Mark Clark

Mark Clark was born on the twenty-eighth of June 1947 in Peoria, Illinois, the ninth child of Fannie Mae Clark and Pastor William Clark, who founded and led the Holy Temple Church of God in Christ. Raised in a household of faith and service, Clark came to activism young, drawn early into the civil rights movement and the broader struggle for Black dignity in the American Midwest.

As a young man he founded and led the Peoria branch of the Black Panther Party, serving as its Defense Captain. Under his organizing hand, the chapter launched a Free Breakfast for Children program — feeding local youth before school — and engaged in coalition politics alongside the anti-war and community movements of the day. His work made him a respected figure among Peoria's Black families and a target of the surveillance then trained on the Party.

In the predawn hours of the fourth of December 1969, Clark was in the Chicago apartment at 2337 West Monroe Street when police raided it. He was on security duty, seated in the front room with a shotgun in his lap. The first police shot struck him, and he died almost instantly — one of some eighty-two to one hundred rounds fired by officers. He was twenty-two years old. He was killed alongside Fred Hampton, the Illinois Black Panther chairman.

Later litigation established that the raid had been set in motion through an FBI informant under the COINTELPRO program, and in 1982 a settlement was reached with the families of those killed. Mark Clark gave his brief life to feeding children and lifting his people. May his name endure among the honored, remembered for the love and courage he carried to the end.