Funeral services for Libby Clark, a trailblazing Black female journalist, food and religion writer for the Los Angeles Sentinel for 50 years and editor of the “Black Family Reunion Cookbook” were held Jan. 30 in Los Angeles. She was 94.
Services were held for her at the Chapel of Roses at the Simpson Funeral Home in Inglewood, Calif., where she died of Alzheimer’s disease.
A native of Chester, Pa., she was a graduate of Columbia University where she was one of four Black journalism students. She was the first Black woman to write for the Chester Times and later worked for the Pittsburgh Courier’s west coast bureau.
A syndicated food writer whose work appeared in 150 papers, she came to Los Angeles in 1949 with a journalism degree from Columbia but was repeatedly rejected in attempts to land a reporting job with the Los Angeles Times and was turned away from attending an event at the then-segregated Los Angeles Press Club.
Following rejection from the mainstream press, she turned to public relations, becoming the first African American to be licensed in the state of California to own a public relations firm.
She joined the Sentinel, where she wrote about food and religion for 50 years. She co-wrote and edited the “Black Family Reunion Cookbook,” which was commissioned by the National Council of Negro Women. More than 250,000 copies of the book were bought and it was included on best-seller lists in 1991.
In 1969 Clark became the first African-American public information officer hired by the county of Los Angeles to serve as such for the new Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital.