Quotes by John Henrik Clarke

About John Henrik Clarke:

Dr. John Henrik Clarke was a Pan-Africanist writer, historian, professor, and a pioneer in the creation of Africana studies and professional institutions in academia starting in the late 1960s.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Africa and its people are the most written about and the least understood of all of the world's people. This condition started in the 15th and the 16th centuries with the beginning of the slave trade system. The Europeans not only colonialized most o...

John Henrik Clarke

If I lead the field in any way, it is in the area of curricula development, study guides and other teaching materials.

John Henrik Clarke

The people and the cultures of what is known as Africa are older than the word 'Africa.' According to most records, old and new, Africans are the oldest people on the face of the earth. The people now called Africans not only influenced the Greeks an...

John Henrik Clarke

To hold a people in oppression you have to convince them first that they are supposed to be oppressed.

John Henrik Clarke

Nothing the European mind ever devised was meant to do anything but to facilitate the European's control over the world.

John Henrik Clarke

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, the United States would enter, in a formal way, what had been up to that date strictly a European conflict. Marcus Garvey's prophecy about the European scramble to maintain dominance over the whole...

John Henrik Clarke

Africans in the United States must remember that the slave ships brought no West Indians, no Caribbeans, no Jamaicans or Trinidadians or Barbadians to this hemisphere. The slave ships brought only African people and most of us took the semblance of n...

John Henrik Clarke

All the working-class people could feel a Malcolm X. They could hear Malcolm X, and two weeks later they could whisper back what he said. Verbatim. They could remember the way he put it, and he put it so well.

John Henrik Clarke

In order to have a charismatic leader, you have to have a charismatic program. Because if you have a charismatic program, then if you can read you can lead. When the leader gets killed while you're reading from page 13 of your charismatic program, yo...

John Henrik Clarke

She was not a white woman. She was not a Greek... Until the emergence of the doctrine of white superiority, Cleopatra was generally pictured as a distinctly African woman, dark in color.

John Henrik Clarke

When Marcus Garvey died in 1940, the role of the British Empire was already being challenged by India and the rising expectations of her African colonies. Marcus Garvey's avocation of African redemption and the restoration of the African state's sove...

John Henrik Clarke

Egypt gave birth to what later would become known as 'Western Civilization,' long before the greatness of Greece and Rome.

John Henrik Clarke

I question the political judgement of those who would have the nerve to paint Christ white with his obvious African nose, lips and wooly hair.

John Henrik Clarke

Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad's message made a whole lot of people feel whole again, human being again. Some of them came out and found a new meaning to their manhood and their womanhood.

John Henrik Clarke

Had Elijah Muhammad tried to introduce an orthodox form of Arab-oriented Islam, I doubt if he would have attracted 500 people, but he introduced a form of Islam that would communicate with the people he had to deal with. He was the king to those who ...

John Henrik Clarke

The rise of African nations concurrent with the spread of the Nation of Islam and the civil rights movement gave black America a burst of pride over and above anything they had had since the decline of the movement of Marcus Garvey.

John Henrik Clarke

There are some long silences in Scandinavian and some Japanese films, when the audience knows action is taking place, but the audience hears no action.

John Henrik Clarke

I caddied for Dwight Eisenhower and Omar Bradley long before they became generals or president, for that matter. Just between you and me, Bradley tipped better than Eisenhower did.

John Henrik Clarke

I have walked majestically with kings and queens and presidents and other heads of states.

John Henrik Clarke

The Europeans not only colonialized most of the world, they began to colonialize information about the world and its people. In order to do this, they had to forget, or pretend to forget, all they had previously known abut the Africans.

John Henrik Clarke

Racists will always call you a racist when you identify their racism. To love yourself now - is a form of racism. We are the only people who are criticized for loving ourselves. and white people think when you love yourself you hate them. No, when I ...

John Henrik Clarke

Author Bio

  • NameJohn Henrik Clarke
  • DescriptionAmerican historian and writer
  • BornJanuary 1, 1915
  • DiedJuly 16, 1998
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionHistorian