{"id":3401,"date":"1969-12-29T00:19:27","date_gmt":"1969-12-29T00:19:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/?p=3401"},"modified":"2016-02-22T02:15:36","modified_gmt":"2016-02-22T02:15:36","slug":"panther-clark-expected-death-sister-reveals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/1969\/12\/29\/panther-clark-expected-death-sister-reveals\/","title":{"rendered":"Panther Clark Expected Death, Sister Reveals"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The killing of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, in a pre-dawn raid coordinated\u00a0by the Cook County State&#8217;s Attorney Office, the Chicago police, and the FBI, was a major\u00a0incident\u00a0in the repression of the Black Power Movement. A less well-known victim of that raid was the 22-year-old, Peoria-born\u00a0Mark Clark, who had come to Chicago to attend an Illinois-wide meeting of party leaders.\u00a0On the night of the raid he was on security duty in the front room of Hampton&#8217;s apartment and was shot\u00a0in the heart when authorities stormed the apartment.<\/p>\n<p>Mark was the brother of Richard Pryor&#8217;s close friend Matt Clark, and had been \u2014\u00a0at four years old\u00a0\u2014\u00a0the youngest member ever of Juliette Whittaker&#8217;s acting company,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/1962\/11\/27\/the-enchanted-cage\/#menu-main-nav\">the Carver Players<\/a>. After working as a teenager with his family in the town&#8217;s local NAACP chapter, he had founded\u00a0the Peoria chapter of the Black Panther Party.<\/p>\n<p>John Gwynn, president of the Peoria and Illinois chapters of the NAACP, recalled that &#8220;all of the Clark brothers were participating. All were alert and pretty much read up on the issues.&#8221; He added that Mark &#8220;could call for order when older persons or adults could not.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;He was a nonconformist,&#8221; his sister Eleanor said. &#8220;He was the type of person who, regardless of whether anyone went along with his ideas&#8230;he was going to do what was right and appropriate.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The Clark family was never notified by law enforcement officials of the shooting, according to the <em>Tribune<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The killing of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, in a pre-dawn raid coordinated\u00a0by the Cook County State&#8217;s Attorney Office, the Chicago police, and the FBI, was a major\u00a0incident\u00a0in the repression of the Black [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,400,244,24],"tags":[125,129,188,228,231,242,176,183],"class_list":["post-3401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-1963-1969","category-3-riding-the-whirlwind","category-movement-radicalizes-and-splinters","category-segregation-desegregation","tag-1960s-civil-rights","tag-black-panther-party","tag-civil-rights-movement-in-peoria","tag-john-gwynn","tag-mark-clark","tag-matt-clark","tag-national-association-for-the-advancement-of-colored-people-naacp","tag-racism"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3401"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3401\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6881,"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3401\/revisions\/6881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}