Alexander Clark ~ born 1826
'STUDIES IN IOWA HISTORY'
The Negro In Iowa
by
Leola Nelson Bergmann
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There was no distinct Negro residential district in Des Moines until after the turn of the century. Their ability to pay the rent or purchase price of a house was the determining factor, and consequently they often had comfortable homes in desirable environments. About l9l0, however, conditions began to change. Negroes were unable to rent homes in the more desirable sections of the city, but if they had sufficient money they could purchase a house. Real estate dealers found that it was impossible to rent to white people after colored tenants had lived in houses and that property depreciated in value when rented to them. Apparently this change to a semi-restricted town did not come about through the prejudices of the old Des Moines citizens, but, it is claimed, through a southern real estate dealer who came to Des Moines and, using outside agencies for propaganda channels, advocated residential segregation.
In following the geographic and economic pattern of Negro life in Iowa during this period between the Civil War and the first World War, one gets glimpses here and there of the social pattern as well. That they were isolated from their fellow citizens, the white people, is quite apparent. They organized their own lodges, churches, and clubs, and through these groups found an outlet for their associative needs. In l866 the Negroes in Iowa City organized the Ethiopian Lodge, No. 1, of the Independent Order of Good Templars, which was an occasion for sarcastic comment on the part of John P. Irish, editor of the Democratic State Press:
We must protest in the name of consistency against this separation on the dividing line of color. Gentleman those negroes are simply black white men, according to the logic of the day, and should have been admitted on a equal footing into the other lodges.
After the establishment of the first Negro church in the State at Mt. Pleasant in l863, many Baptist and Methodist churches were founded in southern and river towns. When the first church census of Iowa was taken in l906 there were 33 Negro Baptist churches with a membership of 2,387 and 37 colored Methodist churches with a total membership of l,675.
Camp meetings were fairly common phenomena among the Negroes in the seventies and eighties. The Iowa State Press reported in the summer of l874 that the colored people of Iowa City had been agitating for the old-fashioned Methodist camp meeting for several months. It was finally held in Berryhill's grove in the south end of town for two days during the middle of August. Unfortunately a circus was in town simultaneously and the first day's gathering was small; but the next day colored people for miles around rumbled into Iowa City in their wagons to Hear Rev. Willett, who was so hoarse by the evening of the second day he could hardly make himself heard. "Singing and praying was also extensively indulged in and listened to attentively by the throng of people gathered beneath the trees."
So far as education was concerned it took a few court cases to establish the constitutional right of Negro children to attend common schools. Some districts in the State provided separate schools for colored children and expected the Negroes to observe this color line. Such was true in Muscatine, for example. But in l868, the year when the amendments granting various rights to Negroes were finally adopted, Alexander Clark, a barber in that city, brought a suit against the school board on the ground that his twelve-year-old daughter Susan was refused admission into the grammar school attended by the white children solely because of her race. The court ruled that the board of directors had no right to require children to attend a separate school because of race, religion, or economic status.
In l874, two colored boys, Geroid Smith and Charles Dove, residents of Keokuk, another town that provided separate educational facilities for colored children, were denied admission into the schools there. The Iowa Supreme Court again decided that Negro children could not be excluded from the public schools, nor could they be compelled to attend a separate school.
Two of the children concerned in these cases came from families who left their names on the pages of Iowa history.
Susan Clark's father, Alexander Clark, was the most prominent Negro in Iowa from Civil War days almost to the close of the century. he was born in Pennsylvania in l826; his father, a manumitted slave, was half Irish, his mother a full-blooded Negress. When he was thirteen years old he left Pennsylvania -- with little formal education, but a fair amount of knowledge -- to live in Cincinnati with an uncle, who taught him the trade of barbering. In the spring of l842 he came to Muscatine, Iowa, where he decided to settle and open a barber shop. For over a quarter of a century he ran a successful business, and enjoyed the respect and affection of Muscatine citizens.
Shrewd in business matters, he invested his money in timberland and contracted to furnish wood for steamboats on the Mississippi. Other business ventures were likewise successful and when he retired from the barbering business in l868 he was able to live a life of comfort and security. Three of the children born to Alexander Clark and his wife, a woman of Negro and Indian blood, grew to maturity and were well educated, his son, Alexander, Jr., receiving his degree from the Law Department at the State University of Iowa in l879. The father, undoubtedly stimulated by the legal atmosphere brought home by his son, matriculated in the Law Department in l883 and received his LL.B. degree in the spring of l884 at the age of fifty-eight.
To Be Continued. . .'Alexander Clark's fight for Negroes' rights.'
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Copied by Nancee(McMurtrey)Seifert
September 10, 2003
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