05/05/2006

Notification of Death - Clarence Carter

April 30, 2006

OFDA received word this afternoon that Mr. Clarence Carter, 76, who opened the first black-owned funeral home in Elyria and was a funeral director in Lorain County for 40 years, died Sunday, April 30, 2006 at the Community Hospital and Surgical Center in Lorain.

He moved to Lorain in 1966 from Louisville, Mississippi, where he had operated a funeral home for 12 years. A year later, he opened the Carter Funeral Home in Lorain. In 1971, at the urging of family and friends, he opened his second funeral home, the Carter Funeral Home of Elyria on West Bridge Street. It was the first African-American funeral home in the city. Carter managed both homes until he retired this year because of illness. The funeral homes are being operated by two of his sons, Dennis and Clarence Jr.

He had been president of the Greater Lorain County Funeral Directors Association, the Ohio Embalmers Association and the Buckeye State Funeral Directors & Embalmers Association. Carter was honored as the Man of the Year in 1980 by the Buckeye State Funeral Directors Association, as Business Man of the Year in 1977 by the Negro Business and Professional Women's Club of Lorain and by the same organization of Elyria in 1988.

He was born in Louisville, Miss. He attended the Ministerial Institute and College in West Point, Mississippi, and Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi. Carter earned his degree in mortuary science from the Cincinnati College of Mortuary Science.

His first wife, Alruth, who worked with her husband and was the first black woman in Lorain County to hold a funeral director's license, died in 1997. Mr. Carter is survived by his second wife, Roberta, of seven years; sons, Clarence Jr., Dennis and Roderick Jackson; daughters, Tanya Jackson, Jonette Jackson, Ramona Jackson, Richelle Gross and Ilene Davis; 12 grandchildren; four great-grandchildren; and two sisters.

Services: 11:00 AM Saturday, May 6, 2006, True Vine Primitive Baptist Church, 737 W. 18th St., Elyria. Arrangements: Carter Funeral Home of Elyria and Lorain.