Joe Clark, principal who inspired ‘Lean on Me,’ dies at 83
Educator’s methods of discipline made him center of debate
Joe Clark, the bullhornbearing New Jersey principal who gained national celebrity in the 1980s with his efforts to impose order on his high school, a story that inspired the 1989 film “Lean on Me” and made him a lightning rod in an enduring debate over education in America, died Dec. 29 at his home in Newberry, Florida.
A self-described “poor black welfare boy from Newark,” Clark grew up in poverty and often found refuge, as well as heat on cold winter days, in the public library. In that place, his daughter said, he discerned the power of education to improve his life, as well as those of others.
After a turn as a drill sergeant in the Army Reserve, he began his career in New Jersey’s Passaic County, where he worked first as an elementary school teacher. From 1982 to 1989, when he presided over Eastside High in Paterson, Clark was arguably the country’s most famous principal — the subject of glowing praise from admirers who saw him as a savior of foundering youths, and withering criticism for tactics his detractors regarded as draconian and even cruel.
Bedecked in a three-piece suit and gripping a baseball bat in his hands, he struck the stance of a martinet for a portrait that ran on the cover of Time magazine in 1988. Seemingly omnipresent on television and the lecture circuit, he trumpeted his campaign to expel scores of troublemaking students he decried as “leeches, miscreants and parasites” to make his school more hospitable for those who wished to study.
“My job as principal was to make sure the environment of the school was conducive to learning,” he once said in a speech. “I was everywhere, in the halls, in the bathrooms. I do not fear anything. I walk down the street and even the dogs fear me. I am not going to permit a handful of individuals to disrupt the tranquility, the serenity of an educational institution.”
Declaring himself “conservative in about everything I do,” he won accolades from the Reagan administration for his efforts to right the course of his school. On one occasion, he padlocked the doors during the school day in violation of fire codes, in what news accounts described as an effort to keep drug dealers out of the building.
Such actions provided plentiful material for the filmmakers who brought his story to the screen in director John Avildsen’s “Lean on Me.” Clark was portrayed by Morgan Freeman.
The film grossed $16 million in its first two weeks, and brought even greater attention to Clark, despite its depiction of a miraculous academic turnaround that was not entirely accurate.
The film’s release coincided with Clark’s departure from Eastside: In 1989, he was suspended after dancers wearing sequined bikinis and G-strings were permitted to perform at a school assembly celebrating the film’s release.
In a memo, Paterson city officials described him as a “loose cannon” whose tenure as principal at Eastside “cost the city of Paterson . . . more than it has achieved.” Clark, who was not present at the assembly but had approved the program, stepped down soon after following heart surgery.
He conceded he had “not been able to get my test scores up as high as I would like.” But he did manage, he said, “to bring about discipline and order and an environment that’s conducive to learning.”
Joe Louis Clark, named after the heavyweight champion, was born in Rochelle, Georgia, on May 8, 1937, his daughter said. When he was 6, his family moved to New Jersey, where he received a bachelor’s degree from what is now William Paterson University and a master’s degree from Seton Hall University.