Clay Smothers
Texas state legislator and educator
Claiborne Washington "Clay" Smothers (April 1, 1935 – June 11, 2004) was an American politician and commentator. He was a member of the Texas House of Representatives from District 33-G in Dallas County from 1977 to 1981. Elected as a Conservative Democrat, Smothers switched to the Republican on December 17, 1979, near the end of the first year of the administration of Bill Clements, the first Republican governor of Texas since Reconstruction.
Smothers had been a Republican in 1970, when he unsuccessfully ran in District 12 for the Texas House; he was defeated by the Democrat Sam Coats. In that same election, George Herbert Walker Bush lost the U.S. Senate race to Democrat Lloyd Bentsen, and Republican gubernatorial nominee Paul Eggers failed to unseat Preston Smith in their second consecutive match.
Background
Smothers was the fourth of five children born and reared in Malakoff in Henderson County in East Texas, where his parents, James William Smothers (1896–1975) and Alice Olenza Wingfield (1899–2000), ran the St. Paul Industrial Training School, the only African-American orphanage and school in Texas that operated without federal funds. The institution housed many homeless youth over the years. It remains operational.
Smothers graduated from the historically black Prairie View A&M University in Waller County, Texas.
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This entry incorporates text from “Clay Smothers” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.