Cianon Jones sat under a gray sky next to a hillside grave in Muscatine, Iowa. The second-year student in the Iowa Playwrights Workshop had spent considerable time researching the man whose name was on the tombstone.

But, she says, this trip may have been the most important step in her work to bring Alexander Clark’s life to the stage.

“I needed to go and be in these places he was,” Jones says of visiting Clark’s gravesite, home, and where his church used to be. “It reminded me that this person is still here, in a physical sense to some degree, but also with all the work he did. It’s still here and still impacting our lives.”

An early leader in the fight for equal rights in Iowa, Clark is best known for successfully suing to desegregate Iowa schools in 1868, 86 years before the United States Supreme Court’s decision of Brown v. Board of Education.

But the longtime Muscatine resident also helped recruit Black soldiers during the Civil War, successfully fought for the right of Black men to vote after the war, and was politically active at the local, state, and national level. After his son, Alexander Clark Jr., became the first Black person to earn a law degree at the University of Iowa in 1879, Clark earned his own law degree from the university in 1884. Clark died in 1891 as he was serving as the U.S. minister to Liberia.

But even in Iowa, Clark isn’t all that well known. Melanie Alexander would like to help change that, with an assist from the talent found at the “Writing University.”

“There are some people who can say, ‘Oh, Alexander Clark is the one who fought for the right for his daughter to attend school,’” says Alexander, director of the Muscatine Art Center. “But there is so much more to his story. We wanted to find a creative way to make this bit of Muscatine history, Iowa history, and national history more accessible — especially to young people.”

The Muscatine Art Center partnered with Global Education at the Stanley Center and UI Arts Share to commission Jones to write a play about their famous resident from the 1800s. On Feb. 20, 2025, eight UI students performed a staged reading of the play during the afternoon for Muscatine high school students and in the evening for community members.

The project grew out of a partnership with Arts Share in which UI students with the Darwin Turner Action Theatre traveled to Muscatine the past two years to perform for Muscatine sixth-graders. Those performances included monologues, poetry, music, and dance that spoke to Black culture and the Black experience.

“We were blown away by the talent of the university students,” Alexander says. “It was also an amazing experience for these younger students to see young men and women not much older than them perform and then get to ask them about how they got to where they are and talk about the emotions that were evoked through the performance.”

Jones was one of the students who performed with the Darwin Turner Action Theatre in 2024 — and it’s where she first heard of Alexander Clark.

The playwright grew up outside of Nashville, Tennessee. Her father is a poet and visual artist, so she was raised around writing. Jones, however, started out pursuing acting. Halfway through her undergraduate education, she decided to commit to playwriting.

“It’s my main go-to artistic expression,” Jones says. “I still love acting, and I still act from time to time, but I just find so much joy in playwriting.”

A mentor suggested she go to graduate school. She applied to a few schools, but she says the Iowa Playwrights Workshop felt right.

“This has been a really necessary time,” Jones says. “I’ve started to feel the growth that I’ve made in my time here. Especially recently with this project, I’ve learned so much, as well as some new plays that I’m developing in the next coming months.”

Jones says her research into Alexander Clark began with reading any articles and documentation she could get her hands on, as well as supplemental historical materials that discussed what was going on in the state at that time.

“It was all helpful, but also overwhelming,” Jones says. “I didn’t want people watching this play to feel like they were reading a history book. I had to seek out something that made him feel human.”

That’s when she traveled to Muscatine to visit locations associated with Clark. Soon after, she was able to see the story rising out of everything she learned.

That’s when she developed the character Barberman — and found the title of her play. Clark was a barber early in his life, and the character acts as a narrator through whose perspective the audience experiences moments from Clark’s life.

Isaiah Mark Owens, who plays Barberman, says he thinks of his character as Hermes, the messenger of the gods and a mediator between the living and the dead. The first-year MFA student in acting from Tennessee learned about the project while working on the play Dutchman, which was directed by graduate student Josh Turner, who is an Arts Share assistant and also directed the staged reading of Barberman: The Alexander Clark Story.

Owens says he was thrilled to have the chance to work with Jones — “Any opportunity to read for Cianon is an opportunity that is blessed” — and to leave his mark on a new work.

“It feels as if we leave a little bit of ourselves in the work,” Owens says. “I like that with this process we can find our own identities and allow some of that to process into the work and to flow into it.”

Preston Coleman, a first-year MFA student in acting from Baltimore, has a passion for history and happened to learn a little about Alexander Clark while reading about Black history in Iowa before coming to campus.

In Barberman, Coleman plays Jim White, a Black man whom Clark helped keep from being returned to Missouri, a slave state.

“He illustrates the real stakes at play, that this is life or death,” Coleman says. “I love history, especially if it’s unspoken or never heard of. While this play can get very political, it also goes into the lives of each person. They all have their own perspective of what’s going on and how they’re affected by it, all the way down to the youngest character, Susie. Even though it’s very factual, the story comes alive through these characters.”