David Clark Laboratories
Title
Description
While no full length biography of David Clark exists, sociologist Bart Dredge has written extensively on Clark’s work as an editor and outspoken supporter of white supremacy. Dredge locates the vehemence of Clark’s racism in the motivations of the generation of men whose fathers fought for the Confederacy and who believed that the South lost the Civil War because of its relatively low level of industrial development.
Susan Washington Graham Clark, the daughter of North Carolina Governor William A. Graham, gave birth to David Clark in Raleigh in 1877. His father was Walter M. Clark, a colonel in the Confederate army and a long serving member of the North Carolina Supreme Court. As a student at NC State College, David Clark played on both the baseball and football teams, sparking a fondness for sport at the school that would last through his lifetime. In 1896, Clark earned a degree in mechanical engineering and another in civil engineering in 1897 at NC State College, and served as Alumni Association President in 1903-04. He started his own cotton mill, which did not survive the Panic of 1907, a series of runs on banks and a rapid stock market loss that caused mass bank failure. From there he went into trade publishing, working at Textile Manufacturer.In 1910, he started his own journal, The Southern Textile Bulletin, to which he added other trade publications through his business Clark Publishing. In 1933 his signature trade journal became simply Textile Bulletin until it ceased publication in 1971. David Clark saw himself as the defender of textile industry, and used the pages of the Bulletin to rail against racial integration, child labor laws, and, in his words, “unions, communists, subversion, free lovism, and negro equality.” Clark’s views were so vehement that his father warned him to exercise some temperance and discretion.
David Clark directed much of his ire at professors and students, and held an extended feud with University of North Carolina President Frank Porter Graham, whom he considered far too accommodating to those on the political left. As a member of the Board of Trustees of the Consolidated University of North Carolina, he frequently criticized Graham and professors at UNC for their support for labor unions and racial integration. In 1940, he vociferously objected to a visit to UNC by poet Langston Hughes, during which English Professor E.E. Ericson “took dinner in a negro hotel at Durham with a negro communist. If he had been at any other Southern university except the University of North Carolina, it is a safe bet that he would have been fired.” Clark railed against Graham’s approval for Ericson’s subsequent academic promotion.At NC State, Clark sought to prevent the freedoms he saw as too broadly practiced at Chapel Hill. On May 16, 1941, he wrote to President J.W. Harrelson about his concern that out-of-state Jewish students would corrupt the youth of North Carolina. He wrote:
For a number of years there has been more or less disturbance at State College by reason of articles in the Technician and in almost every case they were written by New York Jews...We cannot, of course, rule that no Jew can be connected with a college publication, but the same result could be accomplished by having the Faculty Council rule that no out-of-state boy shall be eligible for a position with a college publication. The basis for such a ruling would be that State College is a North Carolina institution and that out-of-state are not well qualified to express North Carolina sentiments.Anti-Semitism like Clark’s became less open in the United States in the 1940s, as Americans entered World War II and sought to distance US culture from views espoused by Adolph Hitler. Such interference in student matters made Clark less than popular with NC State students, and in November of 1952, when the NC State Student Legislature met, they introduced an unsuccessful bill “to remove John W. and David Clark from the Board of Trustees.”
Textile manufacturers appreciated Clark for his work on behalf of their interests, and in 1944 the university awarded Clark an honorary doctorate in textile science. His connections made him an influential fundraiser for the university, and had a special affinity for athletics. He was heavily involved in recruiting players for the football team and even paid tutoring fees for a star athlete. By the early 1950s, Director of Athletics Roy B. Clogston had taken to addressing Clark as “Uncle Dave.”After Clark’s death in 1955, university officials talked about naming an athletics facility for him. Instead, they decided on renaming Mangum Hall, which served for research and teaching in textiles chemistry. NC State architecture professor and first chair of the Department of Architecture Ross Edward Shumaker designed Mangum Hall, which opened in 1939. Shumaker came to the university in 1920 and specialized in Beaux-Arts design, a style the combined classic elements with modern materials and lines and associated in the United States with Louis Sullivan and Daniel Burham. Clark Laboratories underwent a redesign in 2005 and currently houses the Department of Zoology and the Biological Sciences Program.
Original Sources“Legislators Lambasting.” The Technician (Raleigh, NC). (LH1 .N6 T4) Volume 33, no. 7, November 4, 1952. Special Collections Research Center at NC State University Libraries
UA 015.007 NC State University, Athletics, Subject Files, 1909-1976, Box 2, Folders 10 and 11. Special Collections Research Center at NC State University LibrariesUA 002.001.002 North Carolina State University, Office of the Chancellor, John William
Harrelson Records 1933-1953, Box 7, Folder 4; Box 31 Folder 3; Box 46 Folder 12. Special Collections Research Center at NC State University Libraries
UA 003.001, North Carolina State University, Office of the Vice Chancellor for Finance and Administration Records 1887-2013 Box 2, Folder 18 and Box 6 Folder 8. Special Collections Research Center at NC State University LibrariesFor Further Reading
Bushong, William and Felicity Smith. “Shumaker, Ross Edward (1889-1960).” North Carolina Architects and Builders. NC State Libraries. https://ncarchitects.lib.ncsu.edu/people/P000518Chemerinsky, Erwin and Howard Gillman. Free Speech on Campus. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017.
“David Clark vs. a ‘Small Group of Radicals’.” A Right to Speak and Hear: Academic Freedom and Free Expression at UNC. Online Exhibit. UNC Libraries. https://exhibits.lib.unc.edu/exhibits/show/academic_freedom/between-wars/david-clark
Dredge, Bart. “David Clark’s ‘Campaign of Enlightenment’: Child Labor and the Farmers’ States Rights League, 1911-1940.” North Carolina Historical Review 91, no. 1 (January 2014): 30-62.Dredge, Bart. “Defending White Supremacy: David Clark and the Southern Textile Bulletin, 1911 to 1955.” North Carolina Historical Review 89, no. 1 (January 2012): 59-91.
Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd. Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.McLaurin, Melton A. Paternalism and Protest: Southern Cotton Mill Workers and Organized Labor, 1875-1905. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1971.
Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.