Clark Foreman
Clark Foreman, photographed in 1933 and shared by Foreman family.
Clark Foreman (left) as president of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, congratulates Joe Louis at a dinner in his honor at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York in 1946. From left: Clark, Frank Sinatra, Carole Landis, Joe Louis
FOCUS
Social Sciences
ROLE
Faculty
ATTENDANCE
1943 - 1944
BIRTH
1902-02-19
NC
DEATH
1977-06-15
Adjuntas, Puerto Rico
Clark Foreman taught Political Science at the college from the fall of 1943 to spring of 1944. While at the college, he advocated for the admittance of African American students with involvement in the interracial program.
Clark Foreman was an advocate for civil rights and worked in many government organizations throughout his career. He attended Harvard, the London School of Economics, and Columbia, where he received a Ph.D. in political science. In 1933, he served as an adviser on race problems to Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes, who in 1935 appointed him director of the power division of the Public Works Administration.
Five years later he was named director of defense housing for the Federal Works Agency. He entered the civil rights field in 1942 when he became president of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare.
In 1944, he became secretary of the National Citizens Action Committee and in 1951 began a 17‐year association with the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, from which he retired as director in 1968. While he was with the liberties committee, he was involved in the legal action that led to the Supreme Court'Court voiding in 1965 a provision of the Subversive Activities Control Act (McCarran Act). The Court ruled that the Fifth Amendment protected members of the Communist Party from registering as agents of a foreign power.
The same year he also participated legal efforts that culminated in the Supreme Court'Court invalidating a Federal law requiring persons receiving Communist political propaganda from abroad to maze a special request to the Post Office to deliver it. Mr. Foreman wrote a number of books including “The New Internationalism,” published in 1934; “The Consumer Seeks A Way,” written in cooperation with Michael Ross, and “Total Defense,” written with Joan Raushenbush. In 1948, he was briefly involved in politics when he was named treasurer of the National Wallace for President Committee.
Biography shared in New York Times obituary article, written by Werner Bamberger in 1977.
Foreman was interviewed for the Southern Oral History Program Collection by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1974.
Author
Amanda Hartman
Amanda Hartman is the creator of BMC Yearbook, serving as the lead director, engineer, and researcher. She holds a MLIS in archive/ collections management, MA in art/ museum education, and BA in design. After working in museums and archives for a decade, she made the transition to tech and is now a software developer specializing in applications for museums, archives, and higher education.
Her interest in Black Mountain College began while working as a digital archivist with the Asheville Art Museum's BMC archive collection. She transcribed and digitized over 1500 documents created by the college. While working closely with these archives, she began independent research on the interracial program and Negro Week activities BMC, writing biographies of lesser known students and staff members. That research transformed into this BMC Yearbook project.
