Peter Clark was a prominent African American abolitionist, educator, and activist in Cincinnati in the mid-19th century. He witnessed the 1841 Cincinnati race riots as a young man, fueling his commitment to racial equality. Clark was an important figure at the 1858 Cincinnati Colored Convention, where he criticized the Republican Party for not doing enough to abolish slavery. He argued that Black people should pursue their own rights instead of relying on Republicans. Clark had a lifelong career advocating for racial justice, education reform, and workers' rights in Cincinnati until leaving the city in 1887.

1. The Life of Peter Clark and the 1858 Colored Convention
Matthew Gibson
HIST-324
Dr. Anderson
March 23, 2016

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Abstract
Peter Clark (March 29, 1829-June 21, 1925)
Peter Humphries Clark was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. He was a free Black man who
worked as a barber, abolitionist, publisher, editor, principal, and teacher. Clark was important to
the 1858 Cincinnati Colored Convention because he we was the first person to speak at the
convention on a multitude of issues concerning African American’s political role in the abolition
movement. He was a childhood friend of John Mercer Langston who was also at the convention,
and he spoke heavily on the Kansas-Nebraska act that fueled his argument against the
Republican Party for the reason why Black people should achieve rights on their own instead of
relying on the Republican Party.
Biography
Born March 29, 1829 in Cincinnati, Ohio, Peter Humphries Clark is the son of Michael
Clark and Ann Humphries. Unfortunately, Peter Clark’s mother died in 1833 due to cholera.
Both of his parents were free individuals in the Cincinnati area; however, this did not stop the
Clark family from experiencing the violence and harshness of discrimination. The constant
violence and repression in the Cincinnati area sparked his determination to effect change for
African Americans. Clark witnessed the Cincinnati anti-black riots of 1841 when he was only
twelve years old where there were over three-hundred black men arrested, fifteen to twenty
people wounded and according the mayor Cincinnati’s statistics, four people were killed.1
Another witness of this riot was his childhood friend John Mercer Langston, and this event drew
both of these men together to eventually battle the discrimination against African Americans in
1 “Cincinnati’s 1841 Riots: A Young Witness Survives & Marches to Congress And Academe.” Cincinnati
Curiosities. N.p., n.d. Web. 7 Apr. 2016.

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America. Also, they were family because Clark’s older sister, Ann, married Langston’s older
brother, Giddeon Langston.
Clark gain skills through education and his family to subvert slavery and help enhance
the civil conditions of Black people. Clark attended a private elementary school in which his first
teacher was an antislavery activist who taught him rudimentary skills and elements of a plain
English education.2 Clark attended a public Cincinnati high school, a rare opportunity among
African Americans, where he was exposed to a curriculum consisting of Greek, Latin,
philosophy, rhetoric, elocution, composition, geography, and music; classes designed to prepare
the students for college. In school, Clark was a part of his school newspaper where he gained
oratorical and rhetoric skills. He was also exposed to socialism for the first time in high school
by his principal, Hiram S. Gilmore, who was eventually fired from the high school for his
socialist beliefs. Clark joined Gilmore’s group called the Communication of Socialist
Brotherhood, which did not last long. While Clark received a great education that prepared him
for college, he did not pursue a degree. Eventually, Wilberforce University granted him an
honorary master’s degree, but Clark’s main goal was to avoid getting a job that would make him
subservient to white men.3 In 1849 Clark’s father died, and he became a barber for some time,
which was just the kind of job he loathed. Eventually, his political career surfaced.
By 1849, Clark attended his first Convention of Colored Citizens; the topic of this
convention was African-American emigration to Liberia. At the conference, he heard many
people speak including his long-time childhood friend, John Mercer Langston. Clark heard
Langston’s argument that Blacks should not go back to Africa but instead, Black people should
2Nikki. M Taylor, America’s First Black Socialist:The Radical Life of Peter H. Clark .(Lexington: The University
Press of Kentucky, 2013), 29.
3 Taylor, America’s First, 33.

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create a separate nation adopt in this country.4 Langston believed that in order to become a
political force, African Americans had to be united under one nationality that would symbolize
the first steps of being an independent people. By the end of the conference, Clark, despite his
peers, believed that Black people should emigrate to Africa so that they could establish a
political system that was not held down by the U.S. government, but could be equal or superior
to the United States with military alliances with other black nations to help fight for the freedom
of enslaved Blacks in America. By the 1850s, colored conventions began to focus on self-help,
racial solidarity, economic advancement, and emigration. During the 1850s, Clark attended a
total of five different colored conventions, which were located in Columbus, Xenia, and
Cincinnati. After the convention of 1849, Clark joined different emigration groups that sought to
gain support for emigration to Africa. At the 1852 convention, the delegates held a vote on
emigration which did not pass, with the final vote being thirty-nine nays and nine yeas. This
convention marked the beginning of Clark’s role as a leader. By 1854, Clark’s view of
emigration changed because of the lack of support as his solution became making every
organization black owned. He envisioned black churches, a black Masonic organization, the
black press, black conventions and, finally, black schools. As an educator, Clark was one of the
most distinguished teachers and principals in Cincinnati black schools. He stressed the
philosophy of his students, regardless of the discrimination they faced, still strived to attend
school (Woodson 19). Clark’s goal was to enhance African American’s cultural capital.
Arguably, that side of his black nationalism had the most staying power in his political career.
By 1856, Clark had attended a few conventions outside of Ohio. He attended one
convention in Syracuse, New York where Frederick Douglass did the honors of introducing
4 Taylor, America’s First, 42.

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Clark as a speaker at the Radical Abolition Party’s nominating convention. Clark’s speech
focused on America’s failure to honor the concept of “universal brotherhood”. Clark believed
that the obligation to one’s fellow human had been mandated by God and the Founding Fathers.
He emphasized the relationship between universal brotherhood and the anti-slavery, and he
concluded “To this great doctrine underlies the anti-slavery movement, and whatever triumphs
have been achieved, have been achieved because the friends of this movement have been faithful
to this doctrine; and whatever remains to be achieved will be achieved by fidelity to this
principle.”5 Most of the issues addressed in Clark’s speech connect with the Radical Abolition
Party’s motives, which were to achieve the immediate freedom of those who were enslaved and
use politics the best and most effective way to end slavery.
Clark did not join the Radical Abolition Party, but the similarities between the Party’s
motives and his speech led to his active involvement in the Cincinnati segment of the
Underground Railroad. Evidence of his involvement is documented in an account of him saving
a fugitive slave in southwest Ohio named George “Wash” McQuerry. McQueery escaped to
Troy, Ohio around 1849. Once his owner discovered his whereabouts in 1853, he travelled to
Troy to seize his slave under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, who was handed over to a U.S.
marshal that transferred him to Cincinnati to be put on trial. In response to this incident, Clark
mobilized a community protest that fought for McQueery’s rights to freedom.6 McQuerry did not
achieve his freedom and was given back to his owner, but this was another event that contributed
to Clark’s dedication to immediate abolition of slavery.
5 Taylor, America’s First, 87.
6 Taylor, America’s First 93. Daily Cincinnati Gazette, 17 August 1853; Daily Enquirer, 17 August 1853; Cincinnati
Daily Commercial, 18 August 1853; Steven Weisenburger, Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-
Murder from the Old South (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), 103.

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While in New York, Clark also worked alongside Frederick Douglass as an assistant
editor of Douglass’s autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, and the Frederick Douglass
Papers. By the mid-1850s, after the failure to get the Ohio constitution reformed to give black
people equal rights to whites, Clark began to preach violence in order to achieve equality.
Ultimately, Clark became impatient with the slow rate of progress.7 This marked the beginning
of Clark’s argument during the 1858 convention in which he proclaimed that he had decided not
to petition for another right again, asserting that “if he could seize it [rights], he would do so.”8
His sentiment regarding the occasionally necessary violence to end slavery had not changed
much a year later when he participated in a rally expressing solidarity with John Brown.
Peter Clark regarded himself as a socialist but never politically acted upon that ideology,
which means that Clark constantly critiqued American capitalist society and attended socialist
conventions but politically supported Republican candidates such as Rutherford B. Hayes
(Gutnam, 413). It wasn’t until the after the election of 1876 that Peter Clark fully committed to
socialism by running in the 1878 Ohio congressional election under the Socialist Labor Party.
Although Peter Clark voted for Republicans, he still despised their lack of effort to progress the
lives of African Americans. This growing dissatisfaction that Clark had with the Republican
Party is evident in his speech in the 1858 convention.
In the 1858 Colored Convention in Cincinnati, Ohio, Peter Humphries Clark was one of
the most important delegates. At the convention, Clark made a speech regarding the Republican
Party. He was fed up with the Republican Party’s inability to take action on the abolition of
7 Taylor, America’s First, 98. . Ibid. For more on nineteenth-century scientific racism, see Rael, Black Identity &
Black Protest in the Antebellum North, 242–43.
8 Taylor, America’s First, 98-99. Liberator, 3 December 1858.

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slavery, and he remarked that Republicans feared to be called Abolitionists.9 Clark also began
advocating for violent rebellions to shift the abolition movement from gradual abolition to rapid
abolition of slavery.10 The goals of the 1858 Colored Convention were to ensure African
Americans received the right to vote, the right to sit upon juries, and the removal of all
distinctions based on complexion. (“Cleveland Morning Leader”). The primary goal of this
convention was to have some of the best male representatives present these claims to their white
friends and to get other “colored” people to increase their morality, intelligence, and become
better citizens. In order to do this, the convention needed to raise money by February 1859. Peter
Clark was among the best men to represent the convention and to collect money for the
convention’s movement to achieve all of the above demands, which was also illustrated in the
Liberator. The Liberator was created by William Lloyd Garrison who was a white abolitionist. It
was also a newspaper that voiced the opinions of those who wanted immediate emancipation of
slavery and those who preach moral suasion to apply the principles of the Declaration of
Independence to all people regardless of color in the North.11 Most of the Liberator subscribers
were African Americans.
In regards to his speech about the Republican Party during the convention, the speech
focuses on the Republican Party being perceived as the Anti-Slavery Party when its actual
motive was to contain slavery and gain money, not philanthropic work, which was quoted in the
Liberator a month after the convention. Also, his speech was motivated by the 1854 Kansas-
Nebraska Act, which was about whether the government should bring Kansas into the Union as a
9 “State Convention of the Colored People of Ohio.” The Liberator. December 3, 1858. 19th Century U.S.
Newspapers.
10 Taylor, America’s First, 98-101.
11 “The Liberator | American Newspaper.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Accessed April 7, 2016.
http://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Liberator-American-newspaper.

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free state or a slaveholding state. The other speech made after the convention discussed the
upcoming presidential election and those involved in the political campaign. John Freemont
(Republican) would run against Abraham Lincoln and while the Republican Party expressed
anti-slavery sentiments, it was afraid to act aggressively to upset the status quo.
As a witness of the 1841 Cincinnati race riots, Clark dedicated his life to making sure that
African Americans, both freed an enslaved, achieved rights in the United States. Through a
diverse and challenging education, Peter Clark utilized his skills to become one of the most
important abolitionist in history. Through his many political shifts and transformed beliefs on
how fast the abolition of slavery should take, Clark reached a stable platform in which he
believed that African Americans should achieve their rights through expanding their cultural
capital within the community without the help of the Republican Party.
Ultimately, Peter Clark disagreed with the convention’s theme, which is to obtain legal
rights in the United States with the help of the Republican Party. While Clark does agree with the
motives of the convention, and even willingly participates in spreading information on Black
struggles in America, his motive seems to lean more towards separating from the Republican
Party. After the convention, Clark continued to despise the Republican Party, but he took it upon
himself to still advocate for worker’s rights and expand the educational boundaries in the
education for African Americans even after he left Cincinnati in 1887. Peter Clark had a
profound impact on the African American community all the way until his death on June 21,
1925.

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Work Cited
“Cincinnati’s 1841 Riots: A Young Witness Survives & Marches to Congress And Academe.”
Cincinnati Curiosities. N.p., n.d. Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
Clark, Peter H. “Peter H. Clark.” UDM-Black Abolitionist Archive. N.p., 1858. Web. 21 Feb.
2016.
---. “Peter H. Clark.” UDM-Black Abolitionist Archive. N.p., 1859. Web. 21 Feb. 2016.
“Cleveland Morning Leader. (Cleveland [Ohio]) 1854-1865, December 04, 1858, Image 2.” 4
Dec. 1858. chroniclingamerica.loc.gov. Web. 21 Feb. 2016.
“From the Cincinnati Daily Gazette, September 6, 1841.” N.p., n.d. Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
Gutman, Herbert G. “Peter H. Clark: Pioneer Negro Socialist, 1877.” The Journal of Negro
Education 34.4 (1965): 413–418. JSTOR. Web.
“Peterclark.jpg (170×234).” N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Apr. 2016.
“State Convention of the Colored People of Ohio.” The Liberator 3 Dec. 1858: 194. Print.
Taylor, Nikki. M. America’s First Black Socialist: The Radical Life of Peter H. Clark.
Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2013. Print.
“The Liberator | American Newspaper.” Encyclopedia Britannica. N.p., n.d. Web. 7 Apr. 2016.
Woodson, C. G. “The Negroes of Cincinnati Prior to the Civil War.” The Journal of Negro
History 1.1 (1916): 1–22. JSTOR. Web.