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Photograph by Sam Froelich
The Mayor of Tate Street
Though he politely rejects the title, nobody knows more about the life of College Hill than UNCG’s Jim Clark By Jim Schlosser
A
n ordained minister, Jim Clark was violating a commandment: Thy shalt not read thy old press clippings. “The damn stuff I was saying — like (the need for) an alternative city council — geez,” he says, while studying yellowish, tattered clippings from 30 and 40 years ago. He was in the office of the Greensboro Review, which he edits, and which is next to his cluttered office, from which he directs the master of fine arts program at UNCG. Clark has been up the hill at UNCG for three decades now, an iconic member of the faculty: a poet, writer, teacher, administrator, one who seems to know everyone in Greensboro and beyond who has ever put words to paper. Long ago, he was downhill from UNCG, on Tate Street, the business district below the campus. For about a 10-year period in the late 1960s and well into the 1970s, Tate drew from great distances a counter-culture clan. Jim Clark was mentor and confidante to hundreds of alienated youth who loitered along Tate and in the surrounding neighborhood now known as College Hill. Few attended UNCG. The scene became so chaotic that UNCG discouraged students from visiting the area. The school planted thorny bushes on the hill beside the Brown Music Building to, ouch, discourage young people from sitting on what became known as Hippie Hill. Before the bushes, the knoll provided a splendid view of the entire stretch of Tate. The “freaks,” as they were called, were also constantly being shooed from sitting on a wall in front of the offices of two doctors near the intersection of Tate and Walker Avenue. “On Friday and Saturday there were hundreds of people with nowhere to go, nowhere to sit,” he recalls. Clark remembers that at times he was in the face of one of the doctors, the late Joe Christian. Clark now realizes how much good the physician did for Greensboro. He loved music and art, and almost single-handedly built the Bog Garden behind Friendly Shopping Center and gave it to the city. He also was known to make house calls. “You think these people are your enemies, then you sit down and find you like the same things,” Clark says. “We were so busy being angry, sometimes we didn’t make friends.” Clark arrived on Tate Street in 1969 as an associate minister of Congregational United Church of Christ. Several of the church’s youth members had gone to Tate Street and hadn’t come back. “I went looking for them,” he says, “and didn’t come back.” Draw a caricature of a 1970s hippie and you get Clark. He had a long flowing
24 O.Henry
October/November 2011
beard and scraggly clothes. He still does, and he still lives in the same house as back then, on Carr Street, just off Tate. But he has mellowed after a long stint as member of the establishment, a classification he must accept as leader of the MFA program. He says he can now see points of view that perhaps he didn’t appreciate long ago, such as doctors not wanting the wall in front of their offices lined with hippies, and merchants not wanting store entrances blocked by loitering youth. Still, he liked what he saw on Tate Street. “All the creativity and passion for social justice and desire to deal with problems of the world — I was just amazed,” he says. A group of ministers and other socially conscious people formed the Greensboro Ministry for Social Change, with Clark the main man and the hippies on Tate Street the main constituency. A newspaper was started, the Greensboro Sun, which reported on Tate Street happenings and opined about the nation’s affairs and the Vietnam War. The Sun’s newsroom was space in an elevated ramshackle building behind the east side of the Tate Street business district. Because it looked like one, the hippies and others named it the Tree House. It became a sanctuary for young people running from the law for drugs, for avoiding the draft and for other violations. Because Clark was the face of Tate Street, he was called the street’s “hippie mayor.” He disputes the title, insisting it belonged to another man who was a street fixture and an activist. “I was called a lot of things on Tate Street — one starting with an ‘m’ — but I was not the mayor,” he says. Nonsense. Anything that happened on Tate and in the College Hill neighborhood, Clark was involved. He helped organize a now legendary baseball game between the hippies and their nemesis, the Greensboro Police Department. The idea was to promote harmony between the two groups. The hippies figured the cops were flabby from riding around in their cars, eyeballing the doings of the nonconformists. The assumption was the cops would be a push over on the diamond. But the cops who showed up at the field in Cone Mills’ Revolution Mill village, Clark recalls, looked as lean and agile as today’s Greensboro Grasshoppers. The hippies didn’t help their own cause. They just had to be hippies. They took to the field in tuxedos and cowboy boots and other outlandish outfits. Their fans in the stands passed around an inflated pig with a cop hat to raise money for charity. The final score was something like 20 to 0. He can’t tell the story of the game without mentioning the headline in the next day’s Greensboro newspaper: “Freaks Flub at Revolution.” “That hurt,” he says, adding that after the drubbing, “Everyone wanted to whip some hippie ass.” The Art & Soul of Greensboro