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