Appalachian Figures
The Mississippi Lawyer Who Challenged Torture
On a humid Kemper County morning in 1934, three Black tenant farmers shuffled into the courthouse at De Kalb, bodies marked by rope burns and whip scars. They had already confessed to murdering a white planter, but only after days of brutal beatings in a cedar thicket and the county jail. Into that courtroom stepped their court appointed lawyer, a white small town senator named John Archibald Clark.
Clark could not change the jury or the racial order of Jim Crow Mississippi. He could do one vital thing. He could make a record, forcing the sheriff and deputies to describe their own cruelty under oath and preserving every objection when the judge allowed the coerced confessions anyway. That paper trail eventually led to Brown v. Mississippi in 1936, the United States Supreme Court decision that outlawed convictions based solely on confessions wrung out by torture.
By the time the case was over, Clark had lost his state senate seat and, within a few years, his life. Yet his story does not begin at the Supreme Court. It begins on a red clay ridge in eastern Mississippi and runs through town board minutes, county land records, Parchman’s convict register, and a remarkable series of letters to Governor Theodore G. Bilbo.
This is the story of John A. Clark of De Kalb and how a country lawyer in a hill county helped bend American criminal procedure toward something closer to justice.
Pea Ridge beginnings
John Archibald Clark was born on August 24, 1883, at Pea Ridge in rural Kemper County, Mississippi. He was the son of Alexander John Clark, a South Carolina native, and Frances Jane Henson, part of a white farming family rooted in the region’s piney woods.
Like many ambitious young men in the early twentieth century South, Clark climbed through the local school ladder. The 1917 Official and Statistical Register of the State of Mississippi lists him as a graduate of the high schools at Cleveland, Mississippi, a student of the Cooper Institute at Daleyville in Kemper County, and a 1903 graduate of Millsaps College’s law department at Jackson.
That same year, newly admitted to the bar, he moved back east into the hills, setting up a law practice in the county seat of De Kalb. The town sat at the crossroads of courthouse and cotton, halfway between the Black Belt and the hill country, with social and economic patterns that echoed both Mississippi and the wider upland South.
De Kalb lawyer and Kemper County politician
Clark did not remain just a storefront lawyer for long. By the mid 1910s he had stitched himself firmly into Kemper County’s political fabric. Rowland’s 1917 Register records that from 1913 to 1915 he served on De Kalb’s Board of Aldermen and as the town’s attorney. In 1915 he also became attorney for the Kemper County Board of Supervisors, representing the county in road contracts, tax disputes, and other civil business.
As a young professional he fit the mold of a small town white leader. He was a Methodist, a Mason, and a member of the fraternal order known as the Columbian Woodmen. He sat on the Democratic Executive Committee and moved easily in courthouse circles that ran from justice of the peace offices up through the circuit court.
On October 23, 1904, Clark married Matilda “Tillie” Tann of De Kalb, tying himself to one of the county’s better known white families. Tillie had attended the University of Mississippi during the 1903–04 session, appearing in the Historical Catalogue simply as “Tillie Tann, DeKalb, Kemper County,” one of a small number of women in that era’s Ole Miss student rolls. The couple eventually had one daughter, Helen Alexandra Clark.
In the one party politics of Jim Crow Mississippi, this combination of education, church membership, and local connections was a well worn path into higher office. In 1915 voters of the Fifteenth Senatorial District elected Clark to the Mississippi State Senate. He served from 1916 to 1920, then, after several years focused on his law practice, returned to the Senate for a longer stretch from 1928 to 1936.
Legislative handbooks and Blue Books from these years list him as a busy committee man and, by the early 1930s, one of the more prominent Democratic senators from the hill country counties. From the outside, his career looked like that of many white southern politicians who rose with the courthouse crowd and stayed there.
What set Clark apart was how he used that stature when the poorest and least powerful people in his county needed a lawyer.
Civil practice and a reputation for persistence
Most of Clark’s docket looked like a typical county seat practice. He handled deeds, probate files, criminal complaints, and the general civil tangle that ran through Kemper County’s land and timber economy.
One of the few cases that carried his name into later appellate digests came from an accident in De Kalb itself. In Mississippi Power Co. v. Thomas (1932), a Kemper County man sued the power company after being injured by a sagging high voltage line. The Mississippi Supreme Court’s opinion lists “L. P. Spinks and John A. Clark, both of De Kalb, for appellee,” noting that the plaintiff’s lawyers argued the utility had a continuing duty to maintain its wires so they would not become dangerous to people passing underneath.
The court agreed in principle, and later decisions would quote Thomas for the rule that electric companies must keep their lines safely out of harm’s way. Clark’s role in that case is a reminder that he was not simply a politician. He was a working trial lawyer who could carry a client’s cause all the way to Jackson and win.
That persistence would matter when his clients were no longer white farmers or injured townsmen, but Black tenant farmers facing the death penalty.
Brown v. State – torture in a cedar thicket
In March 1934, a white planter named Raymond Stuart was killed in Kemper County. Local officials quickly focused on three Black tenant farmers: Arthur Ellington, Ed Brown, and Henry Shields. Over the next several days, deputies and the county sheriff took the men from the jail into nearby woods, whipped them with leather straps and other implements, and in at least one instance staged a mock hanging from a tree to make them “confess.”
When the case reached circuit court at De Kalb, Judge W. D. Barnett appointed John A. Clark and another local lawyer to represent the three defendants. None of the men had money to hire counsel. Transcripts and later scholarship show that Clark objected repeatedly to the admission of the confessions, cross examined the sheriff and deputies about the whippings, and pressed the trial court to recognize that statements forced by torture could not be the basis for a fair conviction.
The judge overruled him again and again. The jury convicted all three men of murder, and they were sentenced to be hanged.
On appeal to the Mississippi Supreme Court, the case took the caption Brown v. State. There, too, Clark stayed in the fight. In the published opinion, his name appears as counsel for the appellants, and the court openly acknowledges that the confessions were obtained through brutal beatings. Yet a majority still affirmed the convictions, reasoning that later statements in the jail supposedly “purged” the earlier torture and that the question of voluntariness had been properly left to the jury.
For Arthur Ellington, Ed Brown, and Henry Shields, that ruling was nearly the end of the line. For American criminal procedure, it was the start of something else.
Brown v. Mississippi and the Fourteenth Amendment
The case did not stay in Jackson. With help from civil rights advocates and the national bar, Clark’s record and the Mississippi Supreme Court opinion became the foundation for an appeal to Washington, where former governor and Jackson lawyer Earl Brewer joined the defense team. In 1936, the United States Supreme Court unanimously reversed the convictions in Brown v. Mississippi, 297 U.S. 278.
Writing for the Court, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes held that convictions resting solely on confessions extorted by brutality violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The opinion did not name Clark, but it quoted the Kemper County record at length, drawing directly on the testimony he had forced into the transcript about whippings and rope burns.
Later legal historians would treat Brown as one of the earliest modern confession cases, a forerunner to the Warren Court’s decisions on police interrogation in the 1960s. Richard C. Cortner’s book on the case, A “Scottsboro” Case in Mississippi, goes further, dedicating the study “to the memories of two Mississippians of uncommon courage John A. Clark, of De Kalb, and Earl Leroy Brewer, of Jackson.”
That dedication captures how later scholars understood what Clark had done. In the teeth of local white opinion, he insisted that the law could not bless torture, even when the victims were Black tenant farmers and the local mood ran hard against them.
The price was steep. The Mississippi Encyclopedia and later Supreme Court histories note that Clark, who had been a leading figure in the state senate, suffered a political and personal collapse in the aftermath of Brown. He lost his seat in the 1935 elections and, already in poor health, withdrew from statewide politics.
Within a few years, he would find himself advocating for another Black client caught in the gears of Mississippi’s justice system.
“Released to the Honorable John A. Clark” – the Hattie Johnson Roberts case
In 1929, a Kemper County Black woman named Hattie Johnson (later known as Hattie Johnson Roberts) was convicted of murdering her husband and sentenced to life at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman. The convict register entry describes her as a 35 year old, five foot two woman weighing just over one hundred pounds, with multiple scars on her arms, face, and leg.
Family and archival research into her case paints a grim picture. Hattie’s husband had reportedly beaten and threatened her for years. On the day of the killing, she went to meet him while carrying a shotgun, later insisting that she fired in self defense when he advanced on her. A Kemper County jury still found her guilty, and she entered Parchman’s fields as another Black woman imprisoned under a system that blended punishment with coerced labor.
After only a few months, Parchman superintendent J. W. Williamson wrote Governor Theodore G. Bilbo asking that Hattie’s sentence be temporarily suspended so she could visit her four children, citing her declining health. In July 1930 he wrote again, this time suggesting that her attorney in Kemper County, “the Honorable John A. Clark,” be enlisted to help seek clemency.
What followed shows Clark working a very different side of the law than in the Brown case. Local attorney Henry Davis drafted multiple petitions for a suspension of sentence that ran in the De Kalb newspaper. Over 350 Kemper County citizens signed, including several jurors who had convicted Hattie but now supported her release after learning more about her husband’s abuse. Only one local banker wrote a letter opposing clemency.
On December 20, 1930, Governor Bilbo suspended Hattie’s sentence and ordered that she be released “to the Honorable John Clark, attorney,” effectively placing a Black woman who had been a Parchman prisoner into the custody of a white lawyer from her home county.
The story did not end there. On May 11, 1931, Clark wrote Bilbo’s secretary, Lula Wimberly, asking that the temporary suspension be turned into a full pardon. The governor granted that request, and Hattie’s life sentence formally ended.
The Johnson family historian who reconstructed the case emphasizes that Bilbo was an entrenched racist and that his motives likely mixed political calculation with whatever sympathy he felt. Even so, the paper trail in the Pardon and Suspension Files at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History makes it clear that petitions, jurors’ letters, and Clark’s own correspondence all played a part in winning Hattie’s freedom.
Taken together with Brown, the Roberts clemency campaign suggests that Clark’s commitment to legal fairness was not a one off performance. Whether arguing in the Mississippi Supreme Court or writing to a segregationist governor, he used the tools available to push back against the harshest outcomes of Jim Crow justice.
Final years and Tillie Tann Clark’s own path
By the late 1930s, Clark’s health had deteriorated. Contemporary reports and later reference works agree that he retired from the Mississippi Senate after 1936 because of illness and the strain of the Brown case. On February 26, 1940, he died in a Jackson hospital, with his obituary running that day in the Greenwood Commonwealth and other state papers.
His widow stepped into public life in her own right. Matilda “Tillie” Tann Clark had long been active in Democratic politics; the Secretary of State’s Blue Book for the late 1930s lists “Tillie Tann (Mrs. John A.) Clark, DeKalb” among Kemper County’s party leaders.
After John’s death, voters elected her to the Mississippi House of Representatives, where she represented Kemper County from 1940 into the mid 1940s. Modern compilations of women state legislators list “Matilda F. Tann Clark” as a Democratic state representative during that period, marking her as part of the first generation of women to serve in the Mississippi Legislature.
Tillie outlived her husband by more than a decade. She died in 1956 and is buried at Pine Crest Cemetery in De Kalb. Her Find A Grave memorial, which links her to other members of the Tann family, records her birth on February 18, 1885, and death on November 13, 1956.
For local historians in Kemper County, the Clarks are thus a political couple: a lawyer senator who challenged torture in one of the twentieth century’s key confession cases, and a school educated woman who carried the family’s name back into the legislature after his death.
Why John A. Clark matters to Appalachian and southern history
On a map, De Kalb sits outside the counties usually claimed as “Appalachia.” On a deeper level, the world John A. Clark inhabited looked very familiar to anyone who studies the mountain South: one party rule, company and planter influence over courts and sheriffs, a racially stratified labor system that extended from cotton fields to coal seams, and local lawyers who either upheld that order or quietly pushed at its edges.
Clark’s story matters for at least three reasons.
First, Brown v. Mississippi is a reminder that some of the most important moments in American constitutional law grew out of poor rural counties, not just big city police departments. The cedar thicket beatings in Kemper County forced the Supreme Court to say plainly that the Constitution does not tolerate torture, and they did so in a case where the first line of defense was a country lawyer in a small courthouse rather than a national civil rights organization.
Second, the Hattie Johnson Roberts clemency campaign shows that legal resistance to injustice did not stop at courtroom doors. Clark’s letters and the petitions he helped channel into Bilbo’s office were acts of advocacy that worked within the structures of the time but chipped away at some of their harsher outcomes. In a world where Parchman functioned as what one historian has called a “state run plantation,” the simple fact that a Black woman walked free because neighbors and an attorney insisted on it is significant.
Third, Clark’s fate illustrates the personal cost that white southern lawyers sometimes paid when they broke with racial expectations. Later Supreme Court histories speak of his “collapse” after the Brown decision, both political and physical. Losing his senate seat and dying only a few years later, he never saw how often the Brown opinion would be cited in later struggles over police interrogation from the Deep South to the coalfields of Kentucky and West Virginia.
For Appalachian and southern historians alike, John A. Clark stands as a figure who bridged local and national stories. The records of his life lie scattered across county courthouses, state archives, law reports, and family histories. Taken together, they show how one lawyer in one hill county helped move American law away from the open use of torture and toward a more robust understanding of due process.
Sources & Further Reading
Official and Statistical Register of the State of Mississippi, 1917. Edited by Dunbar Rowland. Biographical sketch of “John Archibald Clark” with details on his birth, education, and early public offices.
Mississippi Legislature, Hand book: Biographical data of members of Senate and House, personnel of standing committees (various editions, especially 1928, 1936, and 1940). Short biographies of John A. Clark as state senator and Matilda “Tillie” Tann Clark as Kemper County’s representative.
Mississippi Secretary of State, Mississippi Blue Book: Biennial Report of the Secretary of State to the Legislature of Mississippi (1930s series). Listings of state officers and county Democratic leaders, including “Tillie Tann (Mrs. John A.) Clark” in Kemper County.
Brown v. State, 173 Miss. 542, 158 So. 339, 161 So. 465 (Miss. 1935). Mississippi Supreme Court opinion affirming the convictions of Arthur Ellington, Ed Brown, and Henry Shields and acknowledging that their confessions were obtained by whipping.
Brown v. Mississippi, 297 U.S. 278 (1936). United States Supreme Court decision holding that convictions based solely on confessions extracted by brutality violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.
Mississippi Power Co. v. Thomas, 162 Miss. 734, 140 So. 227 (Miss. 1932). Mississippi Supreme Court decision arising from a De Kalb injury case, with John A. Clark listed as counsel for the appellee and widely cited later on electric utility duties.
Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Governor Theodore G. Bilbo, Pardon and Suspension Files, Series 901, Box 1536. Petitions, letters, and administrative orders in the case of Hattie Johnson Roberts, including correspondence to and from John A. Clark.
Mississippi Department of Corrections, Parchman Convict Register, MF Roll #13794. Entry for “Hattie Roberts” with personal description and sentencing details.
“Hattie Johnson [Roberts] – The Johnson Family of Kemper County, Mississippi,” Johnson Family of Kemper County website. Genealogical narrative that reproduces images of the Parchman intake record, Bilbo pardon file documents, and Clark’s letters, with full archival citations. Johnson Family of Kemper County
“Brown v. Mississippi,” Mississippi Encyclopedia (online). Concise summary of the case’s facts, procedural history, and impact, with discussion of Clark and Brewer’s roles. Internet Archive
Richard C. Cortner, A “Scottsboro” Case in Mississippi: The Supreme Court and Brown v. Mississippi. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986. Definitive monograph on the Brown litigation, dedicated to John A. Clark and Earl Leroy Brewer. eGrove
“John A. Clark (American lawyer),” Wikipedia. Modern synthesis of Clark’s biography, drawing on Rowland’s Register, the Mississippi Blue Books, legislative handbooks, and the Greenwood obituary. Wikipedia
“Matilda ‘Tillie’ Tann Clark (1885–1956),” Find A Grave entry, Pine Crest Cemetery, De Kalb, Mississippi. Memorial with birth and death dates and family links, useful as a pointer to local burial records. Find A Grave
Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), Rutgers University, “Matilda F. Tann Clark” profile. Brief entry identifying her as a Democratic state representative for Mississippi, 1940s, and situating her among early women legislators. CAWP Data