Local Veteran, Teacher And Organizer Runs For Congress

OAK PARK, IL — Anthony Clark looked tired. When Patch met him at a table in Oak Park's Saigon Vietnamese cafe for an interview, it was immediately clear that this candidate for the Illinois 7th Congressional District had a long day. Despite his active campaign to become a congressman, Clark is still teaching full time at Oak Park and River Forest High School and fielding interviews from local journalists, and he made it no secret that keeping all these plates spinning is challenging.

But then the questions started - about racism and capitalism, hope and struggle - and any signs of fatigue on Clark's face vanished. He spoke at length and with increasing energy about his past, his plans and his frustrations with America's political landscape, returning at several points to a coda reminiscent of other young leaders in America's resurgent leftist movement:

"There's a universal language that exists, and it's called 'struggle,'" he said.

On the surface, it sounds like a campaign slogan, and perhaps it is. But it's also more than that. Listening to Clark's speak, it became clear he really believes it. It's an ethos around which he said his whole life has been shaped, going back to his early childhood.

"I was born on the south side of Chicago, Morgan Park neighborhood... With the racist War on Drugs, the prior prohibition of cannabis, often times there's a vast lack of opportunity that exist in many communities, so my brother fell into the life of selling narcotics, selling cannabis to try to take care of himself and his family," Clark said. "He ended up incarcerated for a long period of time. So my mother and father, extremely hard-working individuals... scraped together the money that they had to provide me with a better life, better opportunities."

Clark's parents relocated with him to Oak Park when he was five, he said, to try and provide him those better opportunities. Even as a kid, he said the differences between Morgan Park and Oak Park were readily apparent and striking.

"It was so interesting being that young but still having some type of awareness in regards to just literally how you can cross the street and everything changes," Clark said. "When you change an area code or zip code, the lack of opportunity either increases or decreases... Being at that young age, I didn't know how to articulate it. But I just knew once I went to visit Grandma and Grandpa; cousins that were still on the south side, west side of Chicago, it was different."

Clark said that though Oak Park felt more invested than the south side of Chicago, there were times he and his family were made to feel like they weren't welcome because of their race and working class status. The experience, he said, laid the foundation for his political activism in later years.

But his trajectory from merely experiencing anti-Black racism and economic anxiety to actively trying to fight against it included detours. As a young man, Clark said he stole money from a business in Atlanta and faced a difficult choice that ended with him joining the U.S. military.

"I moved to Atlanta, ended up getting in trouble in Atlanta, ended up stealing money in Atlanta," he said. "When my father came to get me, the business that I stole money from gave me a choice, an option. They said that if I chose something positive to do with my life that they wouldn't press charges... the military dangled in front of me free education, free housing, free healthcare and a guaranteed job."

During his six years of active duty, Clark said he was put into contact with many other men and women like himself; working class young people who joined the military because they saw it as a path - perhaps their only path - to a better life. He said the experience left him with a gunshot wound and Behcet's Disease - an uncommon malady he attributed to being exposed to military chemicals - but he said it also solidified in him the idea that struggle was something that defined the experience of working class people of all walks of life. Needless to say, Clark has none of the flag-waving love for the military that veterans are often expected to have.

"Poverty is the draft," he said at one point. He also noted that so much of what the military provided him - free education, healthcare, housing - are things many leftists say should be available to the general public, no boot camp required.

After leaving the military, Clark became a teacher. It's a job he's now had, at multiple institutions, for more than a decade. He said he chose the career so as to give young people an education they could use to avoid some of the systemic pitfalls he fell into, "so they wouldn't have to join the military," he said.

He also got involved with of a number of grassroots organizing efforts, including founding a restorative justice and community watchdog nonprofit known as Suburban Unity Alliance in 2016. It was the participants in these and other efforts - like Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats- who Clark said first pressured him to run for the 7th congressional seat in 2018.

"From that work, I was actually nominated to run," he said. "I never wanted to be a politician, I never felt politicians - outside of Bernie in 2016 - ever really spoke our language... so when I was nominated, I thought about it and sat down and told myself, 'I could either spend the rest of my life working with my nonprofit... I could spend the rest of my life treating symptoms... putting bandages over open wounds, or I could accept this nomination through Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats and work to attack root, cause issues.'"

The 2018 race, Clark said, was "the natural progression of a movement that was not content with the status quo." However, he said that he and his team "had no idea what [they] were doing."

Despite his team's and his own professed inexperience, 7th district voters were relatively receptive to Clark. He ended up taking about 26% of the IL-7 vote against long-time incumbent Danny Davis. Two years later, Clark is again running against Davis, and said he wants to build on the base laid by the numerous progressive campaigns of 2018. He cited the victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in particular as a watershed moment. Clark has again received endorsements from progressive organizations like Brand New Congress and the Chicago branch of the Democratic Socialists of America, among others.

In turn, Clark has endorsed the candidacy of Bernie Sanders for president, and has held campaign canvasses where he pitches his own congressional run in tandem with Sanders' run for the presidency.

As an Illinois representative, Clark said his top priorities would be healthcare and environmental justice, vis-a-vis Medicare For All and the Green New Deal, respectively. While Clark continuously stressed that "everything is connected to everything," he also said that "without our environment and without our health, no other fight really matters."

A Black man who has experienced racism throughout his life, Clark also said he would make it a priority to address systemic racism in America from within the system itself. Like the famous Black socialist and Chicago native Fred Hampton - who was killed for his political activism and whose photo adorns Clark's Twitter page - Clark argued that one of the best ways to address systemic American racism is to attack capitalism itself.

"Individuals like Martin Luther King Jr., prior to their death, recognized that your particular 'ism' that oppresses you, like racism, is directly connected to economic oppression," he said. "before he was murdered, he was about to lead a damn union [strike], because he identified that. He was fighting for economic justice because he recognized it was directly tied to oppressive 'isms' that exist."

When asked how he intended to pitch his message of anti-racist socialism to whiter or more conservative voters in the 7th District, his response once again recalled his belief in the universality of struggle. Even Trump voters, he said, could understand it.

"What I recognize and what what I truly believe is... if you know how to speak Struggle, one doesn't necessarily have to look like you, have your same exact experiences or have your same exact background," he said. "If [people] have struggled... those are those connections that exist."

The interview concluded not long after that question, about 40 minutes after it began. Outside, the winter storm was getting worse, and Clark seemed eager to tuck in to the warm bowl of Pho he had ordered. It had been a long day. When Patch asked for a photo to go along with the story, he remained seated and raised his fist in the decades-old gesture of power - Black power, socialist power, people power.

Then, quickly glancing around at the restaurant staff tending to other customers, he said,

"Let's do it here. This is real life."