African American Businessmen- John C. Claybrook

John C. Claybrook was born in Florence, Alabama, in 1872. After running away from home at thirteen to find work in Memphis, he worked on riverboats and then a Mississippi plantation before moving to Crittenden County, Arkansas. There he began a logging and farming business. By the mid-1930s he owned a reported 3,500 acres of land. The town of Claybrook, southwest of West Memphis, was testimony to his success. It boasted a boarding house, farm store, sawmill, and baseball stadium. Claybrook’s baseball team, the Claybrook Tigers, was renowned throughout the Negro Leagues. In 1938, Claybrook became the first African American to sit on a jury in Crittenden County in fifty years. Two years later, he opened a logging business in Marianna, Arkansas. In ill health, he later moved to Memphis, where he died in 1951. I’m John Kirk of the UALR History Department and this has been an Arkansas moment.