The Reverend Peter W. Clark: Sweet Preacher and Steadfast Reformer

By Elaine Parker Adams

Peter Clarks ministerial journey provides an in-depth understanding of the sacrifices and hardships faced by black Methodist preachers as they spread the gospel and expanded Methodism in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. It provides deep insight into the racial attitudes and economic conditions that prevailed in post-Reconstruction Louisiana.
- Angella Current-Felder,
author, Breaking Barriers: An African American Family & the Methodist Story

I could feel the story better than most because I had been down some of the same roads Peter Clark traveled, although a hundred years later and under more comfortable circumstances.
- Rev. James L. Killen, Jr.,
author, Pastoral Care in the Small Membership Church

We sensed Peter Clarks strength and leadership throughout this very turbulent and racially charged time in our history. He would have been honored to have his life written about with such loving care.
- Rev. Cindy Foster Serio,
spiritual director and retreat leader, Mosaic Spiritual Formation Ministry

The information regarding tuberculosis is insightful. The biography walks the reader through some very important points and offers some food for thought on the thinking at the time and implications for the race, the individual and the family unit.
- Dr. Lisa Armitige,
medical consultant, Heartland National TB Center

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Jul 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781449797829

Elaine Parker Adams

Elaine Parker Adams is the great-granddaughter of Rev. Peter W. Clark. She shares his esteem for education and social justice. In 1991, she was the founding president of Houston Community College-Northeast. Earlier, she served the State of Texas as assistant commissioner for educational opportunity planning, coordinating statewide efforts to diversify enrollment in higher education. Retired, she resides with her family in Houston, Texas.

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Copyright © 2013 Elaine Parker Adams.

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ISBN: 978-1-4497-9783-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4497-9784-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4497-9782-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013910609

WestBow Press rev. date: 08/02/13

Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Chapter I Early Life

Chapter II Religious Life

Chapter III Church Assignments

Chapter IV Family Life

Chapter V Tribulation

Chapter VI Legacy

Afterword

Appendix A: Selected Writings of Rev. Peter Wellington Clark

Appendix B: Selected Writings of Peter Champ Clark

Chronology

Bibliography

Biosketch of the Author

The Reverend Peter W. Clark Scholarship Fund

Notes

This book is dedicated

to Peter and Ada George Clark

and to

Lloyd and Lurania Bell Clark

One of our greatest needs is a consecrated ministry,

sweet preaching and no reformation of the lives of people is no good.

—Peter Wellington Clark, Eyes That Are Open,

Southwestern Christian Advocate, November 22, 1894, 2.

Preface

R EV. PETER WELLINGTON Clark was a nineteenth-century black pioneer for the Methodist Episcopal Church in Louisiana. His memorable life had its successes and challenges, but the passage of time had obscured its significance. Younger generations of Clark’s family were unaware of his importance to Louisiana church history. Over the years, crises had separated family members, and survival had left them too busy to engage in documenting family history.

With the deaths and dispersals as time passed, Rev. Peter Wellington Clark had all but vanished from family discussion. I am Clark’s great-granddaughter, the daughter of Grace Clark Parker. The Peter Wellington Clark I knew best was my mother’s brother, Champ. He was a dominant figure throughout my life as my uncle, my parrain (godfather), my advisor, and my professional colleague. The only child of Rev. Peter Clark I ever met was Joseph Clark, my mother’s Uncle Joe. I saw him and his family on infrequent visits with my mother to Los Angeles or when Uncle Joe made the trek to my family’s New Orleans home.

Like many African-American families, mine suffered the effects of life’s uncertainties. The desperate pursuit of employment triggered hasty moves with accompanying treasures limited to what could compete with the necessities for space in a suitcase. Consolidation of households as family members suddenly became too ill to care for themselves left strangers to sort through abandoned household goods while family members cared for the sick and dying. The primary historical record preserved was the family Bible, which provided dates of life events—births, baptisms, marriages, and deaths but little else. The few photographs that exist—human subjects formally posed for posterity—were often clouded in mystery with no names. On the bright side, there were the fantastical fables told by the more gregarious members of the family that lauded heroic efforts and astute dealings of folks from distant times and places. Seldom, however, did such tales focus on religious achievements.

During my childhood, my mother’s family of Clarks was led by Lurania Bell Clark, Rev. Peter Clark’s widowed daughter-in-law. Lurania lived with her mother, Lelia Carr Bell, in a small, narrow, L-shaped house they owned on Lowerline Street in the Gert Town neighborhood of New Orleans. It was a community of struggling households and small family businesses, such as the goat’s milk dairy down the street. Lowerline ended at the canal fronting prestigious Xavier University, so the family’s locational reference was always across from Xavier, although it was actually a block and a half away from the main campus.

Next door to Lurania lived her only surviving sibling, Robert Bell, and his wife, Ruby Dastague Bell, in a shotgun double house they owned and shared with tenants, Lawrence Newton and his family. When the Clarks gathered, it was usually in Lurania’s cozy home. Holidays and other special events focused on encouraging the grandchildren to demonstrate their talents. On these occasions, the elders eagerly watched hopes and dreams blossom. The family past was more frequently shared in personal conversations, with each senior electing to confide in the child he or she considered most available and companionable.

At rare moments, there might be a vague mention of Rev. Peter Clark—I knew he had been a minister, but I knew little else. I did not even know that his particular faith tradition was Methodist. Peter Clark had died in Lake Charles when my mother, Grace Clark Parker, was only a toddler and Champ Clark had not yet been born. Their own father died in Alexandria three years later, and the children grew up in New Orleans. Separated from Rev. Peter Clark’s family by geography, there were few opportunities to learn the family history at informal gatherings or formal reunions. Moreover, a change in the children’s faith tradition significantly impacted their knowledge of Methodism and Clark’s role in its dissemination in Louisiana.

When Grace and Champ Clark attended Catholic school in New Orleans, they converted to the Catholic faith. The fervor of the nuns and their classmates impressed them, and they desired to participate fully in the Catholic religious experience. Lurania Clark supported her children’s desire to convert to Catholicism, sensing that it would ease their way socially into Catholic New Orleans. However, Lurania herself retained the Methodist tradition and attended her church faithfully. She was a leader in the Women’s Society of Christian Service at Phillips Memorial United Methodist Church in Gert Town. Lurania’s grandchildren were all baptized as infants in the Catholic faith.

Lurania’s religious status intrigued me since Catholicism, New Orleans style, considered non-Catholics to be in a precarious position as far as life after death. On the one hand, my religious advisers encouraged me to pray vigorously for my grandmother’s conversion to Catholicism, but on the other hand, I was cautioned to avoid discussing her religious beliefs with her lest I become tainted. One concession was that I could sing along with her on hymns such as In the Garden. As a shy and sometimes lonely child, I found great comfort in the notion that He walks with me, and He talks with me. And He tells me I am His own.¹

Despite my puzzlement over the idea that my grandmother could be considered a religious outsider, I knew her to be a most virtuous woman and fully expected to see her among the saved in heaven. In fact, my reaction was more of an angry resentment. It made no sense to me whatsoever that a kind and good God would reject a kind and good woman such as my grandmother.

Lurania and her family had little or no time to discuss events of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Their eyes were resolutely on the future, and their expectations of it were high. Life in Louisiana was hard for people of color. They recognized that the promised land would not be reached instantaneously. Lurania and her family envisioned progress as generational, with each generation building on the previous one. Although Lurania did not meet her goal of earning a college degree, she made sure her children did, and her hope was for her grandchildren to reach even higher stars. Rev. Peter Clark had held similar dreams for his children, but sickness and death stalked his family, and few survived to achieve his dreams for them. Had the later generations known more about Clark’s ambitions and accomplishments, he would have certainly been a standard bearer for them.

A century after Rev. Peter Clark’s last days, his great-grandchildren are entering their retirement years. Aided by advances in electronic communication and information technology, the oldest of the group, now retired, have the available time and personal interest to access and assemble information about their forebears. A chance online search of the name Peter W. Clark surfaced an editorial Clark had written for the Southwestern Christian Advocate, an official newspaper of the Methodist Episcopal Church addressing its work among blacks. Grant Shockley, editor of Heritage and Hope, considered this newspaper to have had more impact on black education, opinion, and public issues than any institution in the denomination excepting its church pulpits and college classrooms.² At that moment, Rev. Peter Clark’s story became more than disjointed family chatter. I realized if my great grandfather’s words were important enough to be shared in the newspaper, I was obliged to discover more about who he was and what his message counseled.

Research revealed that Rev. Peter Clark had dedicated himself to the spread of Methodism in the state of Louisiana, building congregations and churches during key decades of Methodist history. Unfortunately, he and other black pioneers were historically overlooked after the United Methodist merger. Until recently, his photograph did not appear among the ministers posted in the photo gallery of nineteenth-century pastors in the Louisiana Methodist Conference archives.³ The gallery had exhibited portraits only of white males. This omission illustrated the difficulty that the United Methodist Church has had in reconciling its black and white history in the South. Tim Hebert, manager of the gallery website, was alerted to the omission, immediately recognized the oversight, and added the photographs of several black ministers, including Rev. Peter Clark, to the gallery. Later, Clark’s older half brother, Rev. Elijah Harp Clark, joined him in the gallery of Louisiana Methodist nineteenth-century pioneers.

Now that I have reached my senior years, I realize with trepidation that my peers and I have become the resident griots—the tribal historians. Some of our elders have shared tidbits of history, but much family history has already slipped into the graves with their human tenants. It has become the charge of my generation to collect and disseminate the records that capture our people’s experiences. If we do not develop this anthology, the generations that follow will learn of their past chiefly through shallow, fragmented remnants of black life reported by oft-uninvolved or misled historians. Narratives of triumphs in the black community may be far outweighed by reports of tragedies. America has had such a rich history that it would be pitiful for it to be reduced to commentary that minimized or omitted the roles and contributions of those of all backgrounds. Just as America celebrates its variety of geographical features—mountains, plains, oceans, rivers, hills, and valleys, it also should relish its many peoples.

The title Reverend Peter W. Clark: Sweet Preacher and Steadfast Reformer evolved after I read Clark’s editorial Eyes That Are Open. In it, he made a plea for a consecrated ministry that went beyond the dramatically rousing sermon and understood that preaching was meaningless without spiritual awakening and change.⁴ The title fully endorses the high esteem given pulpit oratory, since Among the Methodists … the prophetic function of preaching was central … it helps define the nature of Methodist ministry.⁵ It also embraces Clark’s ministry as a catalyst for change.

Clark was in demand as a preacher, often speaking at the churches of his ministerial colleagues and at other community events. However, Clark also was a pastor dedicated to the spiritual growth of his flock. A prime example of Clark’s reformist approach was his willingness to enfold those in the bawdy city of New Orleans who needed to hear the message of salvation and be warmed by church affiliation. In response, Clark proposed and executed the Louisiana Conference’s City Missions Project, bringing the Word to those who claimed no church. His life story vividly illustrates his commitment to the practice of Christian discipleship, having the mind of Christ and walking as he walked. John Wesley called this practical divinity.⁶

Acknowledgments

Samson Skip Alexander, Archivist, Radio Station WBOK, Resource Specialist

Lisa Y. Armitige, Associate Professor of Medicine, University of Texas Health Science at Tyler, Heartland National

Reviews for The Reverend Peter W. Clark

[lizasarusrex · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The book starts at the turn of the twentieth century, but takes place during the twenty-first century as the author looks back during the preface. This is where the characters are introduced and defined, which includes a lot of detail. In the beginning you are introduced to many different characters all at once, which was a bit overwhelming. I felt I should be taking more extensive notes, more than I usually do. Describing the family and the members within, what appears on the onset, to be an introduction of key members within the inner circle; albeit a large circle.In the fist chapter of the book, they define what could be determined from official record the birth of early childhood of Peter Wellington Clark. Slavery was going on strong despite the larger numbers of the black population compared to the lower numbers of the white population. The settling starts in Louisiana at the start of the civil war, around 1862, and takes the reverend through many tragic evelming. I felt I should be taking more extensive notes, more than I usually do. Describing the family and the members within, what appears on the onset, to be an introduction of key members within the inner circle; albeit a large circle. Why Peter Clark decided on becoming a Methodist minister is a mystery, but the book desires in some detail his life's joinery during the late nineteenth century in the state of Louisiana. The book describes the sacrifices and the hardships the reverend faced as he practiced and spread the gospel of Methodism as well as providing the reader with an understanding what black ministers endured during the late ninetieth century to the early twentieth century. The last thirty percent of the book is dedicated to a chronology of Reverend Peter Clark, a bio sketch of the author, bibliography and footnotes, etc. I believe the bio sketches and chronology would be better suite in the preface, which would make the preface much more detailed. Overall, the book was very detailed in historical accounts and details and seemed to be very accurate. A pretty good read, that I would rate a 4/5.