Jim Clark

It's too bad I don't believe in Hell.

A fleshy-faced bear of a man who stood 6-foot-2 and weighed 220 pounds, Mr. Clark strode through the civil rights era wearing a lapel button emblazoned with a single word: “Never.” A billy club, pistol and cattle prod often dangled from his belt.

By the mid-1960s, Mr. Clark was considered one of the most controversial men in Alabama, if not the South. Staunch segregationists adored him. Blacks reviled him, and even many moderate segregationists were unsettled by the level of violence he regularly used. In 1965, as The New York Times reported, Mr. Clark was receiving 200 letters a day — pro and con. Because of repeated death threats against him, he moved with his wife and their five children to the Selma jail for safety.

“What they want,” Mr. Clark told The Times in 1965, speaking of civil rights demonstrators, “is black supremacy.”

Enshrined in the public memory for acts of brutality, Mr. Clark could be charming and even courtly in private, according to many news accounts of the period. But on civil rights, he remained steadfast till the end of his life. He told The Montgomery Advertiser last year, “Basically, I’d do the same thing today if I had to do it all over again.”