The Early Life of Alexander Clark

In 1842, at the age of 16, Alexander Clark moved to what is now Muscatine, Iowa. His skill set, including being a barber, put him in a position to be in daily contact with the most powerful men in the community. Clark was born a free man and therefore was able to own property. He was able to purchase his first home at the age of 22. In this clip from the "Lost in History: Alexander Clark" documentary, historian Dr. Paul Finkelman describes Alexander Clark's beginnings as a barber and businessman.

Clark is born a free man in 1826 in Washington, Pennsylvania, about 30 miles southwest of Pittsburgh. When he turns thirteen, the young man goes to live with his uncle in Cincinnati. Two years later he takes a job as a bartender on the steamship George Washington and finally moves to Muscatine, then known as Bloomington, in 1842, where he soon purchases land near the Mississippi.

Dr. Paul Finkelman: “The young man goes west. And what does he do when he goes west? He starts out figuring out how can I make a living? I can make a living by chopping wood and selling it to steamboats because there's steamboats going up and down the river.”

Paul Finkelman is an historian who has spent most of his career studying the relationship between race and the law. Because of the 1868 Iowa desegregation case, Finkelman has studied Clark's life extensively.

Finkelman: “In many ways Alexander Clark is just like thousands and thousands of other young American kids, except he's black. And of course, that makes everything different.”

Clark has another skill that gives the young black man unusual access to Muscatine's white power elite. He is a trained barber.

Finkelman: “Being a barber is very important in antebellum America. The safety razor has not been invented, and so shaving is a semi-suicidal task for many men. So a lawyer or a doctor or a businessman, he would have to go to the barber on a regular basis for a shave. So Alexander Clark is shaving all of the important men in town. Black barbers tend to be very high up on the internal black social scale because they have access to the power structure of white people, they talk to white people. They also learn about business possibilities. They learn about investments.”

Clark does well with his investments. Besides using his land to chop firewood and supply the steamships, he grows vegetables and sells them in the markets in Muscatine. By the late 1840s, at the age of twenty-two, he purchases a huge home on Chestnut Street where some of the city's most powerful residents live. He also befriends the owner and publisher of the Muscatine journal. They would remain lifelong friends.