The Difficult Ethnic and Religious Mind of Dennis Clark

Dennis Clark is one of a cadre of American activists who have been largely forgotten in the scholarly literature of urban history and politics, church history and ethnic studies. Clark is in fact someone who should be remembered for the significant and sometimes deeply contradictory role he played as an historian, political activist, and lay activist within the Roman Catholic Church. Before dying of cancer at the age of 66 in 1993 Clark would write at least eight books, contribute multiple book chapters and numerous articles on a diverse number of topics. He would also leave behind a number of manuscripts both fiction and nonfiction. The majority of Clark's efforts focused upon documenting the history of the Irish in Philadelphia from colonial times to the early 1990s when he published Erin's Heirs: Irish Bonds of Community, but Clark's intention was not simply to document the Irish experience in Philadelphia. He strongly agreed with the ItalianAmerican activist Monsignor Geno Baroni that race relations in America would only improve if ethnic groups first understood themselves. Until they did this they could not effectively deal with the racial/ethnic tensions that pervaded so much of American politics and civic culture in the latter part of the twentieth century. Clark's extensive efforts at documenting the Irish experience in Philadelphia were intended to be both formal social, political and religious history and a pedagogical tool for understanding the Irish experience in the United States. Clark also wrote a number of articles or book chapters that stand as academic political histories of various components of Philadelphia's past.1 These too were meant to expand historical understanding. Clark believed strongly in the idea that place plays a significant role in defining identity, so he was concerned with pro-