In 1968, he became the first Black person to serve in the Legislature since Reconstruction. Shunned by colleagues at first, he became a political force in the state.
Robert G. Clark Jr., who became the first Black person to sit in the Mississippi State Legislature since Reconstruction and who endured insults and ostracism before becoming a force in state politics, died on Tuesday at his home in Ebenezer, Miss. He was 96.
His death was announced on Facebook by his son Bryant W. Clark, who succeeded his father in the Mississippi Statehouse seat that Mr. Clark had occupied for 36 years.
A reserved yet genial politician, Mr. Clark was on the cusp of the revolution that transformed politics in Mississippi, a bastion of the most virulent white resistance to desegregation in the 1960s. For many years he waged a lonely fight.
When he entered the State Capitol in Jackson for the first time on a cold January day in 1968, Mr. Clark, a former high school teacher and coach, was assigned a solo desk at the far edge of the chamber. Other legislators were paired, but nobody would sit with the lone Black man in the Mississippi House of Representatives, an independent who was backed by the breakaway Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, a faction that had turned its back on the segregationist regular Democrats.
Previously, Black people had had difficulty being admitted to the chamber even as spectators.
Mr. Clark sat alone for eight years. Once, he found a watermelon on his desk. When he rose to speak, he was cut off. “They’d cut me out, and I couldn’t get the floor,” he told the historian John Dittmer in 2013 in an oral history for the Library of Congress.
One night Mr. Clark had had enough. Furious, he cleaned out his desk and strode from the chamber, intending never to return. “I was ready to walk out!” he recalled. “Walk out!”