Peter Humphries Clark, principal of the Colored High School in Cincinnati, Ohio, was one of a small number of 19th Century African American Socialists. Grandson of William Clark of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, schoolteacher and later Principal of the Colored High School in Cincinnati and staunch Republican until 1877, there was little in Clark’s background that suggested he would by the end of Reconstruction embrace socialism as a political philosophy and join the Workingmen’s Party. Certainly few other African Americans of the period followed his path.

Clark delivered a speech on July 22, 1877 to a crowd of striking railroad workers who were part of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, at that point the largest national confrontation of labor and management in U.S. history. Dozens of strikers and non-striking workers were killed, millions of dollars worth of property was burned, and hundreds of factories were closed by strikers. Eventually President Rutherford B. Hayes used federal troops against strikers. Against that backdrop Clark gave the speech which outlined his views and his belief that the strike was part of a broader class struggle that would lead to the fundamental transformation of the American economic system. The speech appears below.

Gentlemen: If I had the choosing of a motto for this meeting, I should select the words of the patriotic and humane Abraham Lincoln, “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right.” These words, so full of that charity which we should exercise toward each other, are especially suited to this day and time, when wrongs long condemned have at last been resisted and men are bleeding and dying in the busy center of our population, and all over the land other men, with heated passions, are assembling to denounce the needless slaughter of innocent men who, driven by want, have appealed to force for that justice which was otherwise refused to them…

I sympathize in this struggle with the strikers, and I feel sure