by Peter H. Clark devoted his life to the support of African Americans. Born a free Black in Cincinnati in 1829, Clark was relentless in his political and social activism for the welfare of his community. Clark was an abolitionist and an Underground Railroad conductor; he was also the secretary of the National Convention of Colored Men in 1853 in Syracuse and a drafter of the constitution of the National Equal Rights League. Clark campaigned for African American rights via the Republican Party from its foundation in 1856 until the 1880s. He served as a militant assistant editor of the Frederick Douglass’s Paper and found his own short-lived Black paper, Herald of Freedom, in 1855.
Clark saw teaching as an ideal way to train African Americans toward a better future. As soon as Black schools were opened in Ohio in 1849, Clark started his teaching career. He was fired in 1853 for promoting the writings of Tom Paine to his students, but he returned to class in 1866, this time as principal of the Gaines High School, a Black school named after his uncle, John I. Gaines. He retained this position until 1886.
In his search for the best way to serve his community, in 1877 Clark joined the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), the first Marxist organisation to have a national reach ever founded in the U.S. In the SLP, Clark offered a combined critique of capitalism and racism in a way that had never been achieved before. He attacked simultaneously Southern racism and Northern capitalism, describing socialism as a cure to both evils. Electoral defeats convinced him that he was more useful to the cause in the Republican Party, but his brief militancy in the SLP has earned him the title of “America’s First Black Socialist”.