"Powerful people don't like educating the people they oppress, because once they're educated, they will take the reins." An ongoing illustrative history study
This piece originally posted on 02/01/2025
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"Powerful people don't like educating the people they oppress, because once they're educated, they will take the reins."
We kick off Black History Month 2025 with a look at the unique academic trajectory of John Henrik Clarke. Born on New Year's Day 1915 in Alabama to impoverished sharecropper parents, Clarke would later add his middle name after the playwright Henrik Ibsen. While his family had hoped he would one day also become a farmer, John eventually opted to leave home at the age of eighteen and ventured first to Chicago, and then to New York City --fortuitously timing his arrival with the emergence of the Harlem Renaissance. An autodidact who never actually graduated high school (he was in fact an 8th-grade dropout), Clarke was nevertheless drawn to academia. One of Clarke's earliest tutors was Arthur Schomberg (see Lesson #131 in this series), who encouraged him to study African history. After a short stint in the Army during WWII, Clarke returned to join the Harlem Writers' Workshop and Harlem History Club.
In 1949, at Schomberg's encouragement, the New School for Social Research asked Clarke to teach courses in a newly created African Studies Center, and was during this period that Clarke began to take close notice of the systematic racist suppression and distortion of African history, noting that detractors reliably took a disappointingly Eurocentric view of the subject; arguing that Black Africans somehow had no culture before European colonization... that their culture in fact began with slavery. Going forward Clarke would devote his life to refuting --and redirecting-- this eroded viewpoint. During the years of the Black Power movement, Clarke became an outspoken voice for the place of Africans in world history; challenging the conventional views of academic historians and helping to shift the manner in which African history was studied and taught.
In association with the Black Caucus of the African Studies Coalition, Clarke founded the African Heritage Studies Association in 1968, an organization dedicated, to this day, the exploration and promotion of intergenerational African heritage and legacies. Additionally, Clarke was principally responsible for the creation of the Black and Puerto Rican Studies Department at Hunter College in New York City. He later lectured at Cornell University as a distinguished visiting Professor of African history; he also traveled extensively to Africa and was a regular lecturer at the University of Ghana and also wrote articles for the Ghana Evening News.
Among other roles, he also took on the responsibility of co-editor at the Negro History Bulletin, wrote regular features for the Pittsburgh Courier (a black-owned enterprise), and co-founded the Harlem Quarterly. He also founded the African-American Scholars' Council, the Black Academy of Arts and Letters, and the African Heritage Studies Association. He was a close friend and advisor to both Malcolm X and Kwame Nkrumah, and edited the definitive biography of Marcus Garvey (a name that has begin to trend again on social media, these past few weeks!)
In 1986, the Africana Library at Cornell University of Ithaca, New York, was named in his honor. At the age of 78 Clarke at long last received an honorary doctorate degree from Pacific Western University in Los Angeles. Clarke's numerous works include A New Approach to African History (1967), African People at the Crossroads (1992), African People in World History (1993), the aforementioned Marcus Garvey biography, and significantly The Boy Who Painted Christ Black (1975), which is perhaps his best-known work. He died in New York City in 1998.
"My main point here is that if you are the child of God and God is a part of you, then in your imagination God's supposed to look like you. And when you accept a picture of the deity assigned to you by another people, you become the spiritual prisoners of that other people."
--A Great and Mighty Walk, 1996
For further study:
Clarke speaks on the legacy of Marcus Garvey - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJHJmTVshY0
Clarke on Black Knowledge, Wisdom and Overstanding - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJMQGfrblg0
Next lesson - Lesson 172: Mary Louvestre