Joseph Samuel Clark (June 7, 1871 – November 3, 1944) was an academic administrator and college president who spent most of his career in Louisiana.
During the years from 1914 to 1938 he led the development of Southern, designated as a land grant college in 1890 and moved to the Baton Rouge area in 1914.
In 1931 he declined an offer of the ambassadorship to Liberia by Republican President Herbert Hoover, as he was devoted to his mission of developing Southern University.
In this role, he supervised the relocation in 1914 and development of the school in the small farming community of Scotlandville in East Baton Rouge Parish, where the state had bought more than 500 acres of land.
[3] In 1931 Republican US president Herbert Hoover offered Clark the post of United States Ambassador to Liberia.
They had one son, Felton Grandison Clark, who also had a career in education and succeeded his father as president of Southern University in 1938.