MUSCATINE, Iowa–A celebrated historian with a vast knowledge of both American legal history and African American history, Paul Finkelman, the current Robert E. and Susan T. Rydell Visiting Professor at Gustavus Adolphus College, in St. Peter, Minnesota, has had an interest in telling the Alexander Clark story for decades. In 2010, he participated in the first of Muscatine Community College’s Alexander Clark Lectures, helping start a robust tradition of celebrating scholarship relating to one of Muscatine’s most influential historical figures each February. As Muscatine Community School District worked to decide on a name for its combined junior high school, he wrote the district encouraging them to name it after Susan Clark, Alexander Clark’s daughter and the first African American student to integrate an Iowa High School. Feb. 27, Finkelman returned to Muscatine to once again present as part of the Alexander Clark Lecture Series. Prior to his evening talk, he gave a preview to the Rotary Club of Muscatine.
Before Clark’s celebrated legal case, he already had the makings of an important historical figure for Iowa, as he helped create an African American unit to fight for Iowa in the Civil War, using his barber shop as a place to recruit more soldiers.
As a legal historian, Finkelman finds Clark’s case, which brought the issue of segregated schools in Iowa all the way to the state supreme court, intriguing because many later judgements have cited it when examining civil rights issues. “What Clark does is give the Iowa Supreme Court the opportunity to say something important about public education and segregation,” he explained. Because the Iowa Supreme Court found it unconstitutional to assign students to specific schools based on factors such as race, gender, or religion, many other state and national cases have sited it in equal rights cases.
Finkelman found that even after Clark won his landmark case he continued to make history at the national level. A tireless civil rights activist, Clark would travel up and down the Mississippi River working to improve conditions for African Americans. This included helping to found Prince Hall Masonic Lodges and encouraging the growth of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. For a time, he owned and edited a newspaper, “The Conservator,” in Chicago. When Clark received his appointment as United States Ambassador to Liberia, he ranked as one of the most influential African Americans of his time. Finkelman explained, “if you think of that, at the national scale, Alexander Clark was on the same level as Frederick Douglas, the most important civil rights activist of the day.” Douglas received an appointment as the United States Ambassador to Hatti at about the same time Clark went to Liberia.
As Finkelman continues his study of Clark, though it has proved notoriously difficult as the majority of Clark’s papers disappeared after his death, he supports initiatives to continue preserving Clark’s legacy, such as by placing his home on the National Register of Historic Places and having Clark featured on one of the United States Post Office’s annual Black History Month stamps. He also would like to see Alexander Clark’s story expand past Muscatine and into the broader world so that more people can learn about his unique contributions to American legal history and to increasing civil rights for many.
