Robert J. Clark Junior, who became the first black person sitting in the Legislative Council of the Mississippi state since the reconstruction and who bears insults and ostracism before he became a power of state policy, on Tuesday at his home in Abnzer, Miss.
His death was announced on Facebook by his son Bryant Wulio Clark, who succeeded his father in the seat of the Mississippi state, which was occupied by Mr. Clark for 36 years.
Mr. Clark was a politician who was reserved but hereditary, and was on the threshold of the revolution that turned politics in the state of Mississippi, a stronghold of the most fierce white resistance to remove the distinction between the 1960s. For many years, launching a single battle.
When the Capitol Building in Jackson entered for the first time on a cold day in January 1968, Mr. Clark, a former high school teacher, was appointed as a single office on the distant edge of the room. Other legislators were associated, but no one sits with the only black man in the House of Representatives in the Mississippi, an independent who was supported by the Democratic Freedom Party in the Mississippi state, a faction that turned his back on the ordinary democratic discrimination player.
Previously, blacks faced difficulty accepting the room even as viewers.
Mr. Clark sat alone for eight years. Once, watermelon was found on his desk. When he spoke, he was cut. “They cut me, and I couldn’t get the land,” He said Historian John Diez in 2013 in an oral history of the Library of Congress.
One night, Mr. Clark had enough. Angry, he cleaned his desk and wards the room, and plans not to return. “I was ready to go out!” Remember. “Exit!”
Veteran Mississippi journalist Bill MinorA white man who spent his career in fighting the state, ran after Mr. Clark in the parking lot in the Capitol, along with a legislator named Bush Lambert. The rain was flowing.
Sayyid Minor appealed to Mr. Clark the young man: “Well, continue and do that. You are doing what they want to do!”
Mr. Clark narrated what happened after that: “When he said that, I dropped my hand” – he was trying to overcome the two men – “I walked again.”
“And when I walked again on the floor of the house, man, they were suffering from the shout!” Remember laughing. “They were wolves of wolf, they were applauding, and they were doing everything! And when they entered, they became calm like the mouse.”
Years will pass before you become easier for Mr. Clark. He was speaking sometimes against bills Backed – The only way, he said, to obtain the white legislators to vote to they.
But things began to change in 1974, when he helped pushing the Bill of Consumer Protection Teacher; The white lawmakers voted in her favor, although they have benefited greatly from blacks. The following year, after re -dividing the circles, joined the house by a handful of other black actors from Jackson. More black officials were elected in 1979.
Mr. Clark was patient on his way to the highest ranks, where he worked with the white legislators who had previously avoided, such as the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Newman BuddhinWho was a pillar of the chapter, but now he had to send with Mr. Clark to vote.
Remember once, after Mr. Newman fell into one knee, after he convinced Mr. Clark to sign the speaker, you must do a lot of that of black people in the future! “
Mr. Newman made him Chairman of the Parliamentary Education Committee, and in 1992, Mr. Clark became president of the speakers.
By that time, Mr. Clark became “almost an unofficial ruler to blacks in the Mississippi, who came to him from all over the state with their problems,” political scientists Jacques Bass and Walter Davry wrote in their book in 1976, “Southern Policy has turned: social change and political result since 1945.”
In 1982Mr. Clark helped pass the Mississippi teacher Education Reform LawWhich was established in public schools for the first time in the state, one of the few progressive legislation was passed at all.
In the same year, he launched the first unsuccessful campaigns for a seat in the US House of Representatives, which is now kept by Beni Thompson. His offer in 1982 was the first time in the twentieth century that a black candidate launched more than just a symbolic effort to run for Congress.
The campaigns, in the Delta Mississippi region – were the second show in 1984 – against the Republican, Web Franklin, both of which were a reminder that the racist policy was not far from the surface in the Mississippi state. A few white citizens voted for Mr. Clark, and the political advertisements of Mr. Franklin He announced to them, “He is one of us.” Another Franklin advertisement depicts a confederation memorial in Greenwood, Miss.
With more black legislators entering the state, some criticized Mr. Clark Sheikhkha as it is very absorbed. Melanie Nelson, the press secretary of the congress holder in 1982, wrote in memoirs, “Even Mississippi” (1989): “It seemed more comfortable with the black militants.”
Mr. Clark, who lived throughout his life on a farm, bought his slave predecessors in the past from the owner after emancipation, by young colleagues.
It was a “self -made man” was “a strong protection for the individual nature of his accomplishment”, Mrs. Nelson, who “loved hunting, hunting dogs, his farm, good meals, and Swig from Scotch.”
Robert George Clark Junior was born on October 3, 1929, in Abnzer, the three youngest children of Robert and Julia Ann (Williams) Clark. His father was a teacher.
“Mr. Dietur did not wear in the oral history that the former slave grandfather, who was” 11 years old in liberation, “did not wear trousers even after slavery, he said to Mr. Dietur in oral history. He said:” He was always wearing something like a dress or a dress. “
His grandfather became the head of the Republican Party of Hindes County during the reconstruction.
Mr. Clark enrolled in primary schools in Holmes Rural County and Secondary School at Holmes Training School in Durant, Miss.
He obtained a work grant and followed Jackson State College (now Jackson State University), graduated in 1952 with a bachelor’s degree in education and became a teacher in Humphrez Province, Miss, who obtained a master’s degree in administration and educational services from Michigan State University. From 1961 to 1966, he taught and trained football at Holmes Secondary County School. He was finally expelled for his support for the civil rights movement.
In addition to his son Bryant, he survived by another son, Robert George III; Daughter, Lych; And his second wife, Joe Ann Ross Clark. His first wife, Essi Austin Clark, died in 1978.
The first race for Mr. Clark came to the state profession, in 1967, after the approval of the 1965 voting law and the establishment of a legislative area in the Mississippi state of 65 percent. He is opposed by a white worker, who won only a small difference.
Mrs. Nelson, who was a child at the time, recalled “White face tension” in Lexington, the headquarters of Holmes County, when Mr. Clark entered dinner during the campaign. But it “gained respect from local eggs” for his hard work in the state legislature.
Among a number of black candidates nominating the legislative seats in Mississippi in 1967, Mr. Clark was the only one to win. Mr. Dietur asked him how he pulled him.
“Well, one of the things – I offer myself to individuals in a way to inform them that I am one of you,” he answered. “I’m not big for someone.”
