Community leader Clark dies

CHAPEL HILL -- Rebecca Clark, a leader in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro black community, died Saturday morning. She was 93.

Born in 1915, Clark's life spanned the period between the death of slave-turned-black-education-leader Booker T. Washington and the election of Barack Obama as the nation's first black president.

Her parents were both dead by the time she was 11 years old. She had to drop out of high school during the Great Depression.

Working university-related jobs that paid as little as $7 a week, she spent more than 70 years urging local black residents to vote -- even driving them to the polls herself.

Today, Clark's name adorns the UNC-Chapel Hill laundry facility on Cameron Avenue and a local NAACP award for political service.

In 2006, the Chapel Hill Town Council proclaimed her birthday Rebecca Clark Day.

"We will not see another of her ilk because of her history," said UNC-Chapel Hill professor Reginald Hildebrand, who got his job in the 1980s after Clark recommended him to then-Vice Chancellor Harold Wallace. "To have someone overcome the kind of obstacles that she overcame to achieve the kind of influence, respect -- almost reverence -- that she had in this community ... that would be hard to match."

In 1953, when N.C. Memorial Hospital did not welcome black nurses, the doctors and nurses in the OB-GYN department there helped her train and prepare for the state board.

She passed three years later and worked at UNC Hospitals as a licensed practical nurse until she retired in 1979.

She and her husband, John, raised their sons in the Pine Knolls neighborhood, which Mrs. Clark had encouraged university leaders to develop near the Carrboro town line as housing for black university workers. Next door, her younger son Doug Clark, leader of the touring band the Hot Nuts, built his "mansion" with a huge glass window overlooking Crest Street.

Clark was politically active for decades. Hers was an important endorsement for political candidates seeking support from the local black community.

"You could count on her for compassion, but she would not hesitate to let someone know when she thought they had crossed a line," said local human resources executive Anita Badrock, who served with Clark on the town of Chapel Hill Personnel Appeals Committee. "She had a great sense of what was right and decent."

And, despite her failing health, she made sure house-bound voters filled out and returned their absentee ballots in the recent election.

"She had a right to be tired and worn-out even though she never gave that impression," Hildebrand said. "She was a woman of such strength."