Long Overdue Attention for Alexander G. Clark!

My friend Kent Sissel restored and lives in the house Alexander G. Clark built in 1878.

Iowa and the nation are rediscovering the Clark story, especially the part about the 1868 lawsuit that established his daughter's right to attend the community school. After long obscurity, there's much more coming to light.

Last year, I helped Kent start alexanderclark.org. The site makes available a growing collection of biographical and historical information and tracks news about the spreading recognition of Clark's significance.

Soon after launching the site, we told the Des Moines Register about it and nominated Clark for the Register's "Famous Iowan" feature, produced by Tom Longden. In February 2006, Longden's nice article appeared in the Sunday paper and online.

Muscatine was home to the largest black community in Iowa in the 1850s, and Clark was their leader in many ways. He lived in our Mississippi River town for almost 50 years before President Benjamin Harrison appointed him US minister to Liberia in 1890.

Known as the Colored Orator of the West, he was a human-rights champion active in church, freemasonry, and the Republican party. A barber much of his life (he also sold wood to river boats and invested in real estate), he became one of the most influential men of his day.

Among many accomplishments, Clark was publisher of The Conservator newspaper in Chicago in the 1880s (preceding the famous Ida Wells Barnett). He completed a law degree, following his son's footsteps to become the second African American to do so in Iowa.

In June 2006, a high school student from Marshalltown, Stephen J. Frese, was awarded the top prize in the National History Day contest for his paper: "From Emancipation to Equality: Alexander Clark's Stand for Civil Rights in Iowa."

Stephen told me he was looking for an essay subject for the national contest, something for the theme "Taking a Stand in History: People, Ideas, Events." He said he read the Longden article and knew he'd found it.

On Sunday, September 10, he will read the paper and receive a governor's award at the Muscatine Community School District Administration Center (2900 Mulberry Avenue). The 3:30 event is free and open to the public. A reception for Stephen will follow at the Muscatine Art Center (5:00-6:30 p.m., 1314 Mulberry Avenue). A special exhibition of original papers and documents belonging and relating to Alexander Clark will be on view.

For Kent and others of us, it's been an exciting year as we've met Stephen and other researchers who've been finding documents and organizing the growing body of information.

Our latest web posting is the 1892 "Oration on the Life of Hon. Alexander Clark, Delivered by Rev. J.W. Laws of Keokuk, Iowa" (courtesy of Musser Public Library special collections).

Laws offered this suggestion for studying the man he eulogized: "As a leader for the right, for liberty and for freedom, he can better be understood when you study him as one of the underground railroad engineers and conductors, whose field was the South, whose depot was the North, and whose freight was human souls."

Along with the considerable recognition, the History Day prize won Stephen Frese a four-year, full-tuition scholarship to Case Western Reserve University, valued at more than $100,000.

But the really big winner is the Alexander Clark legacy itself, largely forgotten for a century. There's so much more to be told!

Dan Clark
Webmaster
alexanderclark.org
The Alexander G. Clark House
Muscatine, Iowa USA

North Corridor Roadblock

Dad and Mom predicted in the 1960s: "Iowa City and Cedar Rapids will grow together someday."

Once secluded and miles out of town, our family's rural land is today at dead center of the so-called North Corridor, Johnson County's top priority target zone for new housing. Our environmentally sensitive woodland has become valuable real estate.

Several years before Mom died in 1999, our parents established a family trust for preserving the "natural habitats and scenery" of their "Gilead" as long as possible into the future. Dad is 94, and we four kids agree we're not interested in speculating on subdivisions or dreaming of selling out.

Our big news this summer is the Scanlon/Southgate announcement about seeking Coralville annexation for a 130-acre parcel lying along our western border. Big as this looks to us, however, it's a footnote to their larger scheme which envisions some 500 houses planned for 250-plus acres south across Dubuque Street. That's got the whole neighborhood aroused, and it will make news again when dozens (hundreds?) of us show up at the JCCOG meeting next week. (Citizens for Sensible Development http://www.citizenssensibledevelopment.org).

By contrast, developer Dean Oakes' plan for developing a "landlocked" 24-acre property he's acquired north of our place is a minor sideshow.

The Oakes land features ridges and ravines, bounded by the reservoir on the north and creeks and wetland on east and west. To gain the "access" Iowa law entitles him, he proposes to build a private road north from the end of 275th Street NE, along inside the very rugged east border of our 39 acres plus the east border of the adjacent 10-acre Scanlon parcel. (Scanlon land surrounds us except on the east.)

We've agreed in principle to accommodate him while sparing the biggest trees and avoiding the steepest slopes, but we are unwilling to let him come in farther, dividing our land, to angle across on the higher ground where a road, if any, "should" go. And we are unwilling to grant a permanent easement outright without seeing detailed plans and hearing affirmations from the various public regulators that this road really can and must happen. It's really a terrible place for a road, and everyone says so, including the developer himself.

Folks seemingly "in the know" have said a Johnson County Sensitive Areas Ordinance could protect those slopes--if it ever comes to see the light of day. Evidently there's no chance politically. If wishes were horses... (http://www.johnson-county.com/zoning/reports/sensitive_areas/index.shtml)

Our Woodfield Lane neighbors do not want the Oakes development at all, but nobody sees any way to stop it, short of somebody buying him out and guaranteeing conservation. And nobody is coming forward to do that. Some neighbors brought in the US Army Corps of Engineers, so now a federally protected wetland is part of the mix, but nobody believes it can stop the road (http://gileadpress.com/wetland/).

The quest for any other "magic bullet" has been pursued for over a year.

Of course our family would make the issue go away if we could, but we can't. I've worked with Mr. Oakes and his lawyer as our designated negotiator. (I don't dislike either one.) I've consulted and involved neighbors, county officials, and various others. Several of us have done our best to learn the rules and the players; we've tracked zoning decisions and plat plans and steeped ourselves in the county's land-use planning culture.

Well, not surprisingly, Mr. Oakes finally tired of our endless study and consensus process, so last month he got a judge to order that we're headed toward the Eminent Domain fight we all say we don't want. A Compensation Commission is scheduled to walk the route at 9:30 a.m. on September 20, unless we reach a private agreement about route and design and price before then.

Whatever community consensus or land-stewardship argument might favor our side, the Code of Iowa is unambiguous: "The right to take private property for public use is hereby conferred ... [u]pon the owner or lessee of lands, which have no public or private way to the lands, for the purpose of providing a public way, not exceeding forty feet in width, which will connect with an existing public road. The condemned public way shall be located on a division, subdivision or 'forty' line, or immediately adjacent thereto, and along the line which is the nearest feasible route to an existing public road...." (http://www.legis.state.ia.us/IACODE/1999/6A/4.html)

Mr. Oakes is pursuing the shortest line to 275th Street NE. No argument. Is it feasible? What's feasible? That's a matter for experts.

Our slightly longer, curving, family-consensus route--only if the road is unstoppable--might qualify as "nearest feasible," but the 40-foot width limit could prove impossible given the terrain. Another matter for experts. And more likely with voluntary agreement. (http://gileadpress.com/oakesrd-80.jpg)

Our east border is the shortest way, but not the only one. I've pointed out half a dozen. (http://gileadpress.com/oakesrd-alternatives.html)

To be continued.

Dan Clark


"Legal justification is not moral justification."
(Nicholas Johnson, August 22, 2006)

Don't Jeopardize Your Future! (By Mentioning the War)

[I wrote this April 13, 2003, for an online forum in Muscatine where I live now. --Dan]


In Spring 1968, I was a senior at Mid-Prairie High School [Wellman, Iowa]. As part of a class project, we interviewed fellow graduating seniors for a several-week feature on a local radio station. Mainly we asked about future plans. Some said college; some said work; some said the service.

"The service" was the acceptable euphemism for the main option pumped at us by our guidance counselor.

"Not sure what you want to do? Why not enlist and see the world a bit, then let Uncle Sam pay for college once you've got a better idea? That's what I did." Thus counseled our jovial between-wars "veteran" who'd never seen much of anything himself and certainly never faced danger.

That was the acceptable official message of our school, day in and day out. Our small school had already lost one recent grad killed in Vietnam, so we were encouraged to support the troops and hate the godless communists.

It was the spring of the Tet offensive, and Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy were running against their party's war president, but it was not acceptable at MPHS to question the war. We studied long-ago wars but didn't get past WWII. One little section on "contemporary problems" for a few of us college-bound types taught how dangerous and mistaken communism was. Otherwise, the real war all around us was scarcely in the curriculum.

When a few of us got acquainted with some of the "protesters" at the nearby University of Iowa and then talked about it, our teachers and principal warned that none of that stuff would be tolerated at MPHS.

When Martin Luther King was murdered, some of us made a show of praising his life and mourning his death. A few fellow students (few but loud) made a show of calling us "nigger lovers" and went out of their way to "bump" us in the hallway--slam us into locker doors, that is. The adult response was boys will be boys--you should know better than to provoke these toughs anyway.

So, to the radio interviews. I was a "good" student and did my share or more of the project. Late in the project it was my turn to talk about my future. I said I planned to go to college and study art. I liked writing and politics, too. That's the part that aired.

I had also said I cared deeply about injustice in the world, and I was proud of my nation when we were leaders for justice and peace but ashamed when we supported dictators and used guns and bombs instead of sending food and constructive help to people in need. Something like that. And I said I didn't know if I would register for the draft, and I didn't want to hide out from the war under a student deferment. And if I did register, maybe I would seek recognition as a conscientious objector. And so I didn't know if I'd really graduate from college very soon.

The main part of the interview got cut without my knowledge, on orders of the speech teacher. When I heard the broadcast, I was angry and demanded to know why my bit came out so short and bland. The sympathetic student interviewer had drawn me out on my by-then vocal and visible protest and had seemed pleased with my answers.

The teacher explained kindly that she had saved me from myself. It was understandable, she said, that I might not have realized I would have upset the listeners who would have blamed the school for letting me believe such things and actually say them. She did me a special favor, she said, by excising the part about conscientious objection. That would have become part of my "record" and would follow and haunt me the rest of my life. What if I ever wanted to work for the government? What if I wanted a job or career at all? Maybe I thought artists could get away with expressing dissenting views, but she knew I wasn't really that sort. She said I was a bright student with so much potential; I would need a clean record so I could go as far as I should. She said I should thank her.

I don't remember her saying I was comforting the communists and prolonging the war, but she may have said that, too. Plenty did.

Heading toward our 35th anniversary this summer, I don't have near all the answers I'm looking for, but I've learned one thing for sure: "War is STILL not the answer."