Lexington, Miss. Robert G. Clark, who was chosen in 1967 as the first black legislator of the twentieth century of Mississippi and amounted to the second highest leadership role in the State Representatives House, died Tuesday at age 96, his son said.
Representative Bryant Clark, who happened to Robert Clark, said his father died of natural causes in Holmes County, north of Jackson.
A teacher and descendant of slaves, Clark was sentenced to ostracism during his early years in the State Capitol, relegated to sitting alone in a two -people desktop in the house of the house and ignored by white colleagues in social events.
When he left position 36 years later, he had served as president of the Chamber Ethics Committee and the powerful Education Committee. In a state in which almost 40% of residents are black, saw that more black candidates won seats since voting rights were applied and more black districts were extracted for most, sometimes under judicial order.
Clark also won the respect and support of the colleagues, in black and white, who chose it in January 1992 for the president of the Pro Tempore representatives, a position he retained until he retired in 2004.
Clark was among the five activists and the elected officials honest in February 2018 during an optional black thorns gala in the newly opened Civil Rights Museum of Mississippi.
The dazzling event was in a life of the first days of Clark HardsCrabble, when most of his relatives worked in cotton fields in family lands in Holmes County. As a little boy, he would sit next to the field with his old grandfather, William Clark, who was born a slave and shared vivid memories of deprivation.
“I had never had a couple of pants or shoes until after slavery,” Robert Clark told The Associated Press in a 2018 interview. “They were poured into a channel like we fed the pigs, and they had to lower and eat the best way they could.”
The wisdom of that grandfather, he said, helped give him the feeling of being a leader.
“I would launch a corn hand and chickens would be eating. I would launch another corn hand there, and the chickens would leave that corn hand and ran to another hand, ”said Clark. “And I asked: ‘grandfather, why do old crazy chickens have corn and simply run towards the other corn?’ He said: ‘Young, they are just following the crowd’.
“And when feeding the chickens, that became part of me, not just follow the group.”
Clark went to Michigan to obtain a master’s degree in education, and then fulfilled a promise he had made to the older relatives when he returned to the family land in Mississippi. As a teacher and coach, he often entered the houses of his athletes.
“I realized that many of the parents could not help their children with the lessons,” Clark said. “And I went to the Superintendent of Education to ask if I would implement an adult education program. And he told me: “No, I don’t think it’s the best for the County to do that.”
After the local school board completely denied Clark’s request to start the program that would mainly help black adults, announced its candidacy for that Board. Maneuvering to keep a black man out of the Board, the local state representative obtained a change in state law so that this designated school board instead of chosen. Instead of accepting defeat, Clark ran against that representative and made history to win.
Because the blacks were generally not accepted in the Democratic Party that controlled Mississippi, Clark’s family had belonged to what they called the “black and roasted” segment of the Republican party when he was a child. With loyalties turning at the end of the 1960s, he directed his first legislative career as an independent. Only later he would run and win as a Democrat.
On the day of the inauguration in January 1968, Clark did not know if he would be allowed to take an oath. The white candidate who defeated had filed a complaint claiming that he did not live in Holmes County, where his family had lived for generations.
Clark arrived at the Capitol with his lawyer, Marian Wright, who later founded the Children’s Defense Fund, a national defense group of the poor. They were standing near a statue of the deceased Theodore Bilbo, a archipegregacionista who had served as Mississippi governor and American senator, when they were informed about 10 minutes before the ceremony in which Clark would be a jury.
The house of the adorned house, with marble walls and window windows, was full of oak desks of two people where the seatmates exchanged gossip already often became fast friends. In January 1968, in Mississippi deeply segregated, the main member of Clark’s local legislative delegation decreed that Clark would sit alone.
The isolation extended to group dinners for legislators: “No one would sit with me,” Clark said.
Sitting alone at the tables established for six or eight created a dilemma, he recalled: “I soon went up to 240 pounds. I did not intend to gain weight. I was simply not going to leave all that food on the table.”
Clark and his first wife, Essie, had two children: Robert G. Clark III and Wandrick Bryant Clark. She died of cancer in 1977, and he raised her children as a widower, educated them at home and took them to the State’s Capitol while the legislature was in session.
Some 19 years after his death, Clark married Jo Ann Ross. In 2003, he decided not to seek re -election, and the seat was won by his second child. Bryant Clark also continued to practice the law. Robert G. Clark III, meanwhile, served as Foreign Ministry judge in four counties.
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Associated Press’s writer Jeff Amy contributed from Atlanta.
