CLAYTON, Eva M.

CLAYTON, Eva M., A Representative from North Carolina; born in Savannah, Chatham County, Ga., September 16, 1934; B.S., Johnson C. Smith University, Charlotte, N.C., 1955; M.S., North Carolina Central University, Durham, N.C., 1962; director, University of North Carolina Health Manpower Development Programs; assistant secretary for community development, North Carolina Department of Natural Resources and Community Development, 1977-1981; unsuccessful candidate for nomination to the Ninety-first Congress in 1968; chair of the Warren County, N.C., board of commissioners, 1982-1992; elected as a Democrat to the One Hundred Second Congress, by special election, to fill the vacancy caused by the death of United States Representative Walter B. Jones, and reelected to the four succeeding Congresses (November 3, 1992-January 3, 2003); not a candidate for reelection to the One Hundred Eighth Congress in 2002.

View Record in the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress

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In 1992, Eva M. Clayton won election to the U.S. House of Representatives to become the first African-American woman to represent North Carolina in Congress and the state’s first Black Representative since 1901. From her post on the House Agriculture Committee, Clayton advanced the interests of her rural district in northeastern North Carolina and called attention to the economic inequalities that affected African Americans nationally. Years after leaving the House, Clayton reflected on why she entered public service. Politics, she explained, contained “the possibility that I could help, that I could serve, I could make a difference.”¹

Eva Clayton was born Eva McPherson in Savannah, Georgia, on September 16, 1934. She grew up in North Carolina and received a bachelor’s degree in biology from Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1955. In 1962, she earned a master’s degree in biology and general science from North Carolina Central University in Durham. She planned to become a doctor and travel to Africa to do missionary work. Shortly after receiving her undergraduate degree, Eva McPherson married Theaoseus T. Clayton, who became a prominent lawyer. They had four children—Theaoseus Jr., Martin, Reuben, and Joanne— and while raising her family, Clayton turned her attention away from medicine and enrolled in law school, first at North Carolina Central University and then at University of North Carolina. Having to shoulder the responsibilities of both home life and classwork, however, Clayton reluctantly withdrew from law school after the birth of her fourth child. “I wasn’t super enough to be a supermom,” Clayton recalled years later. “I left to be a mom. My husband was supportive, but I felt enormously guilty. I think I would do it differently now. I think I would know how to demand more of my husband.”²

During the 1960s, the civil rights movement motivated Clayton to become active in civic and political affairs. At one point, she picketed her husband’s law office to protest his and his White law partner’s ownership of a building that contained a segregated restaurant. In 1968, Eva Clayton was recruited by civil rights activist Vernon Jordan, head of the Voter Education Project, to run for Congress in a north-central North Carolina district. Clayton won 31 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary, but the incumbent, Lawrence H. Fountain, prevailed. “In 1968, the timing wasn’t there,” she later observed. Despite her loss, Clayton’s campaign had mobilized volunteers and built a “kind of community organization” that successfully increased Black voter registration and participation.³

In the early 1970s, Clayton worked for several public and private ventures, including the North Carolina health manpower development program at the University of North Carolina. At the time, Clayton and her husband were involved with Soul City, a planned community in rural North Carolina created by lawyer and civil rights activist Floyd McKissick with the intention of being “black owned and operated.” In 1974, Clayton cofounded and served as the executive director of Soul City Foundation, a nonprofit funded mostly through the grants provided by the federal government to offer meal programs, health fairs, and other opportunities to Soul City and the surrounding area. Two years later, she worked on the successful gubernatorial campaign of Jim Hunt, who later appointed Clayton the assistant secretary of the North Carolina department of natural resources and community development. Clayton served as assistant secretary from 1977 until 1981 and developed “a feel for the interrelationship between state and federal government.” After leaving state government, she founded an economic development consulting firm. In 1982, she won election to the Warren County board of commissioners, which she chaired until 1990. Over the next decade, Clayton helped steer more than $550 million in investments into the county and successfully passed a bond issue for the construction of new schools.⁴

When Representative Walter Beaman Jones Sr. announced his retirement in 1992, Clayton entered the Democratic primary to fill his seat. In contrast with her 1968 campaign, Clayton faced a more favorable electorate and had developed a wealth of experience in state politics and local economic development. Recently redrawn by the state legislature, North Carolina’s First District was one of two new districts in the state with a Black majority. On the campaign trail, Clayton emphasized her career accomplishments and long-standing relationship with district residents. “I have a record, and I’ve demonstrated to you I care. . . . I care about rural areas. I care about poverty. I care about you.”⁵

After Jones died in September 1992, his son Walter Beaman Jones Jr., who was considered the favorite in the Democratic primary, captured 38 percent to Clayton’s 31 percent. But because he fell two points shy of winning the nomination outright, the race moved to a runoff. Clayton consolidated the support of her other primary opponents and won the nomination with 55 percent to Jones’s 45 percent. In the general election, Clayton ran on a platform of increased public investment and job training for rural areas in the district, which covered a large swath of eastern North Carolina including the towns of Goldsboro, Rocky Mount, and Greenville. She advocated slashing the defense budget to lower the federal deficit. “We went into the projects and knocked on doors and got people out” to vote, Clayton recalled.⁶

On November 3, 1992, she won the special election to fill the last two months of Walter Jones Sr.’s unexpired term in the 102nd Congress (1991–1993) and defeated Republican Ted Tyler for a full term in the 103rd Congress (1993–1995). Although Melvin L. Watt, another Black candidate running in North Carolina that year, also won on November 3, Clayton’s simultaneous election to the 102nd Congress meant that she became the first African-American Representative from North Carolina since George Henry White in 1901. Clayton defeated Tyler in her next three re-elections, taking 60 percent or more of the vote. In 1998, the third time she faced Tyler, state courts had redrawn the district by adding 165,000 new constituents and shrinking the African-American majority by 7 percent, effectively dividing the district between Black and White constituents. In 2000, the GOP ran Duane E. Kratzer Jr., who managed just 33 percent of the vote to Clayton’s 66 percent.⁷

Clayton claimed her seat in the 102nd Congress on November 5, 1992, but she did not receive committee assignments until the 103rd Congress convened in January 1993. She won spots on the Agriculture and Small Business Committees. Clayton eventually became the ranking Democrat on the Agriculture Committee’s Operations, Oversight, Nutrition, and Forestry Subcommittee. Clayton also became the first Democratic woman to serve as president of her class of freshman lawmakers. In 1995, she was appointed to the Democratic Advisory Committee to formulate party strategy. In the 105th Congress (1997– 1999) she dropped her Small Business assignment for a seat on the prestigious Budget Committee. Clayton was also assigned to the Social Security Task Force.

Clayton was a staunch defender of the rural and agricultural interests of her district, which comprised 20 counties with numerous peanut and tobacco growers. Along with Missouri Republican Jo Ann Emerson, she revived the Rural Caucus and rallied more than 100 Members to pledge continued federal aid to farmers, new rural jobs, and technology initiatives. In 1993 and 2000, respectively, Clayton voted against the North American Free Trade Agreement and Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China, insisting that both would adversely affect the agricultural industry and eliminate low-wage jobs from her district. “Must eastern North Carolina lose in order for the Research Triangle to win?” she asked, alluding to the state’s booming high-tech corridor to the west of her district. Although Clayton advocated smaller defense budgets, she remained supportive of naval contracts for projects at the nearby Newport News shipyards, which employed her constituents.⁸

From her seat on the Agriculture Committee, Clayton, unlike many of her Democratic colleagues, supported extending tobacco subsidies to farmers at a time when critics sought to cut back the program. “This is not about smoking,” Clayton said. “This is about discriminating against the poorest of the poor of that industry. . . . They really are attacking the small farmer.” She also fought successfully to preserve Section 515 of the U.S. Agriculture Department’s affordable housing program, which provided federal loans for multi-unit housing projects in rural areas.⁹

Clayton addressed food security and hunger as a member of the Agriculture Committee. She defended funding for food stamps and successfully fought to make documented immigrants eligible for the program. She traced her advocacy for food security to her mother. “Because of my age and also the segregation, we didn’t have a lunchroom [at school]. …But my mother became the president of the PTA, and she was insistent that there be a lunchroom. They made a lunchroom out of almost a school closet where they kept books, and she and one other person, they would rotate. Finally, the school began giving oranges and fruit, and that was the beginning of a lunchroom.”¹⁰

In 1999, Clayton’s district suffered a major natural disaster when rain from Hurricane Floyd caused rivers to swell, flooding some parts of eastern North Carolina under 14 feet of water. Clayton and other Members of the state delegation secured billions in relief aid. Clayton helped obtain $1.5 million in federal money to reconstruct a dike along the Tar River in Princeville, one of the nation’s first towns chartered by free African Americans after the Civil War. She also joined a volunteer force of more than 500 people to help flood victims throughout eastern North Carolina.¹¹

As she gained seniority and power in the House, Clayton became a prominent advocate for programs to help poor and working-class African Americans. Throughout her career, she stressed the importance of job training. “The issue of equity in jobs and fairness of opportunities is paramount,” Clayton said. “Job opportunities combined with a fair wage are key to strengthening families and communities and increasing our quality of life.” As chair of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, a nonprofit associated with the Congressional Black Caucus, Clayton worked with mortgage lenders to establish the “With Ownership, Wealth” (WOW) program. The WOW program sought to help African American homebuyers through financial education programs and assistance in down payments and closing costs. Clayton’s goal for WOW was to “help bridge the huge racial divide in homeownership rates.” In 1996, she also played a key part in fighting GOP efforts to cut summer job programs for young people. Declaring that she intended “to wake up” the House, Clayton said that the programs helped more than 615,000 job seekers in 650 cities and towns. “This is the first opportunity many of these young people have to get a job.”¹²

In the mid-1990s, amid a push on Capitol Hill to reform the nation’s welfare system, Clayton urged lawmakers to keep individuals and families at the forefront of their work. “The family cannot be a footnote that is added at the end of this reform, but should be an integral part of this legislation in its infancy,” she told the Ways and Means Committee in 1994. As welfare legislation advanced in the House, Clayton advocated for a raise in the minimum wage and for federal funding to help prevent teenage pregnancy. When the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act came to the floor in the 104th Congress (1995–1997), Clayton voted against it. In 1994, Clayton supported the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act believing “it had more positive features to fight crime in our communities than had troubling provisions,” she explained. Even as the Congressional Black Caucus pulled its support and criticized the bill, saying it lacked protections against racial discrimination, Clayton remained in favor of it.¹³

In November 2001, Clayton declined to seek renomination to a sixth term in the House. She had been successful in intense negotiations with state legislators to ensure that her predominantly African-American district was “protected” during reapportionment after the 2000 Census. “My heart is leading me somewhere else,” Clayton said. “I don’t know exactly where that is, but I do want to have another opportunity for public service before I really hang it up.” In the fall 2002 elections, Clayton was succeeded by Frank W. Ballance Jr., a Black state legislator. After retiring in January 2003, Clayton became the assistant director-general of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, which focused on combatting global hunger from its headquarters in Rome, Italy. She remained in that position for three years before returning to her home in Littleton, North Carolina.¹⁴

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Johnson C. Smith University
Inez Moore Parker Archives, James B. Duke Memorial Library

Howard University
Moorland-Spingarn Research Center

University of North Carolina
Southern Historical Collection

Yale University Library
Divinity Library Special Collections

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Committee Name & Date	Congresses	Congresses
Agriculture [1820-Present] 16th Congress-Present	103rd (1993–1995) – 107th (2001–2003)	103rd (1993–1995) – 107th (2001–2003)
Small Business [1975-Present] 94th Congress-Present	103rd (1993–1995) – 104th (1995–1997)	103rd (1993–1995) – 104th (1995–1997)
Budget [1974-Present] 93rd Congress-Present	105th (1997–1999) – 107th (2001–2003)	105th (1997–1999) – 107th (2001–2003)

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