Pan-Africanist American writer, historian, professor, and a pioneer in the creation of Africana studies and professional institutions in academia
Historian, Scholar, and Teacher
John Henrik Clarke - A Great and Mighty Walk
"Powerful people will NEVER educate powerless people
on what it means to take the power away from them.
The aim of powerful people is to stay powerful
by ANY means necessary." *
Born on January 1, 1915, in Union Springs, Alabama, as the youngest child to sharecroppers John (Doctor) and Willie Ella (Mays) Clark, he renamed himself John Henrik (after rebel playwright Henrik Ibsen) and added an "e" to his surname Clarke. With the hopes of earning enough money to buy land rather than sharecrop, his family moved to the nearest mill town, Columbus, Georgia. Clarke never formally attended high school, but attended Spencer High School due to overcrowding in the middle schools. Counter to his mothers's wishes for him to be a farmer, Clarke left Georgia in 1933 by freight train and went to Harlem, New York, where he pursued scholarship and activism.
Clarke developed as a writer and lecturer during the Great Depression years. He joined study circles such as the Harlem History Club and the Harlem Writers' Workshop. He studied history and world literature at New York University, at Columbia University and at the League for Professional Writers. He was an autodidact whose mentors included the scholar Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. At the age of 78, Clarke obtained a doctorate from the non-accredited Pacific Western University (now California Miramar University) in Los Angeles. The New York Times noted that Clarke's ascension to professor emeritus at Hunters College was "unusual...without benefit of a high school diploma." The Times also acknowledged that "nobody said Professor Clarke wasn't an academic original", but nonetheless referred to him using the honorific prefix "Mr" rather than "Dr".
In the 1960's, Clarke advocated for studies on the African-American experience and the place of Africans in world history. He challenged academic historians and helped shift the way African history was studied and taught. Clarke was "a scholar devoted to redressing what he saw as a systematic and racist suppression and distortion of African history by traditional scholars." He accused his detractors of having Eurocentric views.
Besides teaching at Hunter College and Cornell University, Clarke was active in creating professional associations to support the study of black culture. He was a founder and first president of the African Heritage Studies Association with Leonard Jeffries, which supported scholars in areas of history, culture, literature and the arts. He was a founding member of other organizations to recognize and support work in black culture: the Black Academy of Arts and Letters and the African-American Scholars' Council.
Dr. Clarke was most known and highly regarded for his lifelong devotion to studying and documenting the histories and contributions of African peoples in Africa and the diaspora.
Dr. Clarke is often quoted as stating that "History is not everything, but it is a starting point. History is a clock that people use to tell their political and cultural time of day. It is a compass they use to find themselves on the map of human geography. It tells them where they are, but more importantly, what they must be."
His writing included six scholarly books and many scholarly articles. He edited anthologies of black writing, as well as his own short stories, and more general interest articles. He was co-founder of the Harlem Quarterly (1949–51), book review editor of the Negro History Bulletin (1948–52), associate editor of the magazine Freedomways, and a feature writer for the Pittsburgh Courier and the Ghana Evening News.
"Egypt gave birth to what later would become known as 'Western Civilization,' long before the greatness of Greece and Rome."
John Henrik Clarke
"Africans in the United States must remember that the slave ships brought no West Indians, no Caribbeans, no Jamaicans or Trinidadians or Barbadians to this hemisphere. The slave ships brought only African people and most of us took the semblance of nationality from the places where slave ships dropped us off."
John Henrik Clarke
"The first light of human consciousness and the world's first civilizations were in Africa."
John Henrik Clarke
Dr John Henrik Clarke Are We Ready For The 21 Century?
Economics For Our Future Dr John Henrik Clarke
Posts
