A tribute to Dr. John Henrik Clarke

Dr. John Henrik Clarke

This past July 13 the African Education at the Crossroads: 10th Annual Tribute to Dr. John Henrik Clarke program was presented before a packed auditorium at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The program was sponsored by the Board for the Education of People of African Ancestry, which is comprised of educators, historians, activists and clergy.

The keynote speaker was Dr. Adelaide Sanford, retired New York State Board of Regents vice-chancellor and long-time community activist. Gil Noble—producer and host of the ABC-TV program “Like It Is” (and a Harlemite)—served as one of the presenters.

Others who gave tribute to Dr. Clarke included his widow, Sybil Clarke, and such former colleagues and activists in the struggle as Yosef ben-Jochannan, aka “Dr. Ben,” former Jamaican Ambassador to Nigeria Dudley Thompson and Brooklyn attorney Alton Maddox. A cultural presentation was performed by 12-year-old spoken-word artist/activist Autumn Ashante.

Speakers provided a lively commentary on the implications of Dr. Clarke’s work in the present-day education of Black children, the school-to-jail phenomenon of Black youth, U.S. racism, the continuing role of the European powers throughout Africa, the current U.S. political and election scene, and the need to save renowned Harlem from encroaching gentrification.

Dr. Clarke was born in Alabama in 1915 and died in 1998. Raised as a youth in Georgia, he was the son of a sharecropper family. He came to New York in search of the true history of Africa and African Americans, saying that he could not stomach the lies of world history he had been taught.

In Harlem, Dr. Clarke became a researcher, writer and educator. He also edited books on Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. DuBois. He was known worldwide as a cultural intellect.

One of his mentors was Arturo Schomburg, the Black Puerto Rican historian for whom the Schomburg Center is named. Paul Robeson was another.

Dr. Clarke was a mentor to the late Ghanaian Prime Minister, Kwame Nkrumah, while he was in the United States as a student. While Dr. Clarke was traveling in post-independent Ghana, he met up with Nkrumah.

Professor Clarke taught Africana and Puerto Rican Studies at Cornell University and Hunter College and traveled extensively to give lectures. He also held many informal teach-ins at his Harlem home. Dr. Clarke was quoted as saying, “We cannot separate folklore and myth from truth. Folklore is both beautiful and essential. And myth is essential to the ego of all people. But myth is not truth. Myth is based on folklore.”

He observed that it is essential that people tell stories that make them feel good about themselves. But in doing this there is the danger of telling someone else’s story.

In the telling of European history, imperialists and colonizers deliberately deny, distort and omit the history of Indigenous first-world peoples. As such, Dr. Clarke stressed the importance of knowing and telling one’s own history and story. He emphasized the power of knowledge, knowledge of self as well as of one’s oppressor. Knowledge has the power to control individuals, social consciousness and identity, he stated. Knowledge of oneself influences how we think of ourselves as well as how we think of others. And the images we have of ourselves (forced upon us or by self-enlightenment) form the concepts by which we see ourselves.

Dr. Clarke consistently stressed the importance of uncovering the truth, speaking truth to power and living his philosophy of “telling it like it is.” He emphasized the need to include African history in the study of world history; to incorporate information about the Black Holocaust and the Middle Passage, beginning with the European slave trade up to the U.S. Civil War, during which time millions of Africans were killed; to acknowledge the deliberate destruction of the enslaved Africans’ culture, language, religion, family structure and one’s own name; and also to include the history and contributions of Blacks in the study of U.S. history. He was seen as a true revolutionary, a warrior who loved his people and their heritage.

Dr. Clarke was admired for being a griot, a teller of great factual stories of ancient Africa and its accomplishments and contributions in the fields of science, math, philosophy, economics and medicine. This was all prior to the arrival of Europeans from Rome and Greece who borrowed, and even claimed as their own, much of the knowledge they took from the Africans.

Dr. Clarke was an activist in his Harlem community and elsewhere, taking a personal interest in political prisoners from the Black Liberation Movement of the civil rights era. He involved himself in South Africa’s struggle against apartheid and saw apartheid as mainly about European or white control of the precious metals on the African continent. He was a strong proponent of African unity and Pan-African nationalism throughout the entire African Diaspora and of the right to self-determination and sovereignty.

Dr. Clarke stated: “History is a clock that tells a people their historical time of day. It is the compass that people use to locate themselves on the map of human geography. A people’s history tells a people where they are and what they are. More importantly, a proper understanding of history tells a people what they still must be and where they still must go.”