Clark, Jerome Bayard

5 Apr. 1882–26 Aug. 1959

Jerome Bayard Clark, congressman, was born on Phoebus Plantation near Elizabethtown, Bladen County, son of John Washington and Catherine Amelia Blue Clark. He was educated in the Clarkton schools, at Davidson College, and at The University of North Carolina. He was admitted to the bar in 1906 and began practice in Elizabethtown. In 1915 he represented Bladen County in the state house of representatives, and he served as presidential elector for the Sixth Congressional District in 1916 on the Wilson-Marshall ticket. In 1920 he moved to Fayetteville, where he continued the practice of law. He was a member of the state Democratic committee from 1909 to 1919 and a member of the judicial conference from 1924 to 1928.

Clark was elected as a Democrat to the Seventy-first and to the nine succeeding Congresses (5 Mar. 1929–3 Jan. 1949), with opposition in his own party only twice and without opposition from any source in his election to the Seventy-eighth Congress. At the beginning of his second term in Congress, he was elected chairman of one of the election committees of the House, from which he was promoted to the Rules Committee. He was appointed a member of the special committee that investigated the seizure of Montgomery Ward by the government during World War II and wrote the report for the committee. He also served on the joint House and Senate committee that investigated the attack on Pearl Harbor and was a member of the subcommittee that prepared its report. Not a candidate for reelection in 1948, he resumed his law practice in Fayetteville.

Clark was a member and officer of Highland Presbyterian Church, the Masons, the Knights of Pythias, and O.D.K. On 2 June 1908 he married Helen Purdie Robinson, daughter of Dr. Heman Robinson of Elizabethtown. They had four children, Mrs. Julian B. Hutaff, Jerome B., Jr., Heman Robinson, and Mrs. George D. Jackson. Clark died in Fayetteville and was buried in Cross Creek Cemetery No. 3.