A name lost to history
Floy Clements sparked a new era in Springfield as the state’s first Black female lawmaker
When Floy Clements became the first Black woman to serve in the Illinois legislature, her father wasn’t there to see her sworn in on Jan 7, 1959. He died decades earlier. Yet he and his wife knew they made the right choice to raise their daughter in Chicago.
When Clements was born in 1891 in Memphis, Tennessee, the brief taste of freedom Southern Black people experienced after the Civil War was gone. They were resubjugated by the night riders of the Ku Klux Klan. Had she grown up there, her chance of getting even a minimal education would have been slim. She would have been lucky to find work as a domestic.
In Chicago, Clements attended Wendell Phillips High School and went on to college. She flirted with a movie career, married into the Black middle class and worked her way up the political ladder from precinct captain to ward committeewoman.
As a reward for helping wean the Black community off the Republican Party, Clements made campaign appearances alongside Mayor Richard J. Daley, boss of the fabled Democratic machine. Her breakthrough opened doors to elective office then closed to Black women.
For her achievements, Clements was indebted to her parents, who gave up on the South and moved to Chicago when she was 3. Her father, Alexander Stephens, was a model of determination and drive. He went to work on a local railroad and soon was shaping up its food service. One of its dining cars was named “Floy” by a grateful management.
He also ran Stephens’ Lunch Room on South State Street and the Waldorf Restaurant, which the Defender proclaimed “one of the most fashionable cafes in the west.”
Stephens was “a race man to the bottom of his heart,” the Defender wrote; he was devoted to the cause of less fortunate African Americans. He was a friend of Booker T. Washington, who famously championed entrepreneurship and education as the route to equality.
Stephens and his wife were similarly inspired, sending their daughter to Wilberforce University. The private university had been educating freed Black people since before the Civil War and was named for the English abolitionist William Wilberforce.
His motto was: “We are too young to realize that certain things are impossible. So we will do them anyway.”
An echo of his words can be found in Clements’ resume.
In college, Clements belonged to “a glamor girl group.” Afterward, she appeared in two films by the pioneering Black director Oscar Micheaux, who had a film production office in Chicago.
In Micheaux’s “Within Our Gates,” Clements plays Alma, a cousin of the protagonist Sylvia. In a climactic scene, Alma reveals Sylvia’s secret: Her mother was raped by a white man, and Sylvia was adopted by a dirt-poor Black family that got her a good education. Micheaux resisted pressure to cut the film’s violent scenes. He was determined to show the stark reality of Black life under segregation.
When Clements married eight years earlier, the Defender’s headline read: “Popular Chicago Girl Wedded This Week,” suggesting she had her choice of suitors. That they were members of the city’s Black elite can be inferred from her address as a newlywed, 4910 S. Washington Park Court. It was a neighborhood of choice for affluent Black families.
Edward Clements appears in the Defender’s society columns as a businessman, and Floy Clements is identified as a clubwoman. Chicago’s private clubs barred people of color, so Black women of means had clubs that met in members’ homes.
Floy Clements made it into a 1927 society wrap-up when she took a house guest to the famed Dempsey-Tunney prizefight at Soldier Field. Afterward, the two women were Edward Clements’ guests at a cabaret party.
Also that year, Floy Clements found her calling. She became a precinct captain, rang neighbors’ doorbells and handed out campaign literature at election time for decades. She was asked why, when elected to the legislature in 1958.
“I have always, all my life, voted the straight Democratic ticket,” she replied. “I feel it is the party that has done most for Negroes.”
That wasn’t an easy sell when Clements’ political career began. Chicago’s African American community remained
loyal to the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator. Meanwhile, white working-class immigrants were increasingly voting Democratic and being assembled into the Chicago machine, in the 1930s.
Fearing that African Americans would be left without political allies, Clements was among the members of the Negro Women’s Division of the Illinois Democratic Women’s Club, as the Defender reported in 1935:
“The Race women banded together in a unit as have the Polish, the Italian, the Bohemians and other racial groups in order to pool their interests and to be credited for the new voters whom they bring to the Democratic party.”
That credit was redeemable in patronage jobs, and Clements was made a deputy clerk of the Municipal Court. She also rose from precinct captain to committeewoman of the Fourth Ward Democratic Organization.
In 1942, Clements enlisted in Chicago’s Red Cross Motor Corps Auxiliary. Members used their own cars to transport soldiers wounded on World War II battlefields to and from local rehabilitation facilities.
By the postwar era, she was a political celebrity. When the national Democratic Party met in Chicago for a planning session in 1953, a Defender photographer snapped a picture of a jovial Clements and other notables in a ballroom of the Conrad Hilton Hotel.
Four years later, Claude Holman, the committeeman Clements served under, had a problem. He had to find a replacement for state Rep. Cecil Partee, who had moved out of the ward and the legislative district. Holman seemed to have sensed that Clements’ decades of faithful service would make her acceptable to all factions of the ward organization. So he told the press:
“The Fourth Ward is proud that it will send to the General Assembly the first Negro woman in the history of the state of Illinois.”
Clements was taken by surprise. “I never thought for a moment I’d get to the state Legislature,” she told the Defender. “I’ll have to feel my way along.”
Shortly after being sworn in, she took part in a panel discussion on the “Political Power of Women” alongside Daley at the Sheraton Hotel in Chicago. In Springfield, she joined eight white female legislators and was particularly interested in a state law on fair employment practices, the Tribune reported.
Yet she didn’t run for reelection. Nor did she call attention to herself as a hero who helped spark an equal rights revolution in the decades after. 1971 saw the first Black woman, Anna R. Langford, elected alderman in Chicago. In 1980, Joyce Tucker became the first Black woman to join the governor’s Cabinet. Today, Rep. Sonya Harper chairs the Illinois legislature’s Black Caucus. The mayor of Chicago, the Cook County Board president and the Cook County state’s attorney are all African American women.
After leaving office, Clements faded from public view. When she died in 1973, the Tribune didn’t note her passing, despite her trailblazing. The Defender’s remembrance was relatively brief.
Perhaps the dearth in post-mortem acknowledgment wouldn’t have bothered Clements. She had the laconic vocabulary of an old pro. She’d proudly proclaim that the Republicans never won her precinct, but when asked about her own election, she pointedly declined to claim it as a personal achievement. Upon her 1958 victory, the Moline, Illinois, Dispatch reported:
“Mrs. Clements said she was drafted for the post” and “has no particular political ambitions.”