Trailblazing Black Tri-Cities educator and MLK award winner has died

A longtime, admired Pasco teacher and principal and winner of the Martin Luther King Jr. Spirit Award has died.

Clarence Alford Jr. died Sunday. He was 81.

Alford, who retired from Pasco schools in 1999, said he was a student of his students since he first arrived in Pasco in 1968 from California, where he’d been the first male teacher at an all-girl Catholic high school.

Alford expected to tackle racial tensions when he reported to Pasco High School to teach math and science, but Pasco wasn’t such a cultural medley in those days, he told the Herald in 2002 when he was honored with the MLK award.

He’d been specifically recruited by the Pasco superintendent to diversify the teaching staff, which “until the late 1960s was almost exclusively white,” said Echoes of Exclusion and Resistance, a book in the Hanford Histories series.

His classrooms, he said, were largely homogenous then. A few years later, when he had a chance to start the math and science program at the alternative school that would become New Horizons High School, Alford jumped.

Again, Alford walked into a new setting and found little resemblance to what he’d expected. He envisioned orderly classes inhabited by engaged students. In reality, his students hid under desks and chatted away, paying scant attention to his efforts to teach basic math.

“It forced me to seriously take a look at a group of kids who were not necessarily as excited about the subject as I was,” he told the Herald at the time.

Tactics such as bringing in a pile of dirt and measuring it into various containers caught their attention – and brought about a lesson on measuring and volume.

“For the first time in my life I realized before you teach a concept, you have to convince students it’s something they care about,” he said.

Alford’s alternative classrooms were filled with students from a variety of racial backgrounds, and before long, he was the teacher they turned to, calling at all times of the day or night.

He fetched kids from jail when they’d been arrested and accompanied them to court. He got to know them and their parents.

After five years of workdays with no beginning and no end, Alford said his wife put her foot down. He tried to resign, but ended up taking an administrative-level job that put him in the middle of efforts to better integrate Pasco schools. That meant busing.

Alford remembers the sessions around a giant map of the district where officials tried to find ways to balance elementary school boundaries. Pins the colors of student’s skin – black, brown and white – showed where they lived. Alford and his crew figured out how to mix them, and he was proud of the results.

Before busing and integration, students from different ethnic backgrounds didn’t encounter each other until high school. Integration put them together in elementary school.

“The payoff started when the kids in the elementary schools started to know each other,” he said at the time.

Alford went to Stevens in 1981, became principal in 1992 and remained there until his retirement.

But schools weren’t the only place Alford spent his energy.

He was one of the original organizers of Afro-Americans for an Academic Society, which has been honoring black Tri-City youth for earning good grades for decades.

He was born in Ringgold, La., but lived in the Tri-Cities for 58 years.

Alford and his wife, Patricia, had three children. Mueller’s Greenlee Funeral Home, Pasco, is handling his services.