“My life has been full of adventures but this sounded like the ace of them all.”

With a name like Elzada Urseba Clover, you’re either born to botanize or you're born for adventure -- and it turns out she was born to do both. Clover marked several firsts in her lifetime: She was the first recorded woman (with University of Michigan graduate student Lois Jotter) to run the Colorado River through the full length of the Grand Canyon. She was the first botanist to catalog the flora along the river in the Canyon. And she was the first woman to become a full professor in the University of Michigan Botany Department.

I happened upon Melissa Sevigny’s wonderful 2023 book, Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon, and to my surprise, I learned that both Clover and Jotter were from the University of Michigan. I’ve lived in Ann Arbor for four decades yet this was the first I’d ever heard of them. As with many stories of women in science, their pioneering work was largely overlooked in their time and was unrecognized for decades.

Clover was 42 at the time of her Grand Canyon expedition, the oldest member of a six-person crew. She was born in Auburn, Nebraska on September 12, 1897, and later moved with her family to the southwest where she became fascinated by the plants of the region, especially cacti. Before coming to Ann Arbor, she taught public school in rural Nebraska and was the principal of a school in Texas. Sevigny described her as “...a tall woman, active, robust, dramatic, daring, perhaps just a little bit wicked. She drank whiskey. She could swim, fish, hunt, and ride a horse. She preferred to describe her own code of behavior as ‘gentlemanly’ rather than ‘ladylike.’”

“Elzada isn’t wanted because she is a woman.”

Clover graduated from the Nebraska State Teachers College in 1930 and earned her Master of Science degree at the University of Michigan in 1932, followed by her PhD in 1935. Not long before the Grand Canyon trip, she’d been denied a faculty position at U-M. Her departmental appointment was no more permanent than instructor and her department chair Harley H. Bartlett confided in his diary that “Elzada isn’t wanted because she is a woman.” Yet Clover wasn’t the kind of person to give up easily. So when she set her sights on cataloging the plant life of the Grand Canyon -- one of the few frontiers left to botanize -- she was determined to do it. “It has never been explored botanically and for that reason everything collected will be of interest,” she wrote. Clover’s goal was to gather specimens and document changes in plant life through the various elevations along the route into the river’s side canyons. 

Since hiking and riding horseback weren’t viable options, she knew she would need to raft the river. However, the prevailing viewpoint in 1938 was that the Colorado River was far too dangerous for anyone, let alone a woman. It had killed plenty of men who’d tried to run it, and the last woman to attempt it, Bessie Hyde in 1928, had disappeared with her husband on their honeymoon. Their bodies were never found. Perhaps because of these serious risks, the University of Michigan refused to sponsor the expedition. Still, Clover applied for a $400 grant from the Rackham Graduate School (they gave her $300) and chose a partner in Norman Nevills, an entrepreneur river runner she’d met by chance the previous summer. Nevills was living along the San Juan River near the remote outpost of Mexican Hat, Utah, and was looking to boost his profile as a river guide for tourists. Clover would therefore get to do her botanizing, yet it would be a commercial, rather than a university-sponsored, expedition. And she -- along with each crew member -- would need to come up with $400 to fund it.

Clover and Neville struck a deal: He would build and guide the boats, help drum up publicity, and bring a couple of men to help -- LaPhene “Don” Harris, a 26-year-old river runner for the US Geological Survey, and 24-year-old Bill Gibson, an amateur photographer who would film the trip. In turn, Clover would bring two students she was mentoring - a woman, Lois Jotter, age 24, in part for propriety since it would simply not do to be the only woman on an otherwise all-male trip; and 25-year-old Eugene Atkinson, a taxidermist working on his PhD in paleobotany at U-M. (At Lee’s Ferry, roughly halfway through the trip, tensions between the crew threatened to upend the expedition and led to the replacement of Harris and Atkinson with 44-year-old Del Reed and 24-year-old Lorin Bell.)

“The best man of the bunch”

The Colorado River was wilder and more unpredictable in 1938 than today. At the time of their trip, it was a raging torrent flowing at 70,000 cubic feet per second, full of scouring silt that clung to the body and clothes. The crew would drink unfiltered water and eat mostly canned food, though Atkinson would also shoot geese and deer along the way. They would face scorching 100-degree heat, risk rattlesnake bites and other potential life-threatening accidents with no feasible means of rescue -- as well as face the looming specter of the great unknown. As Sevigny points out, this was a period when people suspected there might still be undiscovered species of flora and fauna - potential primordial monsters - hidden down corridors of the Canyon. Clover and Jotter decided to don overalls (they considered jeans too masculine) and would take face cream and apply makeup through much of the journey before finally giving it up. 

The story of the two adventurous women spread quickly across the country, with breathless predictions and sensationalized front-page coverage -- some of it misleading or cynical. Several accounts failed to mention the science, focusing instead on the danger of the river and suggesting Clover and Jotter were attention-seeking “school ma’ams” willing to risk the entire crew for their notoriety. A male river runner interviewed by the press even worried that a successful run by women might diminish his reputation. Over 100 newspapermen and gawkers saw the expedition cast off at Green River, and when they were late for a midpoint rendezvous at Lee’s Ferry, there was a media frenzy and a search by a Coast Guard plane. Even a commercial TWA flight out of Los Angeles rerouted its course to look for the river runners. 

Yet on the river, Clover would leave the outside world behind. In the smooth-water section during the early part of the voyage, she floated along playing her harmonica, and her journal of the expedition delights in the beauty of the moon rising over the canyon wall or the wonder of a rainbow after a terrific electrical storm. She would prove to be the most reliable crew member -- Nevills referred to her as “the best man of the bunch” -- keeping her cool even as personalities clashed and tension built as they made their way deeper into the gorge and the more treacherous rapids known as the graveyard of the Colorado River. But despite Clover’s role as the scientific leader of the expedition, traditional sexism persisted: A typical 24-hour cycle saw her and Jotter setting up camp at night, waking up early the next day to gather and press their plant specimens -- all before the men were up and the journey continued. And it was just understood the women would do all the cooking. “The men depend on Lois and me for so many little things. Mirrors, combs, finding shirts, first aid, etc. Just as men always have since Adam,” Clover wrote.

The 43-day trip, lasting from June 20 through July 29 and covering over 600 miles, was a scientific success: Clover and Jotter mapped five different plant zones and were responsible for four first-discovered species (the Grand Canyon claret cup, the fishhook cactus, the strawberry hedgehog cactus, and beavertail prickly pear). Their survey is the only comprehensive one of the Colorado River’s riparian species before the building of Glen Canyon Dam. Nevertheless, Clover fretted over the quality of the specimens, as well as a plant press that went missing temporarily with over a third of the specimens gathered (it was found later that year and mailed to Ann Arbor). In a phone interview with Sevigny, she notes, “[Clover and Jotter] had some scientific complaints about the quality of the work they did. And I think that may have unintentionally contributed to this perception that their work wasn’t important. That [impression] lingered for decades. But this was absolutely untrue. They cataloged 400 species of plants. That’s half of all the plants we know along the river corridor today.”

“I’m so lonely for it now I can hardly stand it.” 

When the trip ended, Clover fell into a melancholy funk. She missed her companions, retreating to her motel room to watch the films, dreaming of further adventures. And she missed the river adventure fiercely, noting in her diary, “I’m so lonely for it now I can hardly stand it.” Almost immediately, she joined Nevills for another excursion, this time down the San Juan River, and she would continue her travels in the following years, surveying the region’s flora on foot and horseback while also making excursions to Texas and Guatemala. Regarding Clover’s wanderlust, Sevigny notes, “I think she belonged out in wild places and that’s where she was happiest.”

Despite the trip’s success -- and perhaps because of its notoriety -- Clover’s work prospects didn’t immediately improve upon returning to Ann Arbor. Sevigny continues: “I think the sensational nature of the publicity did quite a lot of damage to Elzada’s career. She wanted any publicity to be very dignified and very focused on the scientific work.” Clover gave lectures and showed her films to several groups -- women’s clubs, schools, and church groups -- and in 1944, she and Jotter finally completed their species list and published it in the American Midland Naturalist, an influential paper on Southwest plants. Some of their specimens were also given to the Smithsonian’s National Herbarium. 

But there was a notable lack of recognition for Clover’s pioneering work at the University of Michigan, and both she and Jotter were somewhat disinclined to discuss their trip with either family or friends. “I think they were proud of what they did,” said Sevigny. “But I think it wasn’t in Elzada’s personality to go around and crow about it. There were little things like, for example, she didn’t insist on being called Dr. Clover in the press. I think their honesty about the scientific challenges they faced and their reluctance to speak publicly about what they had accomplished might have contributed to people not knowing what an extraordinary thing they had done.” As to their being the first known women to successfully take a boat down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, Sevigny points out that Clover was always careful to say she and Jotter were the first non-indigenous women to boat the Canyon. She was respectful of and interested in the indigenous cultures that preceded her in the places she visited, including the Havasupai and Navajo peoples. 

To Clover’s great frustration - one that followed her all her life - national wire stories would depreciate her and Jotter's scientific achievements and continue to focus on their gender and age. A former river runner described Clover as a “middle-aged woman who has lost her way in life” and a 1946 Saturday Evening Post article described Clover as a spinster looking for a last adventure. “The story depressed and infuriated Clover,” Sevigny writes. “Her work as a respected university professor had been reduced to bedtime stories for children, and instead of an accomplished scientist and explorer, she was depicted as an aging spinster with a life empty of meaning.” 

“Everything is so big and timeless there it makes so many worries and things here seem so petty.”

Yet Clover would funnel her passion into further botany, travel -- and teaching, eventually rising through the ranks at the University of Michigan. She became a curator at the University’s botanical gardens in 1957 (as well as the first U-M instructor to teach a class there) and she became the first woman in the U-M Botany department to earn a full professorship, serving from 1960-1967. By all accounts, she was excellent at her job. One of Clover’s former students, Jane Myers, penned an eloquent tribute to her in the Ann Arbor News when Clover died, and she recalled Clover’s infectious passion for plants and her memorable teaching style: “She was somebody with such intense interest in all things botanical that you did not want to disappoint her. She was not tough on her students—just always intense. Very quietly.” Clover also held small gatherings of students at her upstairs apartment at 1522 Hill Street.

Myers further notes: “In my class out at the greenhouses of the Botanical Gardens in their old 1950s setting, Dr. Clover had us make wire balls with soil in the middle into which we stuck many African violet plants. My mother loved it! There was nothing academic about it; it was just an imaginative use of plants. I think she was ahead of any educational trend by years. She wanted us to enjoy plants as much as she did.” During a book talk at the U-M Biological Station in Pellston, Michigan, where Clover frequently taught, Sevigny met two other former students of Clover’s, and their recollections echo Myers: “Her whole life was about plants. They both said that it changed their lives to absorb some of that passion for the natural world.”

After retiring from the University of Michigan in 1967, Clover moved to San Juan, Texas. On November 2, 1980, she died in McAllen, Texas, close to the Mexico border. Despite all the obstacles she faced, Elzada Clover dared to undertake both an epic adventure and a career path that up to that point had been exclusively the domain of men. “Before them, men had gone down the Colorado to sketch dams, plot railroads, dig gold, and daydream little Swiss chalets stuck up on the cliffs,” writes Sevigny. “They saw the river for what it could be, harnessed for human use. Clover and Jotter saw it as it was, a living system made up of flower, leaf, and thorn, lovely in its fierceness, worthy of study for its own sake.”

The same can be said of Elzada Clover herself. Her legacy is the cacti and succulent room at the University’s Matthaei Botanical Gardens, which was seeded by her southwest collections, and her over 300 specimens in the University of Michigan Herbarium.

“Lockard the teacher, the mentor and a griot…[Griot—a member of a class of traveling poets, musicians, (artists) and storytellers who maintain a tradition of oral history in parts of West Africa.]" – Dr. Ed Jackson Jr.

Known for his portraits, murals, and his inspirational teaching style, Jon Onye Lockard was a prolific artist, educator, and mentor. He made countless contributions not just in Ann Arbor, but around the globe. Jon is remembered for his unwavering devotion to teaching and promoting the artistic representation of Blackness, rebutting centuries of racist imagery, with a steadfast commitment to social justice and to the broader civil rights movement: 

“Painting throughout his life different depictions of Blackness in its myriad of possibilities brought him great joy … He wanted the world to see how beautiful Blackness was, because growing up at a time when that was not emphasized impacted him to want things to change and be better.” - Elizabeth James, former student and current staff in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies [D’AAS]

Today, murals seem almost commonplace. They are found all around town created by a range of artists, executed in many styles. This was not always the case, and in 1982, former student, artist, and professor Mike Mosher wrote: “the majority of murals in schools, institutions and on the street in the Ann Arbor area, when not directly involving Lockard, are the work of students who’ve passed through his classes and influence.” Though many of these early student murals are no longer here, many of his works remain around town. 

“Working in murals demands a sense of consciousness, a sense of the rhythms happening in the community, the country, or the world.” — Jon Onye Lockard

Locally, Lockard’s murals can be found at University of Michigan’s residence halls and multicultural lounges in South and West Quad. Numerous paintings and a mural honoring legendary Washtenaw Community College [WCC] faculty member Dr. Morris Lawrence Jr. are on WCC’s campus. Nearby universities and museums proudly present his works, such as his renowned mural ‘Continuum' at Wayne State University’s Manoogian Center. His work is collected internationally and can be found in public and private collections.

The Early Years of John Melvin Lockard

“One must know where you came from to know where you are going” – Jon Lockard

Jon Onye Lockard was born as John Melvin Lockard January 25, 1932 in Detroit to Cecil E. Lockard and Lillian Jones. He was the middle child, with an older brother named Cecil E. Lockard, after their father. Cecil Jr. would also become an influential figure in Ann Arbor, working as a photographer for the Ann Arbor News for decades.

John Lockard was born during the Great Depression, came of age at the start of white flight in the Detroit area, and experienced unofficial segregation at the schools he attended in the region. The young Lockard was educated at Eastern High School in Detroit, where he had already begun participating in the arts, sports, and acted as a member of the yearbook staff, graduating in 1949. 

After high school, he began working at Ovelton Sign where he experienced harsh working conditions and segregation. He attended Meinzinger School of Art in Detroit and, shortly after, Wayne State University where he would earn his Bachelor’s. Then, he received his Master’s degree at University of Toronto in 1958 before returning to the Detroit area and establishing himself in Ann Arbor.

Jon Onye Lockard: A Great Teacher Emerges

During this period, John dropped the ‘h’ in his name, officially becoming Jon Lockard. Later in the 1960s, a member of his travel group in Nigeria said he should be “Onye Eje/Ije”, which in the Igbo language means “artistic traveler” or “the traveling artist who has many friends,” a name he would adopt, changing his name officially to Jon Onye Lockard.

In November 1964, Lockard celebrated the grand opening of the Ann Arbor Art Center, (of no relation to the current Ann Arbor Art Center–which was, at the time, the Ann Arbor Art Association) his first studio at 215 S. Fourth Ave. During this time he was working “nine days a week” in Ann Arbor, but he still lived in Detroit. He would move to Ann Arbor by 1971, around the same time his studio moved into the old Ann Arbor Railroad Depot building at 416 S. Ashley.

In 1968, advocacy from Black scholars and students worked to include Black Studies programs and push for higher enrollment of Black students, a movement that was gaining traction across the country. The Daily reported in 1969 that the LSA program would begin offering an Afro-American Studies major. 

At the University of Michigan, Jon quickly found himself inhabiting several roles: supporting the Black Action Movement, and participating in the first annual Black Artist's Festival in 1969. The following year he co-founded the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies (Renamed D’AAS in 2011) as an interdisciplinary program that would focus on histories that had been ignored—or worse, taught with factual inaccuracy by other history departments. Elizabeth James reflects on the personal significance of this change: “The History of Art department wasn't offering courses in [the African diaspora] at that time, so I checked with the then-Center for Afroamerican and African Studies. Jon Lockard was teaching a survey course on the arts of Africa. It was an amazing experience that transformed my life.” 

In December 1969, Lockard was brought on at WCC as part of the newly founded Black Studies Program. In 1970, Lockard would organize the first show of Black students’ works in an outdoor exhibit, while the campus expanded programs for Black students through the Black Studies Program and the creation of the WCC Black Student Union. 

Lockard continued to teach at both universities for 40 years. His former students fondly remember that he would make sure to play music before and after each of his classes. Elizabeth James remembers: “He always played music before and after his classes began, setting the scene for the lessons to be learned each day. He deeply believed in developing critical thinking skills so that you would remain curious about the world around you. He was a philosopher who sought to inspire us to think beyond the obvious and examine life in a more nuanced way, similar to the details and symbols in his art.”

Lockard’s reputation for being a “difficult” teacher is also fondly remembered by students. He would not let students get away with lack of participation, and he thereby enriched their educational experiences. Former colleague Bamidele Agbasegbe-Demerson says, "you had to always raise questions because it was through raising questions that you interrogated the subject. You came to some decisions and ultimately, hopefully an understanding.” Mike Mosher recalls that he would not just let students “do their own thing,” that “his classes were dedicated to learning to represent the human figure accurately … you had to demonstrate skill in drawing a model in a full range of values with a single black or brown Conte crayon.”

In addition to his teaching in formal university settings, Jon co-founded organizations such as Our Own Thing, where he offered his knowledge to students participating in scholarship programs. He was a co-founder and acted as Associate Director of the Society for the Study of African American Culture and Aesthetics, and in 1983 was elected president of the African American arts organization National Conference of Artists (NCA). 

Lockard’s former student and working artist Earl Jackson remembers a trip Lockard led for the NCA to Dakar, Senegal, noting the profound influence it had on his artistic direction. Lockard emphasized the importance of color in his teachings, focusing on the differences in meanings associated with colors across cultures. Lockard’s work participated in a dialogue of artworks by members of the African diaspora, which led to the creation of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s-70s, a movement of art toward an “African American aesthetic” that Lockard helped develop throughout his career along with contemporaries and friends such as Bing Davis. 

In line with his mission to promote an African and African American aesthetic in his work, Jon found inspiration in words and concepts throughout history. Sankofa, for example, was one of Lockard’s most revered philosophies. As he interpreted it, “there is wisdom in learning from the past and one’s roots, to ensure a strong future moving forward.” Lockard used this term repeatedly throughout his career: as the title of his show “Sankofa”, originally aired on Barden Cable Television of Detroit from, and as the title of his biweekly journal. In 2000, the Center for Afroamerican Studies named a gallery for Lockard that launched with an inaugural exhibit titled “Looking Back but Seeing Ahead: Sankofa and Creativity.”

A Case for the Inseparability of Art & Politics

In 1983, a year after an unsuccessful lawsuit against the Ann Arbor Street Fair, Lockard spoke with Susan Nisbett of the Ann Arbor News. She wrote: “Lockard expressed a desire to talk about art, rather than politics,” followed by the statement: “In the broadest sense, however, to talk about the one with Lockard is to talk about the other.” Lockard’s artistic philosophy and choice of subject matter from the beginning was focused on Black and African American representation. He knew that his works were provocative and made white audience members uncomfortable at times, but that above all else “art has a responsibility to tell the truth.”

In his early career, Jon Lockard was known as a traveling portraitist, having attended the yearly show at the Ann Arbor Street Fair since its founding. His on-site portrait work was so popular it was known to have drawn large crowds, with art fair organizers strategically placing Lockard’s booth to draw visitors to the far reaches of the event. Though Lockard had by all accounts been a cherished member of the annual art fairs, a legal battle erupted when in 1982, the Ann Arbor Street Fair Jury rejected Lockard as a participant for the first time in 22 years. The rejection of Lockard’s application was based on charges of exhibiting “commercially printed prints” and works by other artists. Lockard did in fact exhibit the work of another artist: a student who had reproduced Lockard’s works as stained glass “faithfully transcribing” from Lockard’s original paintings. 

An ad hoc committee was quickly formed in support of Lockard after his rejection from the fair. The Committee for Salvation of the Human Experience in the Visual Arts (SHEVA) members included Bob Medellin, Leslie Kamil (then Kamil-Miller), and Bamidele Agbasegbe-Demerson. The art fair at the time noted that this was a routine experience for veteran exhibitors, one that would continue to amplify in the following years. Lockard and his committee, however, weren’t the only ones to push back. Carolyn Kilpatrick, a democrat from Detroit at the time and House majority whip, commented in support of Lockard and his cause along with the mayor of Ypsilanti and many Ann Arbor residents. Critics pointed out that in a typical fair of 300 exhibitors, it was estimated that a maximum of four artists were Black each year.

A New York-based law firm, the Center for Constitutional Rights, founded by William Kuntsler also found the case to be worthwhile, and lawyer Mike Gombiner made a case that the jury had violated the artist’s due process freedom of expression on the basis of racial discrimination. Though the case was unsuccessful for Lockard's reinstatement in the fair, it had a lasting impact, and not only on the jurying process. After the case was dismissed, the Art Fair’s lawyer James Erady responded that procedures for jurying were under review. Leslie Kamil notes that “the beauty of the case is that it created the need and the requirement for art fairs to have standards and screening criteria.” Change was introduced locally when City Councilman Larry Hunter proposed that the Art Fair Jury annually submit its findings to the City Council for review ‘to make a public matter public’, but also for the nation as a whole, raising awareness on the potential for bias and discrimination in jurying processes. 

The Later Years: Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial & Continuing Legacy

When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April 1968, Lockard placed a sign on 215 S. Fourth Ave studio: “Closed due to the death of a friend Dr. Martin Luther King.” Nearly twenty years later in 1996, Jon Lockard was chosen as one of five African American men to advise on the creation of a national monument honoring Martin Luther King Jr. Senior Art Advisor for the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C. 

Lockard worked alongside Dr. Ed Jackson as the Executive Architect and Taubman College Professor Emeritus of Architecture James Chaffers Jr. to select an artist to produce the statue, which would be unveiled in 2011 in Washington D.C.’s National Mall. 

Lockard worked on various aspects of the project, from planning to fundraising to construction. The group worked on determining the monuments’ final location, had a design competition and then selected the sculptor, Lei Yixin, a Chinese artist who was the best of the best of artists working in granite globally. Lockard went with members of the committee to China to see a mockup of the statue and offer comments on changes. Leslie Kamil accompanied Lockard, and recalls that he and others in the group had a tense discussion about what expression Martin Luther King Jr. should have, ultimately dissuading the artist from his original design that portrayed King as a “warrior.” Dr. Ed Jackson Jr. remembers Jon throughout the process as “my rock, my defender, my linebacker”, additionally noting that his project marked “the first time a group of African Americans have attempted to build a memorial of this scale on the national mall” and faced national scrutiny. 

"It's only a journey when you have a destination." – Jon Lockard

Jon Onye Lockard died March 24, 2015 in Ann Arbor and is buried at Washtenong Memorial Park and Mausoleum. His legacy continues with his three children, his works of art and murals, his students, and Lockard’s Visions of Destiny (DBA), now protected by the Jon Onye Lockard Foundation. His students, colleagues, and family remember him fondly, with a nod toward his lasting impact on their lives and the lives of others through his questioning nature and unending passion for teaching. Elizabeth James wrote: “I can't think of a time when he didn't ask some question that would leave you pondering the answer. He was a griot and a visionary all at once.” 

Bamidele Agbasegbe-Demerson remembers that Jon, while he was a professor and academic, was ultimately a “Ph.B,” a play on “Ph.D., the Doctor of Philosophy. But John would say that he is a Ph.B., a practicing human being.” This approach to life, “embodies in some ways the totality of all the different hats that he wore … whatever he did. He always strived to be a human being, a practicing human being, a Ph.B.” Today, Lockard’s legacy continues to influence new generations with his vast contributions to the art world and civil rights, which beg audiences to continue asking questions and seeking answers, but most of all creating a dialogue with one another.