Community activist Rebecca Clark dies

CHAPEL HILL -- Rebecca Clark, matriarch of the local black community, died over the weekend. She was 93.

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

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

Born Rebecca Sellars in Chatham County on Oct. 12, 1915, Clark moved to a log cabin off Jones Ferry Road west of Carrboro after her mother died when she was 6 months old. She and her husband settled in the Pine Knolls neighborhood near the Carrboro town line, an area built for black university workers in the mid-20th century. Their sons Doug and John made the Clark name famous with their touring band the Hot Nuts.

Clark's name adorns the UNC-Chapel Hill laundry facility and a local NAACP award for political service. On her birthday in 2006, the Chapel Hill Town Council pronounced Rebecca Clark Day.

"We will not see another of her ilk because of her history, someone who was born in the darkest hours of segregation and having great personal tragedy to befall her," said Reginald Hildebrand, a UNC-Chapel Hill professor. "To have someone overcome the kind of obstacles taht she overcame to achieve the kind of influence, respect -- almost reverence -- that she had in this community ... that would be hard to match."