John Henrik Clarke

John Henrik Clarke was born on January 1, 1915, in Union Springs, Alabama, and grew to young manhood in Columbus, Georgia. In 1933 he moved to New York City with the ambition of becoming a writer. He made his life in Harlem, where he studied history and world literature at New York University from 1948 to 1952 and later attended the New School for Social Research. He was a largely self-directed historian who worked through newspapers, street-corner and classroom lectures, community programs and archives before he held a professorship. His early writing ran toward fiction, short stories, travel writing and poetry. His papers include an early novel of hobo life and a draft travel book, Africa Without Tears. His turn to history grew out of the same search for definition that he later named as the central problem of Black life in America.

His wartime service shaped his habits of record-keeping and institutional observation. As a sergeant-major in a segregated unit at Kelly Field, Texas, during World War II, he helped train African-American enlisted men for mess and other maintenance duties. His papers preserve letters, status changes and disciplinary files that partly record those men's lives. In the 1950s he worked as a journalist and editor. He wrote the weekly series Famous African Chiefs for the Pittsburgh Courier while developing the African Study Center at the New School, and he wrote and edited for the Ghana Evening News, African Heritage and Freedomways. In a December 1957 letter to Martin Luther King Jr., he thanked King for his hospitality in Montgomery. He said he had told the Courier's editor, before the articles ran, that the paper's series on the Montgomery boycott took a negative approach when so much positive could be said. He hoped to write about the Montgomery Improvement Association himself. The letter shows a journalist who treated press coverage of Black movements as a contested field.

His scholarship and organizing in the 1960s and 70s built institutions around African history. He developed African history outlines for the HARYOU-ACT Heritage program and the Timbuctoo Learning Center. He taught core Black studies courses at the New School, Cornell, Rider College and Hunter College, where he began teaching in 1970 as a professor of Black and Puerto Rican studies. He edited and published widely: American Negro Short Stories (1966), William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond (1968), Malcolm X: The Man and His Times (1969), Harlem, USA (1971) and Marcus Garvey and the Vision of Africa (1973). The Garvey files in his papers include substantive correspondence with Amy Jacques Garvey. He was also involved in the African Heritage Studies Association, founded in 1968 when Black scholars walked out of the African Studies Association. His essay on the conflict with that body, and on the fight to reclaim African history, belongs to his case that those who study a people should not be the only ones who define them. His correspondents included Cheikh Anta Diop, Basil Davidson, Richard B. Moore, John G. Jackson, Ella Baker, James and Grace Lee Boggs, Hoyt Fuller and Alice Walker. His consultancy files include the exhibition Harlem On My Mind.

In later decades he became a leading public voice for African world history, Pan-African unity and independent Black institutions. He advised on the Great Kings of Africa series in 1984, spoke about the African Burial Ground in New York, and wrote on media empowerment. He published African World Revolution: Africa at the Crossroads in 1991. In a 1995 interview with Ja A. Jahannes, when he was legally blind, he named the central problem in American society as the search for definition, direction and political orientation. He called multiculturalism "educational fakery" when it blurred African history into other histories. He said the term Africentrism was overestimated and preferred "African Consciousness." He judged that the Black power revolution had been betrayed from the beginning by its creators and then by its inheritors. He also argued that welfare was a sham, since most of the nation is on some form of welfare, and that drug dealers in poor neighborhoods were victims rather than controllers of the trade. He stayed firmly committed to Black colleges. He could be a polarizing figure. A 1991 Amsterdam News headline reported that he agreed with Leonard Jeffries' controversial speech about Jewish involvement in the enslavement of Africans, and his papers also contain correspondence with Shaleak ben Yehuda of a community of African-American Jews. A responsible portrait keeps both the pioneering teacher and the contested claims in view.