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John Henrik Clarke (1915-1998), born John Henry Clark, was a Nationalist, Pan-Africanist, author, poet, historian, and afrocentic lecturer and teacher. Clarke was one of the most significant influences on the search for identity known as the Afrocentric movement.

He was born on January 1, 1915 In Union Springs, Alabama to John, a sharecropper, and Willie Ella (Mays) Clarke, a washerwoman.

A Search For Identity

Clarke proclaimed his own search for identity to have begun as a child simply trying to understand the world around him. He considered his great grandmother "Mom Mary", the family historian, to have been his first teacher. She told him and his siblings stories about their family, its resistance to slavery and her first husband Buck who was sold to a stud farm for slaves in Virgnia.

As a child Clarke's father took their family to Columbus, Georgia. There he went to school for the first time and became the first among his family's nine children to learn to read. As an autodidact, he accomplished that feat "by picking up signs, grocery handbills...and by studying the signboards." Clarke taught the junior class of his Sunday school by the age of ten and read the Bible to old ladies in his community.

Clarke's search for his people began in the Bible, and that search began with questions, such as "why are all the characters -— even those who, like Moses, were born in Africa —- white?" Having read the depiction of Christ "as swarthy and with hair like sheep's wool" he wondered why the church's depiction showed Christ as blond and blue-eyed. As he read more he asked more questions: "Where was the hair like sheep's wool? Where was the swarthy complexion? How did Moses become so white? If he went down to Ethiopia to marry Zeporah, why was Zeporah so white? Who painted the world white?" It was then that his life-long search for self-definition in world history began.

Clarke's best remembrance of his school years were of his first teacher, Evelena Taylor, in Columbus, Georgia. She was the first to teach him to believe in himself by simply stating to him "I believe in you." During his last year of grammar school Clarke "began to receive some of the privileges in the school that generally went to the light-complected youngsters who were called "The Light Brigade." That group consisted of children of professional blacks many of whom had a light complexion. Clarke led the so-called "The Dark Brigade" or poorer children. He received the privilege to ring the bell in the school as the best student.

Clarke's systematic search for the role of people from Africa in history began when a lawyer for whom he worked told him that he "came from a people who had no history but, that if I persevered and obeyed the laws, my people might one day make history."

One day during high school Dr. Clarke was given the responsibility to hold the books and papers of a guest lecturer. One of the books was entitled The New Negro edited by Alain Locke. In that book Clarke found the essay "The Negro Digs Up His Past," by Arthur Schomburg. It was then he realized he "came from a people with a history older even than that of Europe." Years later, at the age of seventeen, he would search for and find Schomburg in what was then New York's 135th street library. Clarke impatiently told Schomburg he wanted "to know the history of my people." To which Schomburg replied, "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." In His later life he traveled the world, he has read more books than any man has ever read in his lifetime. John Henrik Clarke was totally blind in the last remaining years of his life. He expressed he would like to be remembered as a educator.

Criticism of Clarke

As a self-professed autodidact who began his career as a writer of fiction, Clarke did not undergo the rigors of a formal training in history. While this does not of necessity negate the worth of his endeavors, it does call to light certain potential flaws. He is often teleological in his approach, and could be easily accused of manipulating what is in fact a paucity of data in the historical record to support predetermined suppositions and conclusions.

Moreover, his logic can be somewhat circumspect. For instance, his attack of the assumption of Moses being Caucasoid, while valid as a point of inquiry, does not lead to a conclusion that Moses must then be Negroid simply because he had been born in Africa. Birth in Africa is not a critical fulfillment for possession of any specific racial features from the standpoint of physical anthropology: Philo of Alexandria and Charlize Theron were born in Africa as well.

It does not help that Clarke is held as an unassailable figure by many, to the point where the writer of a paragraph above makes the unprovable and rather specious claim that Clarke 'read more books than any man has ever read in his lifetime.' While he has raised many important points regarding assumptions in the interpretation of history, until the man himself can be looked upon with an unprejudiced eye, the validity of his contribution as historian will remain open to question.

• African Americans
• 1915 births
• 1998 deaths