22 Facts About Clay Smothers

Claiborne Washington "Clay" Smothers was an American politician and commentator.

Clay Smothers was a member of the Texas House of Representatives from the former District 33-G in Dallas County who served from 1977 to 1981.

However, Clay Smothers was a Republican in 1970, when he had run unsuccessfully in District 12 for the Texas House; he was defeated by the Democrat Sam Coats.

Clay Smothers was the fourth of five children born and reared in Malakoff in Henderson County in East Texas, where his parents, James William Clay Smothers and the former Alice Olenza Wingfield, ran the St Paul Industrial Training School, the only African-American orphanage and school in Texas that operated without federal funds.

Clay Smothers and his wife, Barbara, lived for several years in Chicago, Illinois, where he was a teacher and special law-enforcement officer involved in the control of youth gangs.

Clay Smothers first worked in the St Paul orphanage but in the late 1960s moved to Dallas, where he operated a grocery store in the South Oak Cliff neighborhood.

Clay Smothers became news editor of the Dallas radio station KNOK-AM, from which he had to step down while running for office.

In 1972, Clay Smothers surfaced to national attention as an alternate delegate for then Governor George Wallace at the Democratic National Convention.

Clay Smothers warned the national Democrats meeting in Miami Beach, Florida, that Wallace, who had been the victim of an assassination attempt in Maryland several weeks earlier, held the allegiance of 20 million voters and had to be recognized.

Clay Smothers lost the runoff election for Dallas City Council Place 8 to Lucy Patterson in 1973.

Clay Smothers was elected to the first of his two terms in the Texas legislature in 1976, when Jimmy Carter became the thus far last Democrat to win the electoral votes of Texas.

In 1977, Clay Smothers was one of eight House members named to the select committee Child Pornography: Its Related Causes and Control.

Clay Smothers was vice chairman in that same session of the House Liquor Regulation Committee.

In 1977, Clay Smothers proposed without success a state constitutional amendment to double the length of House terms from two to four years.

In 1979, Clay Smothers opposed the bill to create Juneteenth as a Texas state holiday observing the end of slavery in the state.

Clay Smothers belittled the observance as mere "ceremoniously grinning and bursting watermelons on the Capitol grounds" and "a fraudulent holiday".

In 1978, Clay Smothers was awarded the American Patriots Medal by Freedoms Foundation of Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.

Clay Smothers was selected from several thousand nominees by a panel of thirty persons, one-third of whom were justices of state supreme courts.

Clay Smothers supported Jonas Savimbi of the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola in the Angolan Civil War in the middle 1970s and accused the Communist Cuban forces, which fought on the side of the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola government against Savimbi, of atrocities.

In 1980, Clay Smothers ran as a Republican on the Reagan-Bush ticket for the United States House of Representatives in Texas's 24th congressional district, but he lost to the Democratic incumbent Martin Frost.

Clay Smothers ran as an opponent of abortion and polled nearly 39 percent of the vote in the district, since reconfigured through redistricting.

Clay Smothers died in 2004 at the age of sixty-nine, and was buried at Lincoln Memorial Park in Dallas, TX.