.
Clark patiently rose to rank, working with white lawmakers who previously avoided him, like Newman, the family chair, and now he has to sue Clark for a vote.
Once, after Mr. Newman fell half incredibly in one knee, he convinced Mr. Clark to sign one of the speaker’s initiatives, he coolly told him using the light-empt terminology of a country white Southern, “Mr. Speaker, your Peckerwood will have to do more of it for black people in the future!”
Newman served as chair of the House Education Committee, and in 1992 Clark became a Protemporé speaker.
By then, Clark “became a nearly unofficial governor of Mississippi’s black people and came from the statewide on their issues,” political scientists Jack Bass and Walter Devis wrote in their 1976 book, Transformation of Southern Politics: Social Change and Political Consequences since 1945.
In 1982, Clark helped Mississippi pass the groundbreaking education reform law, which was the first public school kindergarten in the state.
That same year he launched the first of two failed campaigns for a US House seat. His 1982 bid showed that for the first time in the 20th century, black candidates began efforts more than tokens to run for Congress.
The Delta District of Mississippi (the second bid in 1984 against Republican Webb Franklin) campaign reminded me that racial politics were never far from the Mississippi’s surface. Few white citizens voted for Clark, and Franklin’s political ad declared, “He is one of us.” Another Franklin ad portrayed a Confederate memorial in Greenwood, Miss.
As more black lawmakers entered the Capitol, some criticized Clark for being too kind. “He seemed more accustomed to rednecks than black extremists,” Melanie Neilson, a reporter for the 1982 Congressional Campaign, wrote in his memoir, “Even Counts of Mississippi” (1989).
Mr. Clark, who lived all his life on a plantation that his former enslaved ancestors bought from their owners after their liberation, was ecstatic at the restlessness of his young colleagues.
He is a “home-built man” and “hardly protects the individual nature of his achievements,” Neilson wrote, “I loved hunting, hounding, farming, tasty food and good swigs with scotch.”
Robert George Clark Jr. was born on October 3, 1929, in Ebenezer, the youngest of three children, Robert and Julia Anne (Williams) Clark. His father was a school teacher.
My once enslaved grandfather, who was “11 years old at the time of his liberation,” did not wear pants until after slavery. “He’d always wore something like a dress or a gown,” he said.
His grandfather became chairman of the Hinds County Republican Party during the reconstruction.
Clark attended the countryside of Holmes County and high school primary schools at Holmes County Training School in Durant, Miss.
He received a job and pursuit scholarship from Jackson State University (now Jackson State University), earning a bachelor’s degree in education in 1952 and became a school teacher in Humphreys County, Michigan. He received his Master’s degree in Management and Educational Services from Michigan State University. From 1961 to 1966 he taught and coached soccer at Holmes County High School. He was eventually fired to support the civil rights movement.
In addition to his son Bryant, he is survived by another son, Robert George III. My daughter, Lareche. and his second wife, Joe Anne Ross Clark. His first wife, Essie Austin Clark, passed away in 1978.
Clark’s first run at the State Capitol in 1967 came after the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 and the establishment of a 65% black Mississippi legislative district. He only won narrowly against the white incumbent.
Neilson, a child at the time, remembered the “white face tension” in Lexington, a seat in Holmes County, when Clark walked to the diner during his campaign. But he ultimately “payed respect from the local white people” for his hardworking work in the state legislature, she wrote.
Of the many black candidates running for the legislative seat in Mississippi in 1967, Clark was the only one to win. Dittmer asked how he could pull it off.
“Well, I present myself to the individual to let them know that I am one of you,” he replied. “I’m not someone’s big IOU.”
