John Henrik Clarke

Early life

John Henrik Clarke was born on 1 January 1915 in Union Springs, Alabama, the eldest son of a sharecropping family; his parents were John and Willella (Mays) Clarke. His mother died when he was about seven. At 18 he left the South, riding freight cars to Chicago before settling in New York City.

Learning in Harlem

In Harlem, Clarke educated himself largely outside formal institutions. He joined study circles such as the Harlem History Club and learned from historians and bibliophiles of the day, including Arthur Schomburg. During the Second World War he served in the U.S. Army Air Forces as a sergeant-major in a segregated unit at Kelly Field, Texas.

After the war he took courses at New York University (1948–1952) and the New School for Social Research (1956–1958). In 1949 the New School asked him to teach in its new African Studies Center. He also worked as a journalist, writing features for the Pittsburgh Courier and the Ghana Evening News in the late 1950s.

Writer, editor and organizer

Clarke was active in the Harlem Writers' Workshop and, from 1962, was an associate editor of Freedomways, where he conceived most of the magazine's special issues. He wrote or edited more than thirty books. As editor he produced Harlem, U.S.A. (1964), William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond (1968), Malcolm X: The Man and His Times (1969) and Marcus Garvey and His Vision of Africa (1974). His own books include A New Approach to African History (1967), Christopher Columbus and the African Holocaust (1992) and African People in World History (1993). His memoir, My Life in Search of Africa, appeared in 1999.

In 1968 he founded the African Heritage Studies Association and served as its first president. He was also a founding member of the Black Academy of Arts and Letters.

Academic career

In 1969 Clarke joined Hunter College's Department of Black and Puerto Rican Studies, which BlackPast credits him with being principally responsible for creating. He taught there until 1985, receiving the Thomas Hunter Professorship in 1983, and later held emeritus status. He also lectured at Cornell University as a distinguished visiting professor of African history, as well as at Columbia and NYU.

Legacy

Clarke received honorary degrees from the University of Denver, the University of the District of Columbia and Clark Atlanta University, along with the Carter G. Woodson Award for teaching and the 1994 Phelps-Stokes Fund Aggrey Medal. He died in New York on 16 July 1998.

His papers at the Schomburg Center fill 49 boxes. They include correspondence with figures such as Cheikh Anta Diop and record the growth of African and African American studies in the second half of the twentieth century. He remains a central figure for scholars and community educators in the Pan-African and Afrocentric traditions.