Scion of an elite Atlanta family, Clark Foreman tirelessly pursued progressive reform in the mid-twentieth century South. A liberal New Dealer who openly defied the reactionary wing of the Democratic Party, he was also instrumental in compiling the Report on Economic Conditions of the South (1938) and helped establish the Southern Conference for Human Welfare.
Early Life
Clark Howell Foreman was born on February 19, 1902, at his family’s home on 23 Kimball Street (now Ponce de Leon Avenue) in Atlanta. His maternal grandfather, Evan P. Howell, a Confederate veteran, served as editor-in-chief of the Atlanta Constitution between 1876 and 1897 and was Atlanta’s mayor from 1903 to 1905. Foreman’s uncle, Clark Howell, was managing editor of the Constitution from 1889 to 1936.
Clark Foreman’s parents, Robert L. and Effie Howell Foreman, fostered in their son a fierce independence of mind. He later reflected that “freedom of expression was not only allowed but practiced in the family.” While attending Atlanta Public Schools, Foreman was active in literary society, excelling in debate and declamation, first at the Tenth Street School and then at Boys High School. A precocious writer, he edited the Constitution’s “School News” page. He served as a sports correspondent for the paper while attending the University of Georgia, where he also won acclaim for debate in the Phi Kappa Literary Society.
Awakenings
In February 1921, while at university, Foreman witnessed the mob lynching of John Lee Eberhart, a Black man accused of murdering a white woman in neighboring Oconee County. Foreman later remembered that the “sadistic orgy,” in which local whites burned Eberhart alive before mutilating his corpse, made an “indelible impression.”
The next year, Foreman pursued graduate studies at Harvard University. While in Cambridge, he attended a dinner address, “The Negro Faces America,” delivered by W. E. B. Du Bois at the Radcliffe Liberal Club. Initially reluctant to eat in the same dining room as a Black man, Foreman left the event a great admirer of Du Bois. “That was my first break, so to speak, from the southern tradition,” he would later reflect.
Early Career and Civil Rights Work
After a year at Harvard, Foreman traveled to Europe, where he met H. G. Wells and taught history and English at Neue Schule Hellerau in Dresden under progressive educator Alexander Sutherland Neill. During a brief stint studying at the London School of Economics, he became aware of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC), an Atlanta-based organization with state-level committees across the South. He soon returned to Atlanta, where director Will Alexander hired him as secretary of the CIC’s Georgia Committee. Although Foreman’s two years with the CIC exposed him to the challenges facing Georgia’s Black communities, he became disillusioned with the organization’s incrementalist approach to the problem of inequality.
Foreman then worked for the Phelps-Stokes Fund and, later, the Rosenwald Fund, while attending graduate school at Columbia University. His fieldwork with Horace Mann Bond culminated in a doctoral dissertation, “Environmental Factors in Negro Elementary Education.” Afterward, Rosenwald Fund president Edwin Embree allowed Foreman to take a year’s salary and tour Europe and the Soviet Union. In the latter, he found friendly people but a “complete lack of freedom.” On the same trip, Foreman met his wife, Mairi Elizabeth Fiona Fraser.
New Deal and SCHW
In 1933, Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes appointed Foreman Special Adviser on the Economic Status of Negroes. Foreman accepted the post reluctantly, citing the unfavorable optics of a white southerner in a position that, in his words, “could surely be filled by a Negro.” In that capacity, Foreman worked to ensure that Black Americans received a fair shake in the administration of New Deal programs.
His appointment initially attracted the ire of the African American press and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), as did his early endorsement of all-Black subsistence homestead settlements, which the Chicago Defender attacked as “Jim Crow communities.” But Foreman convinced many of his commitment to justice when his office—itself staffed with Black employees—forced the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) to begin hiring Black men for supervisory positions.
In 1935 Foreman became director of the Public Works Administration’s (PWA) Division of Public Power. His division helped municipalities broaden public access to affordable electricity, prompting intense (if unsuccessful) legal challenges from private power companies.
In the leadup to the 1938 midterm elections, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Foreman to recommend a candidate to run against incumbent U.S. Senator Walter F. George of Georgia. George represented a faction of southern Democrats hostile to Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation. While Foreman knew of no suitable opponent, he recommended that Roosevelt commission a report on southern poverty to draw public attention to the importance of the New Deal. The resulting Report on Economic Conditions of the South, which Foreman helped draft, was the basis for the president’s July 1938 declaration that the South was “the Nation’s No. 1 economic problem.”
The same year, Foreman and a racially integrated group of other southern reformers established the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW). With Foreman as its president, SCHW championed social justice in the South, notably pushing for repeal of the poll tax. In historian Randall L. Patton’s words, it “almost became the flagship organization of a southern economic and political renaissance.” SCHW eventually spawned the Southern Conference Educational Fund, which would play a prominent role in the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. Dogged by financial strain and redbaiting, SCHW folded in November 1948, having laid the groundwork for future civil rights campaigns.
Later Life
Foreman’s work for the Roosevelt administration ended in 1942 when, as director of defense housing, he pursued policies that offended a bipartisan group of conservative legislators.
Following a short stint as a specialist in operational research for the U.S. Navy, Foreman worked in a variety of academic positions and published several books. He was part of the vast research team that produced Gunnar Myrdal’s landmark 1944 study, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. He directed the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee in New York and was director emeritus when he died in June 1977.
