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Bill Clay spent a lifetime being confrontational. The son of a welder, he became a leader of the street demonstrations that took on ӣ����Ƶ power brokers and broke the back of decades of employment segregation for Black people here.

He served more than three decades in Congress, the first African American from Missouri. He raised some hell, fought for labor and the poor, and co-founded the Congressional Black Caucus. Back home, he headed a political machine that could make or break mayors.

William L. Clay Sr. died Thursday morning at his daughter’s home in Virginia. Clay, who lived in Silver Springs, Maryland, was 94.

Survivors include his son, William Lacy Clay Jr.; two daughters, Vicki Clay and Michelle Clay; five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Clay sponsored the Family and Medical Leave Act, which became law in 1993 and requires that companies with more than 50 workers offer up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to employees to care for a new baby or attend to a family emergency.

He worked for two decades to revise the Hatch Act, which restricted the rights of federal workers to endorse candidates and organize fundraisers.

He fought successfully to raise the minimum wage, unsuccessfully to get Congress to ban the permanent replacement of striking workers, and successfully to boost funding for historically Black colleges.

His fiery speeches resonated with the overwhelmingly Democratic voters in his First Congressional District. He told them he didn’t get elected to represent all people.

“I represent those who are in need of representation,” he would say. “I have no intention of representing those powerful interests who walk over the powerless people.”

After serving in Congress for 32 years, Clay stepped down and was succeeded by his son, Lacy Clay, who served 10 terms.

The younger Clay said Thursday his father was a pivotal figure in both American politics and his family.

“He changed a community, he changed a state, and he changed a nation with the work he did in Congress,” Lacy Clay said. “Whether it was fighting in ӣ����Ƶ for equal and civil rights or fighting against apartheid in South Africa, he made a difference.”

Lacy Clay said that he and his two sisters, Vicki Clay and Michelle Clay, tried to emulate their father. “We all wanted to be like him; he was our hero.”

The death in February of his mother, Carol Johnson Clay, caused a marked downturn in his father’s health, Lacy Clay said.

“After, I just think he didn’t have the will to go on.”

Political epiphany

Clay’s epiphany about power, race and politics came at age 18 when police arrested him for murder.

His family lived in the ghetto, as he described it, where the owner of a small neighborhood confectionary and his wife were killed in a robbery.

“They were white, and, of course, the police would sweep down our neighborhood and lock up everybody they saw,” Clay recalled in an interview in 2009.

Bill Clay was starting his freshman year at ӣ����Ƶ University. It was 1949, and the university had just integrated — opening its doors to white women and Black people of both sexes.

To pay his bills, Bill worked at the Good Luck Dry Goods, a downtown clothing store at 812 Franklin Avenue, now Dr. Martin Luther King Drive. He started at age 12, making $5 a week. He did some janitorial work, learned to sew and did alternations for the shop. He saved his pennies in coffee cans.

An ex-convict who ran a neighborhood pool hall told police he had overheard Bill say he had driven the murderer to the bus station to get out of town.

Police Officer Burke — Clay recalled the name with obvious displeasure decades later — handcuffed Bill and drove him to a district police station.

Bill’s boss called his mother. The Clays lived across the street from the station, and his mother was waiting when police arrived with her son. A police officer pushed her aside, saying “It’s none of your damn business.”

She called her sister, who cleaned the house of a city police commissioner. Young Bill was in an interrogation room, under the lights while an officer was preparing to beat a confession out of him. That’s when two detectives arrived with the district captain.

They took Bill to police headquarters, where a polygraph test cleared him. They let him go. No apology; just count yourself lucky.

Clay recalled that the day’s events “convinced me that survival and political influence are inseparable in American politics.”

Growing up

Clay was the fourth of seven children, born in the living room of a four-family flat on Eighth Street. It had no plumbing and no hot water.

His father, Irving, worked across the river in Granite City. He didn’t earn much, but it was more than many others did during the Depression. He was a Republican, like many Black people of his generation during the 1940s. He read the papers every day and told his family to stick together, respect everybody and expect them to respect you.

Bill’s mother, Luella, worked hard to keep their home clean and open to friends and neighbors. After World War II, the Clays were the first family in their neighborhood to have a telephone and, later, a television.

The Clays were Catholic and Bill attended St. Nicholas church and school. He recalled being No. 1 in his high school graduating class, “but there were only ten of us.”

Bill was mischievous and sometimes gave the nuns fits. According to family history, he once sewed a peanut butter sandwich into a schoolmate’s pocket.

The Clays’ second apartment was at 11th and Carr streets, across from a playground. Like the rest of ӣ����Ƶ in those days, it was segregated. The white tennis court was clay, the Black tennis court was gravel. The white wading pool was new; the Black pool was an old pit.

Still in college, Clay continued working and, with his older brother, Irving, helped his parents buy their first home. It was uptown, at 5146 Minerva Avenue, in an integrated neighborhood free of tenements.

Carol Ann Johnson lived across the street. Their first date was at the Ice Capades at The Arena. They also went swimming — in Springfield, Illinois, with a beach where Black swimmers were welcomed.

Clay graduated from ӣ����Ƶ University in 1953 with a degree in politics and history. He was immediately drafted. The Army sent him to Fort McClellan, in Anniston, Alabama.

In 1954, the Supreme Court outlawed segregation in schools. President Harry S. Truman desegregated the military. But word apparently had not yet reached the Alabama of the 1950s.

Black soldiers there could get their hair cut only on Saturdays, when a Black barber traveled to the base. The swimming pool was for whites only.

By then, Clay and Carol Ann had married. She was about to find out how strongly he felt about some things.

He led a group of Black soldiers to the barber shop, where they sat. He and Carol took the children from their housing complex to the pool, where they leaped in. All the white people got out.

The Army transferred Clay to Fort Leonard Wood, where he finished his military career and returned to ӣ����Ƶ. In short order, he and his wife had three children.

Clay worked for a time as a driver for the bus company, where he had trouble backing up and sometimes got lost. One day, he left his bus and passengers on Delmar Boulevard, walked home and called the company to say where it could find its bus.

Other jobs included selling insurance and collecting debts.

He spent his evenings organizing people. He joined the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and started a youth council. They picketed restaurants that refused to serve Blacks, held sit-ins and pressured businesses to hire Blacks.

Clay was unhappy with the NAACP’s leadership as well as the Black leadership in ӣ����Ƶ. He bolted to a newer, younger organization, the Congress for Racial Equality, CORE.

He was not afraid to speak out.

“There’s nothing wrong with ӣ����Ƶ that couldn’t be cured by drowning all Black politicians over 30!” he said in one speech.

Jefferson Bank protest

In 1959, he decided to run for ӣ����Ƶ alderman. By that time, Black ӣ����Ƶans had migrated west of downtown and were a majority in some previously all-white wards.

Clay and his campaign manager, Norman Seay, a teacher and CORE organizer, laid the foundation of the political organization that would keep Clay in power for decades. They broke down the wards, block by block and determined who was influential and could get things done. It could be the hairdresser or the man or woman who sat on the porch giving advice to neighbors.

Clay won big; he became Alderman Clay.

In 1963, he sent a survey to big businesses here asking how many Negroes they employed.

In a cover letter, he said he was asking on behalf of Mayor Raymond Tucker. He wasn’t, but all the companies complied.

Clay took their responses and wrote “Anatomy of an Economic Murder,” disclosing how few Black people the big companies had hired. He sent a copy to the mayor.

Clay and CORE met with the bosses to explain why they should hire more African Americans. Some did. There was an implied threat of boycotts and picketing if they didn’t.

One business that refused was the Jefferson Bank and Trust Co. Located then at Jefferson and Washington avenues, in the middle of the Black community, it had no white collar Black employees.

The bank got a judge to bar activists from interfering with its business. But Clay and others weren’t about to let a court order stop them.

On Aug. 30, 1963, a core group of 35 to 40 began standing outside the bank holding signs: “JOBS.”

They were surrounded by police. When demonstrators tried to keep some customers from entering the bank to cash their paychecks, police arrested Clay and 18 others for violating the court order.

That was the beginning of a struggle against the bank, other big employers, City Hall, and other movers and shakers.

The governor came to town and met with the mayor and the police board before calling on a judge to jail the protesters.

Prominent Black leaders publicly condemned the protesters. The bar association tried to disbar lawyers who represented the protesters. Schools tried to fire teachers who walked the picket line.

Clay got one of the longest sentences — 270 days. He and the others were in and out of jail and the city workhouse as their contempt of court convictions were appealed.

The judge gave Clay an ultimatum: apologize.

Clay refused, and served a total of 112 days.

In his 2008 book, “The Jefferson Bank Confrontation,” Clay described how a small group of protesters eventually won by capturing the hearts and minds of a large portion of the Black population.

Black doctors, schoolteachers and businessmen, who for years had distanced themselves from the movement, felt compelled to get involved, he wrote. Black ministers formed a group to negotiate with the mayor and the bank. High school students loaded into CORE buses to join the fight. “The Black community had risen, phoenix-like to a new and more respected plateau.”

The picket lines continued for 3 1/2 years. A judge finally ordered protesters released. Key to winning, they said, was the threat of racial confrontation. The sight of thousands of demonstrators sent a chilling message to the city’s power structure.

DC-bound

In 1963, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling mandating equal population in congressional districts paved the way for Clay to run for an open seat in the First Congressional District comprised of north ӣ����Ƶ and some nearby suburbs.

Clay promised to support job opportunities for African Americans and civil rights. He won handily.

Early in his congressional career, Clay withstood a series of allegations about ethical violations, including tax evasion and misuse of congressional funds.

In Congress, he was an unrepentant liberal. Politically, he could afford to be. With his support from Black voters and labor, he had a safe seat.

“Tell me where the liberal legislation has been bad for the country,” he said, ticking off a list that included Medicare, Medicaid, student loans, school lunches and portable health insurance.

Republicans, he said, “didn’t want them in the beginning, and they still don’t want them.”

After moving to Washington, Clay had no residence in ӣ����Ƶ and stayed in hotels when he came to town.

He would hold court, with one local politician after another coming to seek favors. He helped make Vince Schoemehl mayor in 1981, and later defeated the mayor’s slate of candidates after a falling out with Schoemehl.

Later, Schoemehl would say: “Bill Clay is the most powerful single individual politician in Missouri.”

In 1982, opponents thought they had a chance to throw him out after the Legislature redrew the lines of his district. G. Duncan Bauman, publisher of the old Globe-Democrat, ordered Clay’s political obituary written.

Clay won handily and somehow, he got a copy of the unpublished article.

He called the reporter and told him: “Good obituary.”

When he finally did call it quits, Clay said that the Congress he was leaving was much different than the one he had found 32 years earlier.

“When I came here, you had people who did stand for something,” he said. “You had some ultra-conservatives, mostly southerners, who knew what their agenda was and they would not stray from it. And you had the flaming liberals.

“It’s no longer like that,” Clay added. Now, politicians on both sides of the aisle are “cowards,” he said. “They read the polls. They’ll say, ‘Well, look, this is popular, this is unpopular.’”

In all, Clay wrote eight books, including a harsh critique of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas published in 2015.

“He’s the worst sonofabitch that ever lived,” Clay said.

Legacy

Testimonials poured in as news of Clay’s death spread Thursday.

“We have lost a true giant,” said state Sen. Brian Williams, a friend and former assistant to Lacy Clay, before he was elected to the Missouri Legislature in 2018.

“As Missouri’s first Black member of Congress, he paved the way for so many of us, including me,” Williams said. “His courage, intellect and unshakable commitment to justice changed the course of history.”

U.S. Rep. Wesley Bell, who now represents the First District called Clay’s death “a profound loss.

“For over three decades, he carried the voices of working people, Black families, union members, and the unheard into the halls of power, and he made sure they echoed there,” Bell said in a statement. “We have lost one of the fiercest champions our city and country have ever known.”

U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Kansas City Democrat and a member of the Congressional Black Caucus that Clay helped start in 1971, called Clay “a principled leader and tireless advocate for civil rights and economic justice.”

“His voice carried the strength of conviction and the clarity of purpose that helped shape a more inclusive nation,” Cleaver said.

ӣ����Ƶ Mayor Cara Spencer said, “Bill Clay’s courageous legacy of public service to ӣ����Ƶ and the country is etched in his historic legislative battles for the poor, underrepresented and disenfranchised.”

“We thank him for his generous service to a city he cared deeply for,” Spencer said in a statement.

ӣ����Ƶ County Executive Sam Page said, “Bill Clay was a tireless advocate for our community and opened doors of opportunity for everyone in our region.”

Former ӣ����Ƶ Mayor Vincent C. Schoemehl Jr. — whose political battles with Clay shaped the landscape of city politics in the 1980s and early 1990s — said Clay “was among the most influential political figures in ӣ����Ƶ and Missouri during his career.”

“He earned that position through tireless work, smart tactics and by always keeping his eye on the ball,” he said. “He was a tough negotiator and a truly great leader who left the world a better place for everyone.”