James Gardner Clark, Jr. (September 17, 1922, Elba, Coffee County, Alabama – June 4, 2007)[1] of Selma, Alabama, was the sheriff of Dallas County, Alabama from 1955 to 1966. He was one of the officials responsible for the violent arrests of civil rights protestors during the Selma to Montgomery marches.
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Early life
Clark served with the U.S. Army Air Force in the Aleutian Islands during World War II. He was a cattle rancher when lifelong friend Governor of Alabama Jim Folsom appointed him as sheriff in 1955.[1]
Sheriff of Selma
In 1964 and 1965, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee engaged in a voters drive in Dallas County, of which Selma is the seat. [2] Clark was sheriff of Selma, and vocally opposed to racial integration, wearing a button reading "Never" (integrate).[2][3] Clark wore military style clothing, and carried a cattle prod in addition to his pistol and club.[2][3]
In response to the voters drive, Clark recruited a horse mounted posse of Ku Klux Klan members and supporters. [4][2] Together with the Highway Patrolmen of Albert J. Lingo, the posse was intended to "operate ... as a mobile anti-civil rights force", and appeared at several Alabama towns outside of Clark's jurisdiction to assault and threaten civil rights workers.[4]
In Selma, the SNCC campaign was met with violence and intimidation by Clark, who waited at the entrance to the county courthouse, beating and arresting registrants at the slightest provocation.[5] At one point, Clark mass arrested around 300 students who were holding a silent protest outside the courthouse, force marching them with cattle prods to a detention centre three miles away.[5] By 1965, only 300 of the city's 15,000 potential black voters were registered.[3]
These actions led to a widespread comparison of Clark to Eugene "Bull" Connor,[3] and to James Baldwin saying of Clark,
I suggest that what has happened to the white Southerner is in some ways much worse than what has happened to the Negroes there ... One has to assume that he is a man like me, but he does not know what drives him to use the club, to menace with a gun, and to use a cattle prod against a woman's breasts ... Their moral lives have been destroyed by a plague called color.[6]
Bloody Sunday
On February 18, 1965, in Marion, Alabama, a peaceful protest march was met by Alabama state patrolmen, who beat the protesters after street lights suddenly went out.[7] A young protester, Jimmie Lee Jackson, attempted to protect his mother and octogenarian grandfather from police beating, and was shot in the stomach by Corporal James Bonard Fowler of the highway patrol.[7] Jackson died eight days later of his injuries. Jim Clark was present on the police side at Marion, despite it being outside his jurisdiction.[4]
In response to the failed registration campaign, and as a direct response to the killing of Jackson, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference organized a protest march from Selma to Montgomery.[2] Selma was chosen by civil rights activists for protests because they believed that the volatile, short-tempered Clark would overreact.[8] According to Wilson Baker, director of public safety, when Clark heard this on a surveillance tape made of the meeting, "He'd scream bloody murder that he'd never do it again, he wouldn't fall into that trap again and go out the next day and do the same thing".[9]
On March 7, 1965, around 600 protesters left Selma. Jim Clark's officers and posse joined with Alabama state troopers in attacking the protesters on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the outskirts of Selma in an event that came to be known as Bloody Sunday, resulting in the hospitalization of over 60 protesters.[4] That evening, the American Broadcasting Company interrupted the television premiere of Judgment at Nuremberg, to show scenes of the violence to around 48 million Americans.[5] Clark manhandled activists such as Amelia Boynton Robinson, Rev. F.D. Reese and Rev. C.T. Vivian in front of news cameras gaining international coverage.[10] This was a critical event in the United States Congress passing the Voting Rights Act.[8]
In an obituary, the Washington Post noted:
Mr. Clark's most visible moment came March 7, 1965, at the start of a peaceful voting rights march from Selma to the capital city of Montgomery. Mr. Clark and his men were stationed near Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge. Alabama State Trooper John Cloud ordered the hundreds of marchers to disperse. When they did not, Mr. Clark commanded his mounted "posse" to charge into the crowd. Tear gas heightened the chaos, and protesters were beaten.... Captured on national television, the Bloody Sunday incident spurred widespread revulsion. Even Gov. George C. Wallace, who had earlier sparked a national showdown over a refusal to integrate public schools, reprimanded the state troopers and Mr. Clark.[3]
Loss of sheriff's office
The Mayor of Selma Joseph Smitherman and Wilson Baker wanted to blunt the force of the campaign by exercising restraint but the voter registration offices were Clark's responsibility.[10] In the 1966 election, following the passage of the Voter Registration Act, Wilson Baker defeated Clark, in part because so many blacks had registered to vote.[3] Clark attempted to have 1,600 ballots cast for his opponent suppressed due to "irregularities", but court orders placed the votes back on record and retired him from his job.[4]
Later life and death
Following his defeat, Clark sold mobile homes and in 1978, during a period of financial hardship, served nine months in prison for conspiracy to import marijuana.[11][4] In 2006, he told the Montgomery Advertiser, "Basically, I'd do the same thing today if I had to do it all over again."[11] He died in Elba, Alabama in June 2007 from a stroke and heart conditions.
References
- ^ a b AP via MSNBC "Sheriff Jim Clark, segregationist icon, dies at 84" June 6, 2007
- ^ a b c d e Jakoubek, Robert; Wagner, Heather (2004). Martin Luther King, Jr: civil rights leader. Infobase Publishing. p. 94. ISBN 9780791081617.
- ^ a b c d e f Adam Bernstein (June 7, 2007). "Ala. Sheriff James Clark; Embodied Violent Bigotry". Washington Post. p. B07. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/06/AR2007060602455.html.
- ^ a b c d e f Newton, Michael (2007). The encyclopedia of American law enforcement. Infobase Publishing. p. 66. ISBN 9780816062904.
- ^ a b c McGuire, Danielle (2010). At the dark end of the street: black women, rape, and resistance : a new history of the civil rights movement from Rosa Parks to the rise of black power. Random House Digital, Inc.. p. 175--179. ISBN 9780307269065.
- ^ Rosset, Lisa (1990). James Baldwin. Holloway House Publishing. p. 138. ISBN 9780870675645.
- ^ a b Fleming, John (6 March 2005), "The Death of Jimmie Lee Jackson", The Anniston Star, http://www.annistonstar.com/opinion/2005/as-insight-0306-jflemingcol-5c09o1640.htm, retrieved 2008-01-21
- ^ a b AP via San Francisco Chronicle, "Ala. Ex-Sheriff Dies; Civil Rights Foe" June 6, 2007
- ^ Steven Kasher, The Civil Rights Movement: A Photographic History, 1954-68 (New York: Abbeville Press, 1996)
- ^ a b Washington University in St Louis, Sheriff Jim Clark
- ^ a b Jim Clark, Sheriff Who Enforced Segregation, Dies at 84
External links
- History of the Selma actions
- Obituary of Jim Clark (economist.com)
- Movie