Oral History Interview with Thomas D. Clark

BETSY BRINSON: .....two thousand and one. This is an interview with Doctor Thomas Clark. The interview takes place at his residence in Lexington, Kentucky. And the interviewer is Betsy Brinson. Doctor Clark, just to get a voice level, give me your full name, please.

THOMAS CLARK: Thomas J. Clark.

BRINSON: And you were born where?

CLARK: In Louisville, Mississippi, November fourteenth, nineteen and three. Teddy Roosevelt was president.

BRINSON: Well, thank you very much.

CLARK: The Johnson case has been talked about, written about and a lot of things have been said. And sometimes things were said, that I thought needed some explanation or put in some context. One of the things that has not been said by these people--I don’t think they have. The Johnson case was a very interesting one; it was part of a pattern of court cases. And I think these Kentucky folks overlook that fact. It was not just something that was pitched down here, but it was a pattern that was started in the border South. In order to begin unraveling the whole, and that’s one part I wanted to cover. I also was sensitized by a statement that Lyman Johnson made and I think he continued to make it to the press, “That he was discriminated against at the University,” which was positively not true. And I confronted him personally with that. Then I felt it colored some of the details of the trial itself, as a personal participant in the trial. And that’s the reason I spoke to you about it. And also some of the after effects, and some of the reactions to the trial that these people have not picked up on.

BRINSON: Okay.

CLARK: I don’t know whether that is a legitimate ...

BRINSON: That’s very legitimate. When you say “these people”, who are you referring to?

CLARK: I wouldn’t want to call them--Wade Hall, for instance and his writing. And then the newspaper folks, almost don’t know who they are by name.

BRINSON: Okay.

CLARK: But then over and over, you’ll see Lyman Johnson stories. And in the encyclopedia, I’ve forgotten who wrote that Lyman Johnson case, that sketch there.

BRINSON: I can tell you.

CLARK: And I was an active, well almost as it turned out in court, almost a minus factor.

BRINSON: Wade Hall wrote the entry in the Kentucky encyclopedia.

CLARK: Yes, yes.

BRINSON: Well, let me ....

CLARK: Just uh, I’ll give you some of the background as I remember it. Coming into--how I got into the case and when I got into it. The Lyman Johnson--Are you recording now?

BRINSON: I am.

CLARK: The Lyman Johnson case has interested me a great deal over the years for several reasons. I was already interested in the fact that inevitably integration of the university system of the South was going to take place. I had no doubt about that. We had begun, here at the University of Kentucky to realize that fact, because there were applicants that came to the institution by blacks who sought admission. In two or three cases, they were turned down as white students would have been turned down; for the simple reason they were not qualified for admission. I remember one case that came to the University was a man who sought admission, but the only prior educational qualification he could present was he had been to a Barber School. And he offered that Barber/Beauty School as qualification for admission to the University. Then there kept cropping up in one way or another the references to the Day Law. If it figured in so many ways, partly as a defense action many times. I was never sure what this community felt about integration. There was, and I’m going to touch on one case. In my opinion, the community was ambivalent on the subject. Some people would have been very decidedly opposed to integration. They would have been very outspoken. Others, I think, would have let nature take it’s course, whatever happened. There were some individuals who wanted to see it brought about. It had--it was bound to come. You began to see the shadow on the wall in the rise of cases. You began to see dragged out of the archives, a case that everybody had forgotten about really, but was a major case. The Plessy versus Ferguson case. It had nothing to do with education, but it had a lot to do with segregation. Plessy provoked a case by buying a ticket and getting on a train in Louisiana. And then had to prove himself a Negro, really, then sued the state of Louisiana and Mississippi in an interstate railroad case. Well, Plessy versus Ferguson became the, really the ground level case for all the rest. Then you began to see the poll tax cases come. I don’t remember the exact order in which these cases came up. But the United States versus Glass, which involved the New Orleans voting system. Smith versus Albright in Texas, with those jaybird--so-called jaybird cases--in which they manipulated the polls in such a way as to discriminate against black voters. And there were other cases that came along. There was the Baker case. I believe it involved the right to vote, and a very sensitive issue which never got into a really a direct court decision. Specifically on the point was the poll tax as a discriminatory device in the South. Well, then you got into that area just prior to World War Two, in which there was a rising sensitivity about educational discrimination. Some of the states were spending ten times more on--for a white student than on a black student. And teacher qualification, school houses, supply of textbooks, all of those things figured in the issue. So the various groups of people, like the black organization ...

BRINSON: NAACP?

CLARK: Yes. They figured prominently in it. And so did some of the organized black worker groups. The University of North Carolina, William, Bill Couch, the Director of the University of North Carolina Press, thought it would be good to publish a book. Have a book prepared on What the Negro Wants. That was the title of the book. He got into that and he got much deeper into it than he ever dreamed as matter of fact. When you read that essay in that book, you discover that he undertook to sort of tone down the sharp tone of the book. He hadn’t counted on getting such a sharp reaction. Well those things, all those things figured. Then came the big case was the Gaines case. Wesley Gaines case was settled in sweat. The Wesley Gaines case that opened the way for the border states. Then came the--and I remember the order---there was the Mclaren case in Maryland was decided. And the Gaines case was a Missouri case. And the Setfield case related to Oklahoma. I had become pretty well informed on those cases by the time this Johnson case came along. It came in nineteen forty-six. The first I knew about the Johnson case, where I read in the paper where a black student had come to the University and appeared at the registration. I didn’t see him. I knew nothing about it. And had sought admission to the Graduate school to get a Doctorate in History. Well, the next thing I knew, I was serving as the foreman of the jury in the circuit court. And when I came in with the decision of the jury to hand to the Clerk of the Court. A man got in between me and the clerk--a United States Marshall--and he summons me to a deposition in the Johnson case. I knew absolutely nothing about the Johnson case. I never heard of Lyman Johnson.

BRINSON: Can I stop you just a moment there. You were in the History department?

CLARK: I was Chairman of the Department.

BRINSON: You were the Chair?

CLARK: I was Head of the Department.

BRINSON: That’s what I wanted to make sure.

CLARK: Yeah.

BRINSON: Okay.

CLARK: I was Head of the Department and I would have been the obvious person. Not only Head of the Department, but Director of Graduate Studies for the department. And I would have been the first person who would have seen an applicant for admission to the Graduate School. Well, he came with his lawyers and photographers. Obviously it was a set up matter to get as much publicity out of it as possible. Then once I got summoned into the deposition, the taking of deposition; we spent--Professor Warren and I of the Department of History, spent considerable time, two or three days with Thurgood Marshall questioning us. It went on and on forever, buzzing around pretty much just one single point. “Could Lyman Johnson get as good training in the doctoral field at the Kentucky State College as at the University of Kentucky?” Well, the question went beyond that, but that was the nub of the question. That was the basic question that was asked. And that was the only question that was asked in the court, as a matter of fact. When we went to court then, Lyman Johnson was there. And so was, and I’m embarrassed to not remember the other black, who was not concerned with the case. But his case got in ahead of the Johnson case and they spent all morning on it. A young, black, who apart from the NAACP and any counsel. As far as I know, he had no counsel. Had applied for admission to the Law School in the University. And Donovan was President of the University. He wasn’t about to break the color line there, for various reasons. One was--I was never certain--but what he was an out and out, hold the line segregationist. The other was, he was afraid of what it would do in public relations for the University. So when we went to court, that case came up. It wasn’t a case that was initially in the court. It involved--in effect--Donovan had asked the professors of Law to go to Frankfort and teach that boy in the, I believe in the court chamber. And they came home and refused to do it, anymore. I don’t know the reason why they refused to do it, but I think the key issue was that they quickly saw that, that was going nowhere. Then Donovan recruited some young lawyers in Frankfort and he set up a quasi-law school in the chambers of the Court of Appeals. And that immediately lead to a black hole. If that had played out, that would have brought about simply disqualification, disaccreditation of the Law School here in the University. Well, that set every lawyer in the state who was a graduate of the University of Kentucky on edge. Because that would in turn have a bearing on his own qualification, on his own license. Well, Judge Ford in that case was greatly upset at what had happened. He spent the entire morning, around the discussion of that case, the entire morning in what was ostensibly was the Johnson trial. At noon he had turned to President Donovan and said, “Professor, I want to ask you a question. Who are these, peripatetic professors that you are sending around to set up schools?” Well, that infuriated the President. It not only infuriated him, it embarrassed him terribly. So he said, “Put Tom Clark on the stand.” When we come back, Judge Ford said to me, “Be prepared to go on the stand.” When we got back, the judge instructed me to take the witness stand. So I got seated and Thurgood Marshall asked me the cardinal question. “Could this client of his, get as good an education, as good graduate work at Kentucky State as at the University?” I never got a chance to say anything. I never uttered one word. Old General Holyfield, who was the Assistant Attorney General, objected. And there became quite a hassle between General Holyfield and Thurgood Marshall. So Thurgood Marshall turned to Judge Ford and said, “I would like to demand a bench decision.” Well, Judge Ford just leaned over the desk and said, “I think I will.” And he handed down a bench decision. Well, at that point Lyman Johnson ceased to be Thurgood Marshall’s client and became my charge. So I took him, after the court session was over. I took him out to my office and sat down with him. And I said, “Now we’ve gone through all this matter of deposition, you’ve heard our testimony. And our testimony is that we don’t care what the color of your skin is. We’re not interested in that, but what we are interested in is that you be a good student, and that we do our dead-level best to give you good training and turn you out as a good historian. And that’s all we are interested in.” And I said, “I want to assure you that so long as I can do anything about it, there will be no discrimination. We’re not looking at the color of your skin. I want to make that very clear to you.” Well, in those two days of testimony that question came up. Thurgood Marshall asked that pointed question. “Would we object to teaching blacks?” And Professor Wall, who is now retired from the University of Georgia, said, “It doesn’t make any difference to me. I don’t care what the color of the skin. I’m interested in what kind of students they are.” And I said the same thing when the question was put to me. When the case was over, and I talked to Lyman Johnson; I took a look at his transcript. And I’m almost hesitant to say this, but nonetheless it is a fact in the case. He had a very poor record at Michigan State. So I am completely, absolutely away from the race issue. The race issue had nothing, absolutely nothing to do. I saw we had a real problem on our hands of trying to correct what might have been poor background training; which might have accounted for that. I don’t know what the issue was with Michigan State. But I could see that he was going nowhere at Michigan State, unless there was great improvement. So he came for a summer session. He entered that summer. He had Professor Hopkins and Professor Kirwin in class. And they came out and reported that he had not done really top grade work. They were concerned about that. It had absolutely nothing to do with the race matter. I thought well, coming off the case, after all that public exposure and all, that we’ll work this case out. But he never came back. I then began to get letters from him saying that he couldn’t come back because an uncle of his had died down in Columbia, Tennessee and he would have to settle out of state. He was executor of that estate. In my papers there must be three or four letters from Lyman Johnson about settling that estate. I was--I am still sorry, indeed, that he didn’t come home and let us work with him; and let us drag one candidate out and see what we could do and what they could do. I was strongly in favor of that, but he never came back. I then read in the newspaper, sometime after that, that he had told the newspaper reporters that he had been discriminated against. And that angered me a bit, I’ll admit. So, I confronted him personally. I said, “I want to talk to you about that. In the first place, I want to know who discriminated against you?”

BRINSON: How did you do that? Did you have a meeting with him?

CLARK: He came up here for something.

BRINSON: Okay.

CLARK: And right after that appearing, I cornered him. I took him aside. Then he quickly said, “No, we had not discriminated against him in any way.” That relieved me, because I couldn’t have believed that Hopkins would have discriminated against him. Hopkins never discriminated against anybody in his life. And certainly Kirwan was beyond discriminating against him. And as far as I know, no other member of the department would have. We were, we were sadly disappointed that he didn’t come back. Now, as to the community. This question had come up. It had been discussed by people all the way back into the early nineteen thirties and President McVey was concerned about it. I think he understood that it was coming inevitably and he didn’t quite know how to handle the University on one side and the public on the other side. And he was deeply concerned about it. And he did have applicants back there for admission. Donovan was ambivalent to say the least. And I hope I am not misjudging him here. I certainly don’t mean to be unfair to him. But I think Donovan left to his own devices, would have delayed desegregation. He sent around letters to heads of departments, asking them to segregate students in the classroom; seat black students on one side of the classroom, and on the other--I couldn’t throw it in the waste basket fast enough.

BRINSON: I’ve seen those pop up.

CLARK: I never got near that. He also carried that issue to the cafeteria--seating in the cafeteria. And a comical thing happened there, white students went over and sat down with the blacks and just completely made a laughing stock out of that. But I don’t know what the other Heads of Departments did with that letter, but I threw mine in the waste basket. And never had any intent of obeying it. But in all the discussions, there were some rampant people who said, “They would never stand for admission of blacks to the University.” And I dreaded--some of those people were good personal friends--and I dreaded going through this court case, and then having to listen to all that stuff. I went home after that trying day in court, and after having that long session in my office with Lyman Johnson, and I was eating dinner, and the phone rang. One of the worst of the crowd, who had said, “If they ever admit Negroes to the University of Kentucky, I’m going to stand at the gate with a baseball bat and graduate them.” This man called me and said, “I wanted to call you. I read in the paper about Judge Ford’s decision,” and he said, “I want to say this. I think it was the best thing that could have been done.” And I said, “Wait a minute, I want to get a chair and sit down. I just can’t take this standing up. What has caused you to change your mind?” Well, he never explained that to me. But the community accepted it. There might have been incidents that I couldn’t possibly have known about, but we did go through that case.

BRINSON: Let me stop and turn the tape over here.

CLARK: Yes.

END OF TAPE ONE SIDE ONE

BEGIN TAPE ONE SIDE TWO

CLARK: ...you may want to ask me questions.

BRINSON: I do. The first time that you met Lyman Johnson, was that at the court?

CLARK: The first time I saw Lyman Johnson was in the deposition hearings. And I might sit up here and pass judgment in a high and mighty fashion. Judge Ford, bless his heart, was not experienced, was not involved in his career. He was a specialist in the discriminatory freight rates between the North and the South. He was an authority on the discriminatory freight rates, not racial discrimination. It had nothing to do with race. And he was not the match for Thurgood Marshall. Thurgood Marshall knew what he was doing and he did it.

BRINSON: Had you, you hadn’t had any previous interaction with Lyman Johnson at that point?

CLARK: None. I had never heard of him.

BRINSON: Did the trial take place in Louisville or Lexington?

CLARK: In Lexington.

BRINSON: In Lexington.

CLARK: In the Federal Court building here in Lexington.

BRINSON: And the case was filed in nineteen forty-six.

CLARK: Yes.

BRINSON: And when did the case actually--when did the Judge render a decision?

CLARK: Right then.

BRINSON: Right then.

CLARK: I was in the witness chair ...

BRINSON: But did it go to trial in nineteen forty-six? You know how these federal cases take a while.

CLARK: It did. It was in trial.

BRINSON: Okay.

CLARK: And when Thurgood Marshall asked me that question, Holyfield objected. And as you can imagine the hassle between the two attorneys. And Thurgood Marshall saw how weak really, I’m sure, Judge Ford was, because he was completely out of his field of experience and interest. Thurgood Marshall just simply turned to Judge Ford and said, he asked for a bench decision. Judge Ford, I was sitting there silent, thank goodness I ended up not saying anything. Judge Ford just leaned over and said, “I think I will.” He rendered a bench decision.

BRINSON: And what was his decision?

CLARK: That blacks would be admitted to the University to participate, I think, in graduate studies and specialized studies. Well of course, that, when he added that special studies, that could have been anything. You could have declared anything a special study. Now I want to follow that up with one thing that is important. That case, obviously, had to go to the Board of Trustees to say where the University stood on the matter. And Earl Clements, who was then Governor and Chairman of the Board of Trustees, was running for the Senate. The last thing the judge, that Earl Clements wanted was to antagonize the black voters of this state, because he needed them. And Judge O’Rear, who was a rock-rid, conservative Republican. A man who had been on the bench, also had been a highly successful defense attorney, wanted to appeal the case. And things became so hot, that Earl Clements invited the old judge out to the hall, and ‘let’s settle it’. Let cooler heads prevail. They never appealed the Johnson case, which historically, I don’t know, was good or bad. But you never see the University of Kentucky mentioned in any of these cases. The Gaines case was appealed. The Sweat Case was appealed. The Setfield case was appealed; Albright, those cases were appealed. But not the Johnson case. It never got into the hands of the, beyond the District Court.

BRINSON: Why do you think they didn’t appeal it? Was it because of Earl Clements?

CLARK: Somewhat, yes. I think--I’m not sure I’m giving you an altogether fair answer there. I think, without positively knowing the answer, that cooler heads on the Board reasoned inevitably this is coming and we might as well just swallow this pill now, as later. And they were already conversant--I think some of them were at least--with what the court had decided, certainly in that Gaines case.

BRINSON: In your book, The Emerging South, which you were writing during this time you actually …

CLARK: Yes.

BRINSON: You just give a sentence to the fact that the UK trustee wanted to appeal the decision, but you don’t mention him by name.

CLARK: Yes.

BRINSON: It’s a good book, by the way, it was very helpful to me.

CLARK: Thank you, thank you. You know, I want to talk to you about that after....Well, I will talk to you on record about that. I just didn’t want to mix up...

BRINSON: About the book, you mean? Well, do you want to finish this and we’ll come back to the book?

CLARK: Yes. Well, I have only two things to say. We received black students in our classes. And some of them did very well. Students acted ugly at times, but I can’t say that I was ever conscious of a student acting up in class towards blacks. I never saw anything that was discriminatory, but you never know what students do outside the classroom.

BRINSON: Well, let me ask you about one. There’s a gentleman, George Logan, who tells ....

CLARK: Yeah, I had George in class.

BRINSON: ...a very complimentary story about you.

CLARK: Now there was a case, there was something came up there. And I frankly don’t know what it was, but whatever it was, I gave him a shoulder to cry on.

BRINSON: Can I tell you how he recalls it? And then see if that ...

CLARK: Yeah, sure.

BRINSON: He recalls coming to class and before you entered the room; that the students actually would not sit next to him and they lined up against the wall. And then you came to class and sort of smoothed things a little bit and said, “That everybody was to be treated fairly and take a seat.”

CLARK: That’s true, that’s true. And I meant that, too.

BRINSON: The second day he came to class, there was actually a sign in his seat and it was not a flattering sign. And the students were still lined up against the wall again. And he recalls that you asked him to go take a cup of coffee...

CLARK: That’s right, and let me talk to the students. [Laughing] That’s right.

BRINSON: Yes. And he says he doesn’t know to this day what you said to them, but when he came back, things were okay after that.

CLARK: Well, I simply talked to them about what had happened, and what must happen, and what was certain to happen and that they should behave themselves.

BRINSON: Okay.

CLARK: I’m an old Southerner, I doubt that a person could come out of a more discriminatory society than I came out of, unless you come from the Mississippi Delta. I came out of a--I had a lot to overcome myself in the matter of prejudice. Obviously, I knew of no other way, until I began to mature. And so in my own case, something that hit me like a ton of brick. I went to see The Birth of a Nation when I was a student at the University of Mississippi. And you know, that had a tremendous emotional impact on me.

BRINSON: And you think that helped to shape your...?

CLARK: It did.

BRINSON: ...your values?

CLARK: It did indeed. And little did I realize sitting as a sophomore, in a shabby, little Oxford, Mississippi movie theater, that later on in life I would come to have some correspondence with Dixon, the author. And as a matter of fact, he wrote me and asked me to arrange for him to come here to lecture. Which I never did do. But I did write the introduction to that, The Klansman, isn’t it? And that has proved a best seller.

BRINSON: Want to go back to Lyman again, because I’ve interviewed his son-in-law, Walter Hutchins. And of course, Walter was not here during that period.

CLARK: No.

BRINSON: He arrived much later. But he is of the impression that Lyman not only had a Master’s degree. He said from the University of Michigan...

CLARK: Michigan State.

BRINSON: Michigan State? Okay. But that he had done some, also some other course work through the University of Wisconsin. And that between the two, he might have had about two thirds, enough credit toward a doctoral degree. And he refers to him, as do a number of other people, as Doctor. But I don’t believe he ever got a Doctorate degree.

CLARK: No, no, no.

BRINSON: Was that?

CLARK: Unless somebody gave him an honorary degree.

BRINSON: Do you think that was just a term of infection, affection or...?

CLARK: That I’m in the dark. I can’t answer that one. I never heard that.

BRINSON: Okay.

CLARK: I can tell you this, that we had work to do getting him towards the standards that we were trying to hold to. And we were going to do that as conscientiously as human beings could do it. As a matter of fact, it was a real disappointment to me and to the other members of the department that we didn’t get to get him finished.

BRINSON: There are also others, Doctor Clark, who recall that Lyman Johnson never really had any intention of coming to the University. That he...

CLARK: That, I think is true.

BRINSON: That he had been trying for years to find a plaintiff. And when he couldn’t, he said, “Well, okay, he would do it.”

CLARK: Yeah. That I think, I don’t know how Thurgood Marshall--It was quite obvious in those hearings, the depositions and in the court--it was quite obvious that Lyman Johnson was simply a selected case. And I don’t know how. The NAACP had something to do with it, but I can’t answer that question. I don’t know, factually. But I know it was a test case. And I think that’s all it was.

BRINSON: Of course, last year, the University celebrated, in a big way, the fiftieth anniversary of the lawsuit. And there is now a statue on campus of Lyman Johnson.

CLARK: Is there?

BRINSON: Yes.

CLARK: I didn’t know that.

BRINSON: And his son, who lives up in Pennsylvania came down when they unveiled the statue.

CLARK: Well, that’s uh--I don’t know that. Ignored over ...[Laughing]

BRINSON: And Bishop Tutu was here...

CLARK: I knew the Bishop was here.

BRINSON: ...and gave the convocation and whatnot.

CLARK: His daughter graduated at the University.

BRINSON: Right, right. How do you feel about all that? About him being recognized for something that he didn’t ...

CLARK: Didn’t do.

BRINSON: ...really follow through on?

CLARK: That’s right. Well, I can tell you positively, absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, that the reasons he gave me, was he was too busy settling that estate. And I wondered how complicated that estate was; to take all that time. Now, you touch on something else, that I can only tell you, on the sidelines. And that is, after the Johnson case was decided, and then other blacks, not many, but some blacks began to drift in; we came down to Brown versus School Board, Board of Education. And after that, the University had not really developed any policy for total desegregation. And I remember riding one day with Vice President Chamberlin and Dean White of the College of Arts and Sciences. Well, we were good friends. We had come up through the ranks together. And we got in a conversation about, “This thing’s coming, the Day Law’s going by the board; and this thing’s coming inevitably, and how ready was the University with a policy?” To just open its doors wide. And there was no doubt in their minds, but what that was going to happen. We came up--I can’t tell you the year--but I would judge it was fifty-four or fifty-five; the University had no policy beyond that simply fake special courses thing; which was a sham to begin with. We had a reception. The University used to have a reception on Sunday before the registration started for parents to bring in, especially freshman students, and get acquainted with faculty members. Not all faculty members would go to those things, [Laughing] but a lot of them would. And we would be lined up around the wall and shake hands with them and let them see we weren’t going to chew up their little angels. And up came, as I recall, two or three black mothers and fathers. They passed right down the line, and nobody thought anything about it. And as far as I was personally informed, nothing happened. And the University just caved in, without any formal policy or anything.

BRINSON: Let me ask you. I’ve wondered about Lyman’s ability to even pay for graduate school, because he was a high school teacher. He had a wife and two small children.

CLARK: That I know nothing about.

BRINSON: And how, if he had come to the University, was there ever any discussion of financial aid?

CLARK: Never in my presence.

BRINSON: I think it would have been very difficult for him to finance the cost of that and to continue to care for his family.

CLARK: I think maybe, he might have gotten some assistance, not from the University, because I don’t think the University had much to give assistance to anybody. If I recall correctly, we had almost no scholarship. There was no agency at that time that would have, such as they might appeal to now. That’s something that I’m not qualified to answer. I don’t know.

BRINSON: Okay. Well, tell me about the book, The Emerging South.

CLARK: By the time I got into that, I had done two books on the South. One that I’m especially proud of, but it never did get the notice that I thought it should have. The Southern Country editor, I went into this discriminatory business in a chapter of how the old southern editors treated the issue. I had become quite, quite disturbed about where the South was going in this matter. And these court cases came down and the School Board case had been rendered. And the South--it seemed to me--to be headed for disaster, which it was. I set out with a contract from Albert Knopf, and that’s a story within itself, to do this book. I interviewed people all over the South, everybody I could lay hands on, I would talk with them about it. I never could get the boy, the football player from Mississippi State University, who organized the Citizen’s Council. I never could come up with him. I went to his office, repeatedly. Over at Greenville, Mississippi, the--oh my goodness, the editor of the paper there--Cotton Carter--they talked to me; and they said they couldn’t get in. And asked me if I wouldn’t get in and interview him, and help them out. But I never could get to him. But I interviewed a lot of extremists, and then some moderates along the way. I stopped by the University of North Carolina, just for a visit with a friend of mine, Fletcher Green. Fletcher said, “This is not the time to write that kind of book.” But the book received good reviews.

BRINSON: Now, you’re talking about The Emerging South?

CLARK: The Emerging South, yeah. And I think it was the time. Because that’s when the pot was bubbling.

BRINSON: It came out in nineteen sixty-one, I believe is the copyright?

CLARK: Yeah, right in the middle of it.

BRINSON: That’s right.

CLARK: It took some courage to do it.

BRINSON: Did you....what kind of feedback did you get from publishing that book? Was there any negative feedback?

CLARK: No, I didn’t. The worst feedback I got was from New Orleans. A radio station called me and asked me if I would be interviewed over telephone. And they were interviewing--the morning line, and they had some of those wild women on the phone. And it was about like being in a tiger’s den.

BRINSON: What do you mean, “wild women”?

CLARK: You know that morning line that they had, that protested, that came out every morning and that screaming, yelling protest against desegregation.

BRINSON: Okay.

CLARK: And they worked me over right sharp, which when I found out who it was, I knew I was going to get. And it didn’t injure me any. It didn’t upset me any, as a matter of fact. I did have a case that did upset me, terribly. To this day I’m upset about it. In some where in this period, right after that book came out, I was invited to give a lecture in Memphis; at Memphis State University. Well, that’s where I had started my teaching career. And when I got to Memphis, I picked up The Commercial Appeal and it was just screaming bloody murder. Bill Heseltine from the University of Wisconsin had gone down. And Bill was a smart aleck and he went down with the full intention of making everybody mad, saying, “That Memphis was inferior to Nashville.” [Laughing] Touched every sensitive nerve. And I said, “Well, lying there in bed in the Peabody Hotel reading it”; and I said, “Bill has just made a mess of things here. He came down just willfully to stir these people here. And I’m not going to say a thing. I’m going to make the most innocuous speech I can and get out of here.” Well, I did. And The Commercial ran just a little story. They sensed that I hadn’t said anything. And I forgot all about it. One day I was working in my little wood shop and my son came and said, ‘Daddy, why don’t you quit saying these things?’ And I said, “What things did I say?” [Laughing] And he said, “Look at this here.” There was a full page of The Denver News, not the Rocky Mountain News, but the other one.

BRINSON: Post?

CLARK: The Denver Post, about a professor who had made a speech in Memphis on the subject, it’s time for the South to quit singing Dixie. The Jackson Daily News down in Jackson, ran a full page. They read me out, disowned me as a native of Mississippi. Then my hometown paper, it picked it up. My own cousins, and they read me out of all creation. And it hurt my mother terribly. And I was just infuriated about that, so.

BRINSON: Were you misquoted?

CLARK: What?

BRINSON: Were you misquoted?

CLARK: I hadn’t even said anything about Dixie! I hadn’t even thought about it. I thought it was a novel idea and I thought maybe the time had come to quit singing Dixie in the sense that they were singing. I sent word to The Commercial Appeal and confronted him with this sort of thing. And they fired the reporter. But things were touchy. I also was in a meeting with a very conservative man, Kilpatrick.

BRINSON: James Kilpatrick.

CLARK: You knew him, I’m sure.

BRINSON: Well, I know of him. He was from Richmond, Virginia.

CLARK: That’s right, quite true, quite true.

BRINSON: It was Ralph McGill and Kilpatrick and I was on the program. And the foreman, the black leader, you know and somebody from Chicago representing, not the Black Panthers, but some other organization, in that forum that the Vanderbilt students had. And Kilpatrick literally chewed Ralph McGill up. Kilpatrick was a very eloquent man, on his feet. He was a very able man on his feet. And I came out of that without....I had the job of sort of cleaning up, summarizing what had been said. I came out of that unscathed. But I was present to see, first hand, the real glue that was holding all that stuff together. And Ralph McGill and I were staying in adjoining rooms in the motel and we had met there together. Coming back, Ralph was so outdone. He was perspiring and he said to me, “Every time I come to Vanderbilt, I just lose control of my emotions.” Well, I knew that wasn’t true. It was what was happening in that session there. But those were stirring times in the South. I interviewed the president of that college at Petersburg. Had a very interesting interview with him. And he said, “I’m working hard here...”

BRINSON: Now the college in Petersburg, Virginia?

CLARK: Yeah.

BRINSON: The black, historically black, Virginia State College.

CLARK: He said, “I have a hard time here. This is a hard situation.” He said, “The blacks have got to be lifted up. And I’m trying so hard to accomplish some of that.” “But,” he said, “It is so hard to be a black here, and it is so hard to make headway in this area.” He took me by the arm and said, “Come over here, I want to show you something.” And we looked out the window at a playground. And he said, “You see that playground down there.” He said, “Blacks can’t--that’s a public playground and blacks can’t go to that playground.” I thought he made the most sense of anybody I interviewed, as a matter of fact.

BRINSON: Do you remember his name?

CLARK: I don’t remember his name.

BRINSON: They’ve actually had a number of presidents there, so.

CLARK: But I also interviewed a very good friend of mine. We remained good friends to the end of his life. Oh my goodness, Dabney.

BRINSON: Virginus.

CLARK: Virginus Dabney.

BRINSON: Right.

CLARK: Well, Virginus. I got nothing out of Virginus.

END OF TAPE ONE SIDE TWO

BEGIN TAPE TWO SIDE ONE

THOMAS CLARK: ...that I was supporting an issue that Kilpatrick had put forward, that, what did they call that? It was nullification, really.

BRINSON: Massive resistance?

CLARK: Well it wasn’t massive resistance, but it was....They had a name for it. Anyway, it was constitutionally getting around in discriminatory decisions. They were--Virginus was caught in a bind there, because the family that owned The Richmond Times Dispatch was ultra, ultra conservative; and Kilpatrick was breathing down his neck with that idea. And an old friend of mine up at Farmville, Francis Simpkins, who should have known better. Francis was as crazy as a loon. He became a segregationist. He’d always posed as a liberal historian. And that old man Crawford up at Farmville, who had come up with that passive resistance idea. He ran a laundry, I think, a dry-cleaning establishment up there. And I was in the process of interviewing him. Getting a wonderful interview from that point of view, and Francis Simpkins kept butting in; interrupting him because he could see what was happening, and that was the last thing that Francis wanted to happen. And I never got it complete. But that old man Crawford was explaining to me how this resistance was going to spread through the South and how they would finally win in the end.

BRINSON: I’ve been very interested that Virginia has never really told much of the story of their experience with the civil rights struggle.

CLARK: No.

BRINSON: In fact there is only one book, and it’s written more about the white reaction to massive resistance when the schools were closed.

CLARK: Let me tell you something. The Chandler family had owned The Times-Dispatch.

BRINSON: Right, no, Bryan, the Bryan Family, Kenneth Bryan.

CLARK: That’s right. Virginia was a hot bed of resistance. No matter what’s said. I know that first hand, [Laughing] because I interviewed those people.

BRINSON: Well, I think the University History Department, with some exception, are so committed to Colonial history and Civil War history, that they’ve never really...

CLARK: Yeah, well William and Mary is solely committed to Colonial history. The University of Virginia was committed to Jeffersonianism without carrying out Jeffersonianism. [Laughing] And that thing over at Farmville was--Francis Simpkins had written that textbook, you know, in southern history. And when I got my text finished and took it to Alfred Knopf, he sent it out for an outside reader. And he sent it to Francis Simpkins’ publisher, he sent it to Francis Simpkins. Francis wrote a very negative report, and I just simply picked up my manuscript and walked over to Oxford and they accepted it immediately. And later on, after I knew Alfred Knopf quite well. Alfred said, “Why did you do that?” I said, “Because you had that report there.” He said, “You shouldn’t have done that. I was going to publish the book.” [Laughing] I said, “You didn’t make any motion to at the time.”

BRINSON: Was Simpkins on the faculty at Longwood College?

CLARK: Yes he was. Long time.

BRINSON: And taught history there. I’ve also been--I really think Kentucky is far ahead of Virginia in the telling of its history. For example, there’s no, you know, general historical overview to the history of Virginia.

CLARK: Yeah.

BRINSON: In a way, you know, we have yours and we have Jim Cotter’s new one.

CLARK: That I think is true. There’s been a lot of--Virginia’s history has been taught in piece meals and in special interests. I attended the University of Virginia, I finished work on my degree at Virginia. But it was understood that I was not qualified to graduate there, because they had a different set of qualifications. But I had good friends there, Dumar Malone was a real good friend. And I’m not sure where Dumar stood. He was such a confirmed Jeffersonian. And I’m not sure where he stood on this race issue. Some of the younger, well, that younger staff at Virginia, like Peterson and others there, Bernie Mayo, and the Dean of the Graduate School, they were fairly conservative people.

BRINSON: Well, now you have some people like Ed Ayres.

CLARK: That’s a pretty good book. That’s a crackerjack good book.

BRINSON: And he’s got some good students and I think it’s just a matter of time before we’ll...

CLARK: That’s a crackerjack good book, too.

BRINSON: It is, it is. Well, let me ask you Doctor Clark, you as a Southerner, and having seen a lot of change, where do you think race relations are today? Where do you think we need to go with the civil rights struggle?

CLARK: I think they are about as muddled as they ever were. That’s an awful, off the top of my head answer, but I think that can be demonstrated. We’ve never had full integration. Although the thing that interests me tremendously, is that, that debacle at Ol’Miss, which was to me, personally, that was a very painful thing. And they admitted Meredith. And Meredith never really carried through fully, himself. I don’t know if these boys could have. They may have been so badly scarred in the scuffle that they couldn’t have. But Ol’Miss now, overdoes itself almost in this matter. It has black athletic teams, almost solid black team. Or Mississippi State, fifty years ago if a black had appeared on campus, they would have hanged him. And now, the athletic teams are predominantly black. And I don’t know what to make of the student body right now at the moment. But I think that would apply pretty generally throughout the South. The barrier that we have never, that invisible, but difficult barrier to penetrate is that matter of social relationships. That’s the hard one. And then, there’s just so many complex things involved here. But one, I think Southerners are still startled when they see a really intelligent black step out and talk their language. And that, I think, the blacks have some barriers to get through themselves, among themselves on that score. How far the public schools have gone, now you take an area like the Delta Mississippi. They have a difficult time keeping teachers in those schools. Can you imagine a young, white-girl teacher going into one of those isolated communities with absolutely no, nothing, but just that dull, day-to-day drudgery of trying to teach? No recreational, no entertainment, no social relationships. And that’s hard to overcome that sort of thing.

BRINSON: I’ve been interested because a few people that I have interviewed along the way with this project, have suggested that with both the integration of the public schools and the colleges, that some whites came along supporting it, largely because they thought it would improve their athletic programs.

CLARK: No doubt about that. But I will say this, I was on the Athletic Board over here and the question came up. Well, I never knew for a fact, but I always suspected that Rupp was not in favor of using blacks on his team. And he certainly has that reputation. I think you must have discovered that. But the issue came up in the Athletic Board about playing blacks and the Director, Bernie Shively, who was Director of Athletics, said, “If we do, we can’t be a member of the Southeastern Conference anymore.” And my answer to that is, “Well, let’s get out.”

BRINSON: I was also interested in a recent program of Al Smith’s on Kentucky Comment on Friday night. One of the reporters made the observation that he thought that blacks in college athletics today was actually another form of slavery.

CLARK: It is. I’ll go along with that. I’ll go along with that. I talked to Whitney Young about that. He agreed. I said, “You know, if I had any advice at all to give black youth; get in there and get a good education, and that’s the way you are going to make it.” And he agreed with that point. This is a snare and a delusion for these boys. They come here. They sit down here and scream their heads off, and they have them running up and down the floor. They think they are somebody; but they’ve been tutored in God knows what, just to get them--just to keep them--just a figment of eligibility. I may be harsh in that judgment, but I think I saw that past. Where do they land? Very few of them go on to that ultimate wealth in professional sports. And very few of them go on beyond that token education they get. How many have you seen stories about that have succeeded after they got out? I think it is slavery too, because look at the money that they bring in. And look at the money that these white managers spend.

BRINSON: Tell me about Whitney Young. How did you two meet?

CLARK: I met him here at the University. And he was a very intelligent person. I thought the tragedy was Whitney Young died. He would have been a very powerful voice. And I felt that he really had in mind a very firm objective for his race and the courage to stand up for it.

BRINSON: Now did he come here to speak? He wasn’t a student?

CLARK: He came here on a program of some sort. But his father, he was born and raised in Kentucky. His father was the President of that Lincoln Institute down there. But an interesting thing happened. I was Chairman of the Committee on honorary degrees. And we voted to give Whitney Young an honorary degree. Came up before the Graduate faculty. And there is always a jackass in the crowd. When I read out the names, this fellow stood up and said, “What has he ever done in the University?” And a calmer voice, I never knew who it was, answered, “He was turned down for admission.” [Laughter]

BRINSON: That’s a good one.

CLARK: He would have been a distinguished graduate of the University.

BRINSON: Yeah, he would have been.

CLARK: And so would that young boy in that law case. You know, I am ashamed of myself. His name was Hatchet, Hatcher. That’s almost right. He became a distinguished lawyer, you know.

BRINSON: He did?

CLARK: Yeah. He went on to one of the Ivy League schools and became an outstanding lawyer.

BRINSON: Now, Governor Breathitt recalls that he was a law student in nineteen fifty-nine, here. And that there was a black student in one of his classes, but he can’t remember the name either. And we’ve actually been trying to...

CLARK: Well, I’m almost right, Hatcher or ....I met him. The Law School brought him back here as an honored guest and he lectured. And I went and had lunch with him. And I sat and looked at that man and I thought how many souls have we sent down the river in all this foolishness.

BRINSON: Well is there anything else you want to talk about?

CLARK: No. I don’t want you to think I’m on an ego trip, but I did want to say what happened.

BRINSON: I’m very glad you did, because you’ve given me some new information today and I think it will be real important to have that in the collection.

CLARK: I would love to....I might do it yet. But I would like to get behind something and find out where this thing came from and how it came, the Day Law. There’s really a good bit written about the Day Law, but I don’t think the Day Law has been explore yet fully.

BRINSON: Well, I know the very basics of how the legislator named Day, went to Berea and didn’t like the fact that they were racially integrated. And of course, that was Plessy versus Ferguson had come down in eighteen ninety-six; a few years before Mr. Day visited the Berea campus. And then he went to the State Legislature and asked that Berea, that schools not be allowed to integrate. Now that’s all I’ve really seen. Is just that little bit.

CLARK: Now he came from Breathitt County, as I recall.

BRINSON: I think you are right.

CLARK: I think he was born and raised in Breathitt.

BRINSON: I don’t know that.

CLARK: I think it is something that hasn’t been brought out. That’s too simple an answer.

BRINSON: Well, what do you think?

CLARK: What I think is that he voiced his anger about it, and that there was a coterie in the General Assembly that used him as a front man. And I hope I live long enough to see if I am right about that.

BRINSON: How would you go about researching that, do you think?

CLARK: I would go and examine membership roll, see where they come from. I would go through the journals and see what they had to say, and see if any of them were members of the Constitutional Convention of eighteen ninety that made those extensive speeches. And see if I can’t trace that germ back. Well you do have the germ, as far as that’s concerned. You have the anti ( ) Law of eighteen thirty-three, which stirred up more than just the issue of slavery. You had the rampant slavery issue in the Constitutional Convention in forty-nine, and in a good bit of legislation in between. In eighteen ninety, you had the voting, well in the eighteen seventies you had the voting issue. I’d go back and take a look at all of those and see if there isn’t some central thing, thread that runs through there.

BRINSON: I’ve been surprised in terms of voting, that Kentucky seems to have allowed the black vote for a long time.

CLARK: They did, and that’s really a miracle that, that happened. It goes back to what, eighteen seventy-four or five somewhere back there.

BRINSON: And some people have said to me, “Well it’s because there was never enough of a black population in Kentucky to be concerned about.” But in some areas, that wasn’t always true, like Hopkinsville had a fairly large black population. Has anybody to your knowledge, ever researched that?

CLARK: No. Well, only in a sort of left handed way. The population of this state has run pretty generally at the same level, about what is it? Seven and a half to eight percent. And the concentrations have remained pretty steady, Louisville, Lexington, Hopkinsville, Winchester, Danville, Paris, Shelbyville and Elkton those foundation communities down there. But the rest of Kentucky didn’t figure into slavery to an amount. And there is a general anti-racial feeling in the mountains, the mountaineers. That I would want to take into consideration, Day and his background.

BRINSON: Where he came from and...

CLARK: Where he came from and his attitudes. I think I would even explore that a bit by interviewing people today.

BRINSON: From that area?

CLARK: From Breathitt County on racial issues. I don’t believe--I could be wrong. I don’t believe the full Day story is out on it. Not one man could have done that.

BRINSON: No, he had to have support for that. Well are there any other topics like this, that you have been thinking, well you wish somebody, either yourself or some other historian would...?

CLARK: Oh, there’s a lot of things that we need to do to understand this state. A lot of things.

BRINSON: In terms of African-Americans or in terms of race relation history though in particular.

CLARK: I think it would be interesting to do a little study....This boy, you know, a very attractive boy, that’s on the faculty here.

BRINSON: Gerald Smith.

CLARK: Yeah. I talked to him about it. When emancipation--well, the Proclamation didn’t have a lot to do with freeing the slaves in Kentucky. But when it was quite visible, even to slaves, that the war was winding down in favor of the North, they began to leave. A lot of them left their moorings quickly and went down to Camp Nelson. Well, that boy, Sayres, that’s a very good book on that situation there. But they formed these little pockets, little segregated communities, like Bracktown, Bobtown, Jimtown, Pralltown. I’ve always thought that I would like to do some kind of study on those. The dynamics of those little communities. And I don’t think you could understand race relations without doing something on those little communities.

BRINSON: You would be interested, Doctor Clark, in an interview, actually several interviews that we’ve done over the last year with a woman out in Mayfield. She is a hundred and two years old.

CLARK: Black or white?

BRINSON: Black. And her father and mother were slaves. And her mother was actually brought from Virginia to the Paducah area when she was twelve. And her father, I think, came out of Tennessee. But basically before, during the Civil War, he ran away to Paducah. And he joined the Union Forces.

CLARK: Bill McGraff’s Forces.

BRINSON: Right. And there were, I believe, four colored regiments from Paducah.

CLARK: Yeah. Well there was a tremendous whoop-de-do in the legislature about black soldiers, you know. Resistance to that.

BRINSON: Tell me about that.

CLARK: Well, they were afraid of them. And they undertook to outlaw black troops.

BRINSON: I didn’t know that. Did that pass?

CLARK: I had something on my mind there. I think the Louisville case, need to explore that a little bit more. The streetcar case in Louisville. That’s a very interesting case.

BRINSON: Right. I’ve read a little bit. Mary Britton, I think, has a little credit.

CLARK: That’s a landmark case. But there’s a lot to be done. Did you ever know slaves?

BRINSON: Not personally.

CLARK: I did. I not only knew slaves, we had ex-slaves on the place. I don’t mean to imply that we had any of ours. All my people, they were old slaves. My great-great grandfather had one or two slaves out in South Carolina, but my immediate forbearers never had slaves, on either side, my mother or my father’s side. But we had Uncle Sam Metz. We always called them Uncle and Aunt. And that was a mark of respect, be it said. Uncle Sam cooked for my mother for a time. And Uncle Sam had ridden through the Civil War with Captain Metz. He was his body servant. Aunt Bessie Harper, belonged to this Harper family down here in Frankfort, been sold South. And she lived on our place. I knew two Congo slaves.

BRINSON: Did they ever talk about slavery to you that you recall?

CLARK: I don’t really recall that, but Negroes living in our community were loyal to white families. There was a whole colony, a black colony. We got our cotton choppers and our cotton pickers out of that community. They were related to a family, I know the married name of the woman. I don’t know her maiden name. Her family had owned these people, fathers and mothers, as slaves. They were absolutely loyal to that white family. I know one time we were busy getting cotton out of the field. She had to have a roof put on her barn. They stopped right in the middle of the day, and we couldn’t move pay until they got that roof on that barn for her. I knew two Congo slaves.

BRINSON: Congo?

CLARK: Middle passage. Uncle Silas and Uncle Jeremiah Miller.

BRINSON: And how did you know them?

CLARK: Because they walked through our gate day after day.

BRINSON: Did they ever talk about any bad experiences? They were much older.

CLARK: No, I remember one time, Uncle Silas didn’t have good brakes and coming down to the barn was a little hillside. And he come down and landed against the farm gate.

BRINSON: And what was he driving? A vehicle?

CLARK: He was driving himself. He couldn’t control it. Uncle Silas had never driven anything. [Laughter] The conversation that took place between him and my father. He had picked up a glimmer of information that there was a war going on. It was World War One. And he stood talking to my father, some of the neighborhood boys were being drafted. And he knew about that. So he said to my father, as he turned to walk on down the rest of that hill, trying to get home he couldn’t do otherwise. He turned and said to my father, “I sure hope they don’t draft me.” [Laughter] Oh, sure, I knew slaves all around. And I don’t recall ever any bitterness about it. None.

BRINSON: There is a book that was reviewed in The New York Times in the book section, this weekend, about the history of African-Americans in the military. And one of the points that the reviewer makes about the Civil War military experience, is that most often the white soldiers were given a stipend to purchase their uniform. But the black soldiers were not and they in fact had to buy theirs.

CLARK: I wouldn’t be surprised at that.

BRINSON: So some very interesting material.

CLARK: You know I think one of the reasons we’re going to have until the end of time, is historians writing about slavery. And I think the reason for that is slavery was such a hodge-podge, mixed up matter of social history.

BRINSON: I’m going to stop you just a minute.

END OF TAPE TWO SIDE ONE

BEGIN TAPE TWO SIDE TWO

BRINSON: We’re were talking about....You were saying slavery was such a...

CLARK: Mixed up....There were families that owned slaves, you could hardly see where the line was drawn. And maybe the bloodline wasn’t very drawn. But leaving that aside, there was genuine affection between whites and their slaves. There were families that had children. They were good to their children. There were children who held their parents in affection. There were parents who were mean and hateful to their children, and their children hated them. And that human factor plays in. As to why the questions always come up about the profitability of slavery. So long as the country needed settling, they were profitable in this country. By eighteen twenty, twenty-five, slavery had ceased to be a very useful institution in this state. When you go back and look at the true picture, it’s concentrated only in a small, few areas. It wasn’t generally over the state. The great majority of Kentucky knew nothing about slavery firsthand. And that was true in other Southern states. In Mississippi, my home county, I never heard of a big slave holder in my county. There might have been just a half a dozen slaves. I really don’t know what the largest number of slaves. Yet, you get into the plantation areas, Louisiana, Delta Mississippi or Arkansas, in the low country of South Carolina with the absentee owners and that beast in the picture, the overseers. You really don’t know that. Of course, basically, slavery had its death mark on it, because of the inconsistency of the American’s great dedication to Freedom and Independence and Rights. And they always ran into that kind of thing.

BRINSON: Let me ask you about Kentucky history, though. Is there work to be done about slavery in Kentucky or about the Underground Railroad?

CLARK: Yes, I think so. The Underground Railroad is such an ephemeral thing. It’s hard to, it’s almost like trying to pick up the fog of the morning. There’s no doubt about it, that the Underground Railroad operated. That, you start with that as a base and a solid assumption. But where, when and how did it operate always? You have the dramatic cases like Deann Webster and Calvin Fairbanks. You had Mrs. Stowe giving free reign to an imagination, which is about a third fact and two-thirds fancy. You had Theodore Weld and the witnesses--a thousand--what is it? The title of that book? With all of....It concentrates on Kentucky pretty much. There shouldn’t be--we should take another look. We are right now, sensationalizing the Underground Railroad, when we ought to be looking at what were the fundamentals of it. There’s a wonderful letter in Governor Magoffin’s papers. There is a series of letters. I think there are four in there. A man went through the South, undertaking to persuade slave owners to give up their slaves. He also was encouraging slaves to run away from their owners. And they had quite an organization, connection between John Brown and all this movement. It was part of the John Brown movement. This man wrote a long confidential report about the fact that he thought they’d have this big slave uprising; that they could take hundreds, maybe thousands of slaves and go over the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers with them into Illinois and Indiana. The place they wanted to concentrate them was in Mammoth Cave, in Kentucky. They wrote all this report and it was so highly explosive, that they didn’t dare send it in the mail. So they picked out a trustworthy carrier and trusted it to him to deliver to John Brown personally, just before the Battle of--before the affair at Harper’s Ferry. Well, this young boy or young man, got on the train with that in his overcoat pocket. He got as far as Philadelphia, and I’m not quite clear what it was he did beyond Philadelphia; but at some way station he got off the train. And the fellow sitting in the seat behind him, saw he dropped something and he picked it up. It was this letter about concentrating slaves in Mammoth Cave. There was a letter from this fellow’s wife begging him not to participate in this Harper’s Ferry affair. Said, “You’ll be killed certainly if you do.” And then there was this letter from this fellow who picked this up from the floor of this railway car and sent it to Governor Magoffin. It’s a tremendously interesting series of letters.

BRINSON: I want to ask you a general question or two here. And I’m curious how you first became interested in history. And when you decided you were going to be a historian?

CLARK: That is a hard question to answer. Well, first of all, if I had been in the Civil War, I couldn’t have been in it anymore than I was. With all the old veterans and ex-slaves and the old Civil War veterans and the memories of their family and all. They weren’t strangers. They were just people walking around and talking. I heard them talk. My mother was a teacher. She read such books as she could get a hold of. And I read such books as I could get a hold of. And I went off to the University of Mississippi with the intention of studying Law. But I never got near the Law School, thank goodness. I fell--formed an acquaintance with one of the most wonderful human beings I’ve ever known. Charles S. Sidner of Virginia. And I never had a class with him. And I called him Uncle Charlie until the day he died. We would stand in that old Lyceum Building, where all that tragedy occurred, and talk and talk. And I then knew I wanted to be a historian. And Charlie was encouraging. And one day I was walking across the campus. I had covered the Chancellor’s office as a reporter for the campus paper. And I almost saw the Chancellor, knew him because I had covered his office. The night watchman resigned. He had no security whatsoever in the University. And that big game between Ol’Miss and A&M College coming on. That meant they could have all kinds of trouble. He had me organize a student police force to take care of traffic and whatever came up. [Laughing] We didn’t have anything but our fists to work with, but we didn’t have any trouble. And I walked across campus one day and met the old Chancellor. And he said, “I’ve just been talking to the President of the University of Kentucky. And he’s asked me to have one of our boys apply for a little scholarship, two hundred dollars.” And he said, “I want you to apply for it.” And I did and came here. I had not taken a lot of history prior to that. I had taken more biology than history. I had taken more English than I had history.

BRINSON: But now you came here?

CLARK: Came here. I went to my Uncle’s, who was Superintendent of school down in Laurel County.

BRINSON: Right.

CLARK: And was an adjunct professor at the University of Virginia. I was never clear what kind of professor that was.

BRINSON: Well, I read that in the interview in the book that Olive McBeatty has done, Interviews with Writers, about you. But then you went to Duke to do your graduate studies.

CLARK: That’s right. I came here. I did an intensive year’s work and got a Masters degree here. And then in the Spring, I had to go somewhere. There wasn’t much open in those days. Scholarships were few and far between. And I made an application to Virginia, as a matter of a fact, Dumar Malone. Later on I talked to him and he said, “I couldn’t give you a scholarship. I didn’t have any money to give anything.” But I made an application to Duke, and they turned me down on the ground that they didn’t have any fellowship program. Professor Ripey in Latin American field came here to lecture, and he said, “They’d changed their mind. And they’d asked me, him to look me over, see if I’d combed my hair.” And they gave me a fellowship and I went to Duke.

BRINSON: So you did a Master’s at UK in History, and then your Doctoral degree at Duke?

CLARK: At Duke, that’s right.

BRINSON: Was Charlie Sidner a faculty member?

CLARK: At Ol’Miss.

BRINSON: At Ol’Miss, he was.

CLARK: And then he went to Duke. Uncle Charlie very much wanted to go to Duke. I would go by Ol’Miss, and he inquired to me about Duke. He had his eye set on Duke. Well, they took him as a professor and made him a Graduate Dean. The only time we ever had any friction between us, even a word of friction. When he became head of the department down there, I wrote him a letter. I was head of the department here. And I wrote him a letter and congratulated him. Almost the next day I heard that Uncle Charlie had also accepted the Deanship of the Graduate School. And I sat down and wrote him a son to father letter, saying you’ve accepted too much. You can’t do it. You’ve bitten off something now that is going to be the end of you. Well, I got a very cross letter back from Uncle Charlie, saying that I should attend to my affairs here on this campus. [Laughing] And then I had a terribly upsetting thing happen. That blew over without any further....We remained father and son relationship. I heard about it, Herman Spiral, Dean of the Graduate School here. Some way or another Herman got the news that Uncle Charlie had died. That’s the first news that I had. Then I got busy and found out he’d died down in Gulf Port, Mississippi. He had gone down to deliver a lecture at Jackson and gone by the Gulf Coast. And they took him to Chattanooga to bury him. The next day I got a letter from him. And that letter said, “I simply have had more to do than I have wit and wisdom to do. It is just too much.” After he was in his grave, I had that letter, which upset me terribly.

BRINSON: I’m sure.

CLARK: But, to answer your question, I simply came out of an environment that had some historical implication anyway. If I had to make a decision today, that I made in nineteen twenty-eight, there on the campus of the University of Mississippi, I’d make it all over. I can tell you this, I’ve been happy in the profession.

BRINSON: I have one last question, Doctor Clark, and there is a theory among some contemporary historians, at least, that history is an organizing tool. It is a way of helping people to understand the past, so that they can deal with the present and plan for the future; and particularly in terms of American social movements. We see efforts of taking stories from history into labor union meetings and whatnot. And I wonder how you would see that?

CLARK: I, well see at the University of North Carolina, and they called in the historians in that area. And an old professor that I knew quite well, made a remark that shocked me out of a year’s growth. The question was being batted around for who do historians write. And his answer: “For other historians.” And I thought, we might as well fold up our tent and go home right now. My own personal feeling is that a historian has two obligations. If he is a teaching historian, to do the best he can to convey to youthful minds some understanding of where they are on the scale of time. Where they are on the scale of civilization; understand that everything you ever accomplish in life is based on what somebody else has accomplished in back of you. And I live by that rule, stoutly. And that is the basis of my own personal philosophy on history. I think history has a very profound meaning in a civilization, in a society, in a culture. If you don’t understand something about the past, if you don’t understand about the errors the past has made, if you don’t understand about the victories that the past has won, then you are setting out without a map to the future. It’s going to be a cloudy future. I also believe although I was trained, rigidly trained in the Van Rocke School, I’ve never been a good Van Rocke historian. Van Rocke killed history, as a matter of fact, but nevertheless, it was a scientific German history. Once these American scholars started going to the German universities, they came back with a pretty dead, dull, meticulous, factual documentation, orientation of history. I believe a historian should write for as many readers as he can entice. And he has an obligation to tell that reader something about what has happened. And give some basis for following some perspective, in two directions, in front and in back. And I stoutly believe, I have never achieved it, but I stoutly believe that a historian has an obligation to write so as people can read it. And that’s something I fail. And to get back to what you said. I’m an honorary member, live long enough [Laughing] to be an honorary of all the professional organizations. The American Historical Review comes to me four times a year. The Organization of American Historians, The Journal of American History comes to me. The Southern History Journal come to me and some of the other professional journals. They are publishing material that is as dead as a doornail that nobody will ever see. Except somebody that is looking for a body to dig up to put in another grave. And I know I am wrong about that. I know I’m wrong. I have a bad attitude, maybe. But if you don’t make it available to some kind of an audience, beyond a professional audience, why do it? Why do it?

BRINSON: Is there anything else you would like to add?

CLARK: That’s all. I’ve done too much already.

BRINSON: No, this has been a great interview, thank you.

END OF INTERVIEW