Alexander Clark


Alexander G. Clark was an African-American businessman and activist who served as United States Ambassador to Liberia in 1890-1891, where he died in office. Clark is notable for suing in 1867 to gain admission for his daughter to attend a local public school in Muscatine, Iowa. The case achieved a constitutional ruling for integration from the Iowa state supreme court in 1868, 86 years before the United States Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education. He was a prominent leader in winning a state constitutional amendment that gained the right for African Americans in Iowa to vote. Active in church, freemasonry, and the Republican Party, he became known for his speaking skills and was nicknamed "the Colored Orator of the West." He earned a law degree and became co-owner and editor of The Conservator in Chicago. His body was returned from Liberia in 1892 and buried in Muscatine, where his house has been preserved.

Early life and family

Alexander G. Clark was born February 25, 1826 in Washington, Pennsylvania to parents who had been freed from slavery. His parents were John Clark and Rebecca Clark.
When he was around 13, Clark moved to Cincinnati, Ohio to live with an uncle and learn the barbering trade. His uncle, , also saw to his education in other areas. Two years later the young Clark started working on the river steamboat George Washington.

Life in Muscatine

In May 1842 at age 16 Clark settled in Muscatine, Iowa, the Mississippi River town where he made his life. He worked as a barber and became an entrepreneur, acquiring real estate and selling timber as firewood to the steamboats that frequented the Mississippi River. Barbering was a service trade that helped him meet influential whites in town as well as blacks.
During the next two decades, this area along the Mississippi River was a destination for other African Americans. Located 90 miles upriver of the border of the slave state of Missouri, Muscatine attracted the largest black population in the state: 62 in 1850, with hundreds more by 1860. Some blacks settled there after fleeing the South via the river as fugitive slaves; others came from eastern free states. Quakers and other religious groups supported abolitionism.
Having gotten established, Clark married Catherine Griffin of Iowa City on October 9, 1848. She had been freed from slavery in Virginia at age 3. The Clarks had five children, two of whom died in infancy. Their surviving children were Rebecca, Susan, and Alexander G. Clark, Jr.
Also in 1848 Clark was among the 34 founding members of the local African Methodist Episcopal Church in Muscatine, helping buy land for their first building, which was completed the next year. The AME church was the first independent black denomination in the United States, founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the early 19th century.
Clark became acquainted with abolitionist Frederick Douglass and was the Iowa agent for the Douglass newspaper The North Star. He reportedly attended a Douglass-organized convention in Rochester, New York, in 1853. They were still in touch in the late 1880s, and some of their correspondence was published in newspapers.
In 1863, during the American Civil War, Clark helped recruit the "60th Iowa Colored Troops, originally known as the 1st Iowa Infantry, African Descent." Despite being a small minority in the state, by war's end, a total of nearly 1,100 blacks from Iowa and Missouri served in the regiment. Clark enlisted at age 37 and was ranked as sergeant-major, but he could not muster due to a physical defect, perhaps in his left ankle.
Clark pressed for improving civil rights for African Americans in Iowa, as well as related issues on a national level. In 1855 he had signed a petition to the state legislature with more than 30 other African Americans from Muscatine County, seeking a repeal of the law prohibiting the migration of free blacks into the state. The legislature did not change the law, but migration to the area increased after the war and emancipation of slaves. As industry developed in other areas, the center of the black population moved to other cities such as Des Moines. After the Civil War, Clark and African-American veterans pressed the Iowa legislature for the right to vote, gaining that in an 1868 constitutional amendment.
In 1867 Clark sent his daughter Susan to a local public school in Muscatine, where she was refused admission due to her race. Muscatine had a separate school for blacks, but it was located about a mile from their house. In addition, Clark thought the quality of the instructors there was low. He sued the school board in 1868 for the right of his daughter to attend her local school. The local municipal court ruled in his favor but the school board appealed.
The Iowa State Supreme Court also ruled in the Clarks' favor in April 1867, noting that under the 1857 Iowa Constitution, the board of education is required to "provide for the education of all the youths of the State, through a system of common schools. The court ruled that requiring black students to attend a separate school violated the law which "expressly gives the same rights to all the youths." Due to Clark's action, Iowa was among the first states to integrate its schools. This state case was cited by the US Supreme Court in its ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.
Clark's son, Alexander G. Clark Jr., was the first African American to earn a law degree from the college in Iowa City, now part of the University of Iowa, graduating in 1879. Clark Sr. also studied there, graduating with a law degree in 1884. They practiced together for a while.

Politics, publishing, and US ambassador to Liberia

After the Civil War, Clark became increasingly politically active in the Republican Party and in Prince Hall Freemasonry, a growing fraternal organization. In 1869, he was a delegate to the Washington, DC Colored National Convention and was among a committee that met with President Ulysses S. Grant. He served as spokesman of the committee. That same year Clark was elected vice-president of the Iowa State Republican convention. In 1872 he was a delegate-at-large to the Republican National Convention which nominated Grant. Because of his abilities as a speaker, Clark became known as the "Colored Orator of the West". In 1873 President Grant offered him an appointment as consul to Aux Cayes, Haiti, but he declined the position as he thought the pay was too low.
Clark moved to Chicago. He had previously invested in The Conservator, a newspaper founded by Ferdinand L. Barnett in Chicago in 1878. In the late 1880s he bought the newspaper, also serving as an editor.
President Benjamin Harrison appointed Clark as U.S. Minister to Liberia on August 16, 1890. This was one of the highest-ranking appointments of an African-American by a U.S. president up to that point. Harrison also appointed Clark's longtime friend Frederick Douglass as U.S. Minister to Haiti. Clark died of fever in office in Monrovia, Liberia on June 3, 1891. His body was returned to Muscatine for burial with honors in Greenwood Cemetery. The grave is marked by a tall memorial tombstone.

Legacy and honors