Peter Humphries Clark (1829–1925)

Peter Humphries Clark provided leadership for African American communities in St. Louis and Cincinnati, Ohio. One biographer titled an article “In His Veins Coursed No Bootlicking Blood,” and that line summarized Clark’s personality. He consistently demanded respect and accepted the responsibilities of leadership. A teacher, journalist, and race leader, Clark deserved the accolades contemporaries heaped upon him.

Born in 1829, Clark spent almost sixty years in Cincinnati before moving to St. Louis in 1888. His father owned a barbershop in the Ohio city and had been a freedman since 1817. Peter attended a private Black elementary school, graduating in 1844, and continued his education in Hiram S. Gilmore’s private high school, graduating in 1848. His father died, leaving Peter the barbershop, but the young man bristled at his white clientele’s demand that he refuse service to Blacks, and he left the business. According to one authority, Clark proclaimed that he intended to shave not another white man, but if he did, “he would cut his throat.”

In 1849 Ohio appropriated funding for Black public schools, and Clark became the first Black teacher hired in Cincinnati. Except for an interlude in the 1850s, during which he edited a newspaper and ran a grocery store while contemplating migrating to Liberia because of discrimination in Cincinnati, he remained in the city’s school system until 1886. He became principal of the first Black public high school in Cincinnati in 1866, retaining the position until a Republican-controlled school board fired him. By 1886 Clark had abandoned the Republican Party and become a nationally known Democrat. He accepted the job of principal of the African American State Normal and Industrial School in Huntsville, Alabama, but stayed only one year. He could not tolerate the sycophancy required by local whites. St. Louis attracted Clark because his daughter Ernestine Nesbit taught there. Clark began teaching in St. Louis in 1889 and continued until he retired in 1908. He remained in the city until his death on June 21, 1925.

As a young man, Clark had achieved some national recognition. In 1853 he attended the Colored National Convention in Rochester, New York, serving as one of the four secretaries at that antislavery convention. Later that same year, he drafted a constitution for the National Equal Rights League, an organization that led in promoting rights for Blacks before and after the Civil War. Politically active for the remainder of his life, Clark moved from one party to the next seeking a political home that recognized the rights of African Americans to participate equally in the democratic process. During the Civil War he remained in Cincinnati, lambasting Lincoln for his reluctance to end slavery and commemorating the contributions of Blacks to the Civil War effort in his booklet titled The Black Brigade of Cincinnati, published in 1864.

Short, wiry, and bearded, Clark easily carried the title of “professor” that contemporaries gave him. Black historian George Washington Williams, who knew Clark, called him a “capital little fellow. He is sarcastic, industrious, earnest, nervous, and even practical at times.” 

A Republican during most of this era, in 1878 Clark became a member of the Socialist Labor Party. He served on the national executive committee of the party and won its nomination for a seat in Congress. Only 275 people voted for him, and he returned to the Republican Party in 1879. Finding little incentive to stay in that party, by 1882 Clark had become a Democrat. From the late 1860s onward, Clark argued that Blacks should divide their votes and support the party that best represented their interests. To remain in only one party would make them politically ineffective, he believed.

In 1888, Clark and James Milton Turner vied for chairmanship of a national meeting of black Democrats. Clark won the position, but he and Turner soon made peace, and in 1892 they originated and helped organize a mass Black protest against lynching and other racial outrages. By then both men lived in St. Louis. They set aside May 31, 1892, as a day of “humiliation, fasting, and prayer.” They asked all St. Louis Blacks, regardless of party, to demonstrate to the nation their concern about lynching and racial injustice. Clark delivered the major speech of the day. He urged African Americans to protest wrongdoing whenever they saw it, and he refuted the claim that lynchings were caused by Black men raping white women.

Clark’s reputation peaked in the 1890s. As that decade opened, the Freeman, a Black newspaper published in Indiana, asked its readers to identify the “Ten Greatest Negroes.” They named Peter Clark, along with such other prominent blacks as Frederick Douglass, T. Thomas Fortune, and James Milton Turner. As Clark aged and continued to teach, he became a much venerated but less politically active personage in the St. Louis Black community.