Cary Clack Shares Wit and Wisdom One Column at a Time

Sometimes mother knows best.

When Cary Clack first came to San Antonio College, he was not in a good mood. A few weeks earlier, he had set out to attend Ranger Junior College on a football scholarship. However, after a few days in Ranger, he knew it wasn’t the place for him.

He returned to San Antonio and, once back home, his mother told him that he needed to go to school. She took him to SAC herself to enroll.

“It was just a bad day,” he remembered. “I was frustrated about a lot of stuff. At one point, we were in the administration building to register and something happened and I said, ‘I’m leaving.’”

 “I was about to walk out the door and my mom put her arm out, grabbed me by the shoulder and pulled me back to register me,” he said, adding, “I’m glad she did.”

From SAC, Clack would eventually become a long-time and highly regarded columnist for the San Antonio Express-News, a popular voice that has entertained, enlightened, and sometimes enraged readers in the San Antonio community.

He would also be recognized as an Outstanding Former Student at SAC and receive an honorary degree in 2011.

He wasn’t at SAC long when he went downtown with his mother and grandmother to see the Rev. Jesse Jackson speak at a convention.

“Something about hearing Jesse Jackson speak lit a fire under me,” he said.

The next day he went to his classes and started to do a deep dive into the topics Jackson talked about, including politics, international affairs, nonviolence, and morality.

“I remember going to the SAC library and just looking for books to read. I began a love affair with the SAC library,” he said

He was also impressed by a sociology class he took. The professor approached the subject in a way that helped students connect the dots with what was happening in their lives.

After leaving SAC, Clack transferred to the University of Houston, where he majored in political science. However, finding the university and classrooms too big, he enrolled at St. Mary’s University back in San Antonio, where he graduated with a bachelor’s in political science.

A year before he finished at St. Mary’s, Clack was selected as a scholar-intern at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, Georgia. It was an experience that would influence him both professionally and personally for the rest of his life.

“I was beginning to see myself as a writer,” he said. They placed me with Coretta Scott King’s speechwriters, so I wrote some CNN commentaries for Mrs. King. And it was that experience which made me, for the first time, begin to think about maybe writing as a career.”

After graduating from St. Mary’s, Clack learned an important lesson that many successful and prolific writers learn during their career – dealing with rejection.

He submitted his resume and a few articles published by a local Black newspaper to different publications without any success. He was able to get a few op-ed pieces published in the local papers, but nothing consistent. For several years, Clack worked as a substitute teacher, a community organizer, or didn’t work at all.

Things began to change when he met Maury Maverick Jr., a legendary lawyer, politician and newspaper columnist. The two began a friendship and Maverick became a mentor for Clack. In 1994, Maverick helped Clack land a job as a reporter and columnist for the San Antonio Express-News. It was an unusual job since reporters are supposed to be objective and not write about their opinions.

Eventually Clack became a full-time columnist writing essays three times a week for the paper.

Clack left the newspaper in 2011 to become the communications director for Joaquin Castro, a state representative running for Congress. He stayed with Castro after he went to Washington and later joined the staff of Ivy Taylor, the mayor of San Antonio from 2014 to 2017.

In October 2019, after being away from the Express-News for eight years, Clack received an email announcing the newspaper had an opening for an editorial page writer and columnist. He returned to his former job in December 2019.

By his count, Clack has written about 5,000 columns in his career, dealing with topics close to his heart and to his hometown. He is the author of two books, Clowns and Rats Scare Me, a collection of columns from his first stint at the Express-News, and More Finish Lines to Cross: Notes on Race, Redemption and Hope, which includes columns from when he returned to the newspaper and resumed being a columnist.

He is also the editor of Deep in the Soul of Texas, an anthology of African American Texas writers, which will be released this summer.

When asked why he thinks readers respond to his columns, Clack says he believes it’s because he is from here.

“I do think there is a certain pride that people take that I am from San Antonio,” he said.

He also believes that people like what he writes about.

“I think it’s the subject matter. I might write about controversial issues – I definitely have  my opinions,” he said. “I’m going to write about them in a way that I want to try to understand the other side. I’m not going to demonize people.”

“I use a lot of humor,” he added. “I think I have a pretty good ability of going back and forth between being serious and being funny. I do try to find the good in people. I do try to find the good in this world.”

–SAC–