Robert G. Clark Jr.

Clark won in 1967 partly because of a map: his two-county district, Holmes and Yazoo, was 65 percent Black. He ran after the all-white school board refused an adult education program, and beat the House education chairman by a narrow margin. He was the only one of eight Black legislative candidates that year to win, and he sat alone until 1975. Few white members would sit beside him, and sometimes he argued against bills he backed so white colleagues would vote for them. Seventeen Black members joined the House in 1979.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Triangle Cultural Center — 20 mi
  A 1904 school on Main Street in Yazoo City that survived the great fire of that May and now holds the county's historical museum, in a town rebuilt in brick on the same lots.
• Blue Front Cafe — 28 mi
  A cinder-block juke joint in Bentonia, opened in 1948 by Carey and Mary Holmes, home of the Bentonia school of blues and a stop on the Mississippi Blues Trail.

More markers nearby

• Elmore James — 2.7 mi
• O.E.S. Birthplace — 6.0 mi
• PFC Milton Lee Olive III — 8.5 mi
• Edmund Scarborough and John Scott — 8.8 mi