John Henrik Clarke: The Pan-African Scholar
Dr. John Henrik Clarke was born Jan. 1, 1915, in Union Springs, Alabama. The youngest child of John (a sharecropper) and Willie Ella (Mays) Clarke (a washerwoman), (who died in 1922). With the hopes of earning enough money to buy land rather than sharecrop, his family moved to the closest Milltown, Columbus, Georgia.
Counter to his mother's wishes for him to become a farmer, Clarke left Georgia in 1933 by a freight train and went to Harlem, New York as part of the Great Migration of rural blacks out of the South to northern cities. There he pursued scholarship and activism. He renamed himself as John Henrik (after rebel Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen) and added an "e" to his surname, spelling it as "Clarke."
Arriving in Harlem at the age of 18 in 1933, 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 intermittently at New York University, Columbia University, Hunter College, the New School of Social Research and the League for Professional Writers. He was an autodidact whose mentors included the scholar Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. From 1941 to 1945, Clarke served as a non-commissioned officer in the United States Army Air Forces, ultimately attaining the rank of master sergeant.
In the post-World War II era, there was new artistic development, with small presses and magazines being founded and surviving for brief times. Writers and publishers continued to start new enterprises: Clarke was a 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 black-owned Pittsburgh Courier.
Clarke taught at the New School for Social Research from 1956 to 1958. Traveling in West Africa in 1958–59, he met Kwame Nkrumah, whom he had mentored as a student in the US, and was offered a job working as a journalist for the Ghana Evening News. He also lectured at the University of Ghana and elsewhere in Africa, including in Nigeria at the University of Ibadan.
Dr. Clarke is the author of numerous articles that have appeared in leading scholarly journals. He also served as the author, contributor, or editor of 24 books. In 1968 along with the Black Caucus of the African Studies Association, Dr. Clarke founded the African Heritage Studies Association. In 1969 he was appointed as the founding chairman of the Black and Puerto Rican Studies Department at Hunter College in New York City.
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."
If you expect the present day school system to give history to you, you are dreaming. This, we have to do ourselves. The Chinese didn't go out in the world and beg people to teach Chinese studies or let them teach Chinese studies. The Japanese didn't do that either. People don't beg other people to restore their history; they do it themselves.
John Henrik Clarke
Clarke was a self-taught man whose mentors included Black Puerto Rican historian and scholar Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. Clarke was a professor of Black and Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College of the City University of New York from 1969 to 1986, where he served as founding chairman of the department. He also was the Carter G. Woodson Distinguished Visiting Professor of African History at Cornell University’s Africana Studies and Research Center. Additionally, in 1968 he founded the African Heritage Studies Association and the Black Caucus of the African Studies Association.
In its obituary of Clarke, The New York Times noted that the activist's ascension to professor emeritus at Hunter College was "unusual... without the benefit of a high school diploma, let alone a Ph.D." It acknowledged that "nobody said Professor Clarke wasn't an academic original." In 1994, Clarke earned a doctorate from the non-accredited Pacific Western University (now California Miramar University) in Los Angeles, having earned a bachelor's degree there in 1992.
This documentary is about Dr. John Henrik Clarke our Grandmaster Scholar Warrior. This documentary is Narrated and directed by none other than Wesley Snipes. It focuses on how Dr. Clarke started studying African History and covers thousands of years of history. It is accentuated with dozens of pictures and film clips. This documentary is a must see and should be part of anyone's collection.
A Great and Mighty Walk
Dr. John Henrik Clarke - The African Rise of Christianity
Dr John Henrik Clarke - Exactly Who or What is a Jew a Jew
Dr. John Henrik Clarke on Religion
LAW AND ORDER DR JOHN HENRIK CLARKE
OUR MASTER TEACHER EXPLAINS HOW WE USED CUSTOM AND OBLIGATION TO GOVERN OURSELVES AND HOW WE TREATED FOREIGNERS WITH HUMANITY AND HOW WE NEED TO RETURN TO TO THE OLD PATH SO WE CAN BECOME A NATION OF TRUTH JUSTICE AND RIGHTEOUSNESS AGAIN.
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