We do not need role models so much as we need identity models... roles are what we do, identity is who we are. Roles are masks, identity is our face. Roles determine our place in society... Identity determines our society. - ToCD
John Henrik Clarke was born January 1, 1915 in Union Springs, Alabama and died July 16, 1998 in New York City. His mother, Willie Ella Mays Clark, was a washerwoman who did laundry for $3 a week. His father was a sharecropper.
Clarke was inspired by his third grade teacher, Ms. Harris, who "convinced me that one day I would be a writer." But before he became a writer he became a voracious reader.
Clarke noticed that although many bible stories "unfolded in Africa...I saw no African people in the printed and illustrated Sunday school lessons," he wrote in 1985. "I began to suspect at this early age that someone had distorted the image of my people. My long search for the true history of African people the world over began."
Clarke committed himself to a lifelong pursuit of factual knowledge about the history of his people and creative application of that knowledge.
Biographical Information and Selected Writings"What you are calling African history and Negro history is nothing but the missing pages of world history. You will have to know general history to understand these specific aspects of history." - Arthur Schomburg
"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." - JHC
"The main focus of an education for a new reality in the African world must have as its mission the restoration of what slavery and colonialism took away. Slavery and colonialism took from African people their basic culture, their language, their concept of nationhood, their manhood and their womanhood. They mutilated and tried to destroy their traditional culture and reduced Africans to beggars at the cultural and political door of other people while neglecting the job of restoring their own culture, the main thing that could have sustained them." - JHC
"Throughout the whole of the African world most Africans who call themselves civilized, and here I have to question their definition of the term, worship a concept and image of a god assigned to them by a foreigner." - JHC
"Most people in the civilizations of the world generally look at a spiritual deity that resembles themselves, mainly the father in their home, be this right or wrong. Why are we an exception?" - JHC
"It is better to be right and march into Hell, than to follow a bunch of fools into Heaven." - JHC
"There is no way to move any people from a lower to a higher position unless they are willing to accept some form of collective discipline. You can not move an unruly mob into anything but chaos." - JHC
"The past illuminates the present and the present will give us some indication of what the future can be. Education for a new reality in the African world has to be three dimensional in its approach." - JHC
"We must be bold enough to reject such terms as "Black Africa" which presupposes that there is a legitimate, "White Africa." We must reject the term "Negro Africa" and the word "Negro" and all that it implies. This word, like the concept of race and racism, grew out of the European slave trade and the colonial system that followed. It is not an African word and it has no legitimate application to African people." - JHC
"In essence, Pan-Africanism is about the restoration of African people to their proper place in world history." - JHC
"The objective of Pan-Africanism is not only the restoration of land and nationhood: it has as one of its aims the restoration of respect." - JHC
"The present search for the place of African people in world history and the Black Power Revolution that produced the Black and Beautiful concept out of which the Black Studies Revolution emerged, is part of a chain reaction to the absence of African people from the accepted commentaries of world history." - JHC
"In the early development of man, the family was the most important unit in existence. Through the years the importance of this unit has not changed. The first human societies were developed for reasons relating to the needs and survival of the family." - JHC
"When you address a people by their right name that name must relate to land, history and culture." - JHC
"Our culture is in our DNA..Where ever there is African blood, there is a basis for greater unity." His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I
There is no BLACK land ergo BLACK people have no land
There is no BLACK history ergo BLACK people have no history
There is no BLACK culture ergo BLACK people have no culture
BLACK is a colour AFRICA is a Continent
There is AFRICAN land ergo AFRIKAN people have land
There is AFRICAN history ergo AFRIKAN people have history
There is AFRICAN culture ergo AFRIKAN peole have culture
BLACK is a label, AFRIKAN is a name, should you choose to use AFRIKAN as your name you will connect yourself to a land, a history and a culture that is the very wellspring of humanity. -ToCD
William Edward Burghardt Du BoisArthur SchombergThe Arab Slave TradeCheikh Anta Diop"Go study the history of your masters, go study the history of the people who enslaved you. Find out why they found it a necessity to remove an entire people from the respectful commentary of the history of the world." - JHC
"Let us therefore stay the course together as comrades in the common struggle so that we can, together, celebrate the common victory and together, rebuild our continent from the Cape to Cairo, form the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, so that in the end our people can together stride the globe as signified human beings, proud of their antecedents, their colour, their culture, their achievements and their humanity." Nelson Mandela
