Mark Clark

Mark Clark was born on the twenty-eighth of June 1947 at Peoria, Illinois, the seventh of seventeen children of the Reverend William Clark — pastor of the Tabernacle Baptist Church of Peoria and an officer of the Peoria NAACP — and Fannie Clark, a member of the choir of the same congregation. The family lived at 600 Buena Vista Street in the South Side district of Peoria. He attended Manual High School of Peoria.

He joined the Peoria NAACP youth council at thirteen, was elected its president at fifteen, and as president of the council in 1962 led the desegregation of the Peoria Park District public swimming pools and the Peoria public library. He was arrested at sixteen at a 1963 NAACP sit-in at a Peoria restaurant.

He was recruited to the Black Panther Party in 1968 at twenty-one — the BPP Field Marshal Steven McCutchen having travelled to Peoria from the Chicago chapter to organise a downstate Illinois affiliate. Clark was appointed Field Marshal of the Peoria chapter and conducted the Peoria-area BPP work through 1969 — including the establishment of a Peoria Free Breakfast for Children programme, modelled on the Oakland programme of Huey Newton (placed in this archive).

He travelled to Chicago on the third of December 1969 at the invitation of Fred Hampton (placed in this archive) for a chapter security-and-organising meeting at Hampton's apartment at 2337 West Monroe Street. Eight persons were present in the apartment at five o'clock in the morning of the fourth of December 1969 when a fourteen-member team of Chicago police, attached to the Cook County State's Attorney's Office and operating from an apartment-floor diagram supplied by FBI informant William O'Neal, breached the front and rear doors of the apartment simultaneously. The first shot of the engagement was fired at Mark Clark — guard at the apartment's front door — by Officer Daniel Groth at point-blank range. Clark died at the scene. Hampton, asleep in the back bedroom, was shot twice at close range and killed. Four other Panthers were wounded. Of the ninety-eight rounds fired in the operation, one came from a Panther weapon — the involuntary discharge of Mark Clark's shotgun at the moment of his being shot.

He was twenty-two.

The 1976 federal civil-rights lawsuit against the city of Chicago, Cook County and the federal government — brought by the Hampton and Clark families — was settled in 1982 for one million eight hundred fifty thousand dollars, the largest civil-rights settlement against state law-enforcement agencies in American history to that date.

He is honored here as the Field Marshal of the Peoria Panthers.