Most of the news coverage about Robert G. Clark, who died this past week at the age of 96, has appropriately focused on his time in the Mississippi Legislature and his historic accomplishment as the first Black state lawmaker since Reconstruction.
What also came to my mind, though, was the racial barrier he was not able to break when he ran twice to become the state’s first Black member of Congress since Reconstruction.
That first attempt in 1982 coincided with my first year at the Commonwealth.
David Bowen, a white Democrat, had represented the Delta-dominated 2nd Congressional District for 10 years but had decided to not seek reelection.
Although Democrats at that time dominated most political offices in Mississippi, and particularly so in the Delta, Republicans had started to make inroads. Thad Cochran held one of the state’s two U.S. Senate seats, and two of the state’s then five House seats had been held by Republicans as late as 1981, before a sex scandal temporarily put one of those seats back in Democratic hands.
While Clark was trying to make history, his white Republican opponent, Greenwood’s Webb Franklin, was trying to do the same by cracking the long-held Democratic grip in the 2nd District.
Prior to the 1982 election, the federal courts had redrawn the boundaries of the district to try to ensure the election of a Black congressman in a state with the largest Black population in the nation.
Nevertheless, Franklin, an attorney and former judge, prevailed, taking almost 51% of the vote.
On election night, the Commonwealth sent reporters to both candidates’ watch parties. I was assigned to Clark’s gathering in Lexington, a more somber affair that dragged into the early morning hours of the following day before the Democrat conceded defeat.
Both candidates complimented the other on running clean, gentlemanly campaigns, with Clark saying, “I was pleased we could run a campaign without racism.”
In a rematch, though, two years later, in which Franklin won by a slightly higher margin despite another judicial redrawing of the district to increase the Black percentage, Clark sounded more frustrated.
He blamed his defeat on “race, pure race,” citing the large number of white Democrats who crossed over to vote for the Republican incumbent. He said the district’s Black population, already at 58%, would have to be increased to 65% to give a Black candidate a chance at winning.
Clark wasn’t precisely right about that. The courts did tweak some district boundaries before the 1986 election, but it was as much a savvy campaign by a Democratic opponent as it was the racial math that eventually caught up with Franklin. He was defeated by Mike Espy, a young Black lawyer from Yazoo City who had worked in state government as an assistant secretary of state and assistant attorney general.
Espy, who would eventually serve as Bill Clinton’s secretary of agriculture, consciously kept national civil rights and organized labor groups out of his campaign against Franklin, so as to not spur a backlash from white voters. He also hammered away at the incumbent over a poor agriculture economy, blaming Republican policies under Ronald Reagan for putting small farmers, many of them white, out of business.
The 2nd District has been represented by a Black congressman ever since, with Bennie Thompson, Espy’s successor, holding the seat since 1993.
Franklin did not run for political office again, instead returning to his law practice in Greenwood until retiring in 2020.
He has never fully agreed with Clark’s assessment that racial voting patterns, and in particular the resistance of whites to vote for a Black candidate, were the sole determining factor in their campaigns in the early 1980s.
“I think race always plays a part in any kind of political race, but I don’t think that it was an overriding factor in the outcome,” Franklin said.
The former circuit judge is also accepting of the federal judiciary’s intentional decision to keep massaging the racial breakdown in the 2nd District until it put a Black candidate in the job.
“The theory (of the court) was that the Black population in Mississippi was sufficient to allow them to have one congressional district in which they could win,” he said.
“It just was the court’s ruling, and obviously everybody had to live with it, including me.”
Franklin has no hard feelings about how things turned out.
“I feel very fortunate to have been able to serve. I certainly have no bitterness toward Robert Clark at all,” he said.
“We were friendly opponents. I always thought he was a good man and a good legislator.”
- Contact Tim Kalich at 662-581-7243 or tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
